Sewing Success
An impoverished town grows to become the children’s wear manufacturing capital of China
Pu Xinquan, Managing Director of the King Boy & King Girl Clothes Co., is animated as he introduces a yellow children’s hoodie to a customer on August 22 at one of his stores in Zhili, a small town in east China’s Zhejiang Province.
“This pullover is made from 100-percent cotton. It is stretchy and comfortable for kids, and is also the latest style this autumn,” he said.
Like many other successful business people in the town, Pu did not receive much of an education and started working at an early age trying many different fields. During the 1990s, many people around him began to make a fortune in the children’s wear industry. Pu, seeing the huge business potential, took the plunge.
“In 1996, I bought 2 mu (1,333 square meters) of land and six sewing machines to build a small workshop, and started my career,” Pu told Chinafrica. After two decades of development, Pu’s family workshop grew into the King Boy & King Girl Clothes Co., which registered sales of around 270 million yuan ($40 million) in 2017.
Pu’s story reflects the leapfrog progress of his hometown, Zhili, which evolved from a small, poor village into a prosperous town with one of the most thriving private economies in China, over the four decades since the introduction of the reform and opening-up policy in 1978.
Children’s wear capital
Zhili, a small town located in Huzhou, has long been known as the center of China’s children’s wear industry. There are around 13,000 companies producing 1.3 billion pieces of clothing in the town every year, which equates to more than 50 percent of China’s children’s clothing. In 2017, Zhili’s total GDP reached 20.3 billion yuan ($3 billion).
Yet in the 1970s, it was a rundown village where the local people struggled to eke out a basic existence. “At that time, Zhili was known as a backwater due to rapid population growth and limited arable land,” said Wu Zhiyong, Secretary of the Communist Party of China Wuxing District Committee in Huzhou.