How Online Shopping Can Help to Kick-Start Chinese Branding

After many years spent offering manufacturing services to international brands, many Chinese ‘original equipment manufacturers’(OEM) have gained a lot of experience. Their products are able to meet the requirements of buyers, with good quality and affordable price,but most of them do not even have their own brands.

In the past few years, many companies have started to sell their products direct to the cutsomer via online shopping platforms such as Taobao. With the increase of sales, some companies have created their own brand, like 歌瑞尔（Gainreel）, 麦包包（M baobao）.

歌瑞尔（Gainreel）is a clothing company located at Guangdong, it used to be a OEM factory with one thousand employees and 3 billion RMB in annual sales. They provided OEM manufacturing services to 40 well-known european underwear brands. Since marketing online at Taobao, their product has become more and more popular. No longer manufacturing for foreign brands but creating their own.

“M Baobao” is an OEM luggage manufacturer. Due to a slow down in foreign trade as a result of the financial crisis, they decided to create their own brand 麦包包（M baobao）. Like Gainreel, they chose to use the Taobao supply chain, which effectively saved the company from bankruptcy.

Foreign companies such as Uniqlo, P&G and Dell are now also joining the competition. Uniqlo started to work with taobao around April 2009. Due to the slow increase in expanding their retail stores, Uniqlo decided to cooperate with taobao in order to first increase their (online)sales and help their branding in china.

Ten days after launching their Online shop store, their sales were the highest ranked at Taobao. That month the sales on their Taobao store were equivalent to an average Uniqlo retail store. Moreover, the hot sale online does not affect the income of real stores at all. Besides the taobao store, Uniqlo have also establisehd a shopping platform at their official website which uses Taobao’s payment and maintenance system.