Business: Alison Mary Ching Yeung on China Homegrown Luxury Brands

Forbidden Treasures Collection

Founded by designer Alison Mary Ching Yeung in 2006, Mary Ching is one of the first high-end footwear and accessories brands to emerge from mainland China. Driven by Alison’s own eclectic aesthetic, Mary Ching seamlessly fuses Asian elements with vintage fashion without ever succumbing to “East Meets West” conventions. A regular sight at her flagship boutique on Ferguson Lane, which opened in 2009, Alison will appear next in London at theWalpole British Luxury Summit on May 17, where she will 

speak about the luxury market in the Greater China region.

Interview: Alison Mary Ching Yeung, Creative Director of Mary Ching Footwear

Mary Ching creative director
Alison Mary Ching Yeung

Monday, April 25th, 2011 In Arts , via JingDaily

Recently, Jing Daily spoke to Alison about Mary Ching and her thoughts on the potential for homegrown Chinese luxury brands.

Jing Daily (JD): Tell us a little about Mary Ching.

Alison Mary Ching Yeung: If “Alice In Wonderland” had a sexy boudoir, it would be the Mary Ching boutique in Shanghai. Mary Ching gave her virginity to the city as China’s first luxury shoe and accessories brand in 2008. The products include vertiginous platform stilettos, saucy d’orsay pumps, and elegant flats in tantalizing textures and shades.

The flagship boutique…on Ferguson Lane showcases a delightful treasure box. In May 2010, ELLE France described Mary Ching as “La Louboutin Shanghaienne.”  Mary Ching has also joined the mile high club on Cathay Pacific and Dragon Air, where we sell leather and cashmere slippers, and is included in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum to represent contemporary Chinese design. Mary Ching was shortlisted as a finalist for the “Creativity Award” sponsored by BP for the British Business Awards.

As the founder, I was always accused of having a shoe sickness by my father. So what better way to transform a sickness to a viral disease!

JD: Where and who are your target customers? Who have been your best customers to date? Where are they located? How do most of your customers find you?

Mary Ching, the Jennifer shoe £259 (€299, $399, ¥2,600)

Alison: With the luxury market so large, fast-growing and young, there is a growing number of sophisticated and self-confident consumers willing to move beyond established big label brands and to try new, young and cutting edge designs to express their individuality. This trend can also be partly seen in the “discovery” of local brands by increasingly patriotic Chinese consumers.

The Mary Ching collector is a cosmopolitan, independent and young professional women aged between 25 to 40 years old. She is determined to make her own (fashion) statement and to be a fashionista trendsetter. It is a phenomenal market like no other where in second-tier cities, young professional women are willing to spend two or three months salary on purchasing luxury items.

Core customers are primarily in Asia but also are found in all corners of the world.

Clients and customers find us through fashion magazines exposure, online social networking and fundamentally through word-of-mouth. I am proud to say, ” We are the best-kept secret in the world.”

JD: Do you feel that China is ready for a domestic luxury brand like your own? What does it need to be ready?

Alison: While this trend is just at the initial phase, I like to refer to it as “the early stages of dating”: our brands are succeeding in seducing the consumer, and we are now close to the first kiss.

With the world’s attention on the booming mega-cities of China, Chinese fashion brands are quickly stepping into the spotlight. As the economy grows rapidly, so have the taste, habits and purchasing power of the Chinese people. As a consequence, local Chinese brands are moving to fulfill demand both at home and abroad. While in par, these up and coming Chinese brands are quick to learn successful retail strategies, marketing campaigns and powerful advertising from foreign brands entering China.

As the founder of Mary Ching, my vision is to create the first iconic Chinese luxury footwear and accessories brand. Vogue Editor Angelica Cheung once told me, “Keep doing what you do, as you are the only one doing it.” Her statement reflects how big the opportunity still is today in China.

I started Mary Ching believing that luxury homegrown luxury brands would be the future. As a “Eurasian” — as my father is Chinese and my mother British — I think there is a space for designers with Chinese heritage like myself to be educated abroad and then return to their roots.

JD: You’re very plugged into the luxury or fashion landscape in Shanghai. Could you describe your impressions of it? What events or strategies have you seen as successes?

Alison: China is currently the fastest-growing and second-largest luxury goods market in the world, second only to Japan. It is expected to reach the number one spot by as early as 2015. In 2009 Chinese consumers purchased 27.5 percent of the world’s luxury goods at a total of US$9.4 billion, in comparison to 2004 when their total was only $2 billion. In addition, the majority of China’s wealthy are young, with 80 percent below 45 years of age, compared to 30 percent in the United States and 19 percent in Japan.

There is no more exciting place to be than in Asia today. Chinese designers like me are in an advantageous position, as the Chinese media and press welcome us with open arms. Furthermore, there is increased government support to nurture Chinese luxury brands. I feel the brand is a success because Mary Ching has combined two different spirits to make a irresistible cocktail craved by all fashion addicts.

There are more and more young designers rising to international attention. A trend of locally born fashion brands, which is now in its infancy, will reach maturity in due course. Watch this space.

Mary Ching has seen success through a combination of marketing events (such as high-end fashion shows in Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing), exposure through Shanghai fashion week, and endorsements via Chinese celebrities and socialites. In par with these brand-building events, the strategy has been to focus on China and, most importantly, to keep a level of sophistication and high standards in creating a luxury brand.

To use an old Chinese proverb that best represents my philosophy, “When you hear something, you will forget it. When you see something, you will remember it. But not until you do something, will you understand it.”

---

Special thanks to Alison Mary Ching Yeung. Be sure to check out Mary Ching products on the Mary Ching website, or at its Shanghai boutique (376 WuKang Road, boutique 106). Mary Ching is also available at stores such as Brand New China (Beijing), Younik at Bund 18 (Shanghai), and Forest Bird(Hong Kong), as well as hotels like the Shangri-La (Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong), Peninsula (Shanghai) and Mandarin Oriental (Hong Kong). Full stocklist here.

Yeah to My Niece Daniela!

The authors of Wrath of the Rat and their advisers pose for a class photo at Washington School. (Washington School photo) (Daniela is back row, second from the right, in the blue sweatshirt with white hood strings)

Washington School Students Unite to Write ‘Wrath of the Rat’

By Jim Buckley | Published on 04.24.2011 from Noozhawk.com

32-chapter novel turns into much more than a class project, will be featured at Saturday's Santa Barbara StoryFaire.

What has 64 hands, weighs more than 2,500 pounds, and writes really well? A pack of novel-writing fifth-graders!

A new novel by this unique set of authors will make its debut Saturday at StoryFaire 2011, the annual celebration of books at Santa Barbara’s De la Guerra Plaza that benefits (CALM) Child Abuse Listening & Mediation andStoryteller Children’s Center.

Wrath of the Rat was written by Barry Nitikman’s fifth-grade students at Washington School. The novel tracks the adventures of a brother and sister (and their talking pets!) who are trapped inside a video game by an evil rat. The quartet faces perils galore, from flying piranha to sword-wielding cloud people to sharp-toothed “minions.”

Each of the 32 kids in the class contributed a chapter and artwork for the 164-page book. Nitikman created the project to show his students all the steps needed to create a good story.

“While I was amazed at their imagination and creativity, perhaps the biggest thing they all got out of it came in the editing process,” said Nitikman, who described how each student’s chapter was read aloud to the class, which then acted as a “group editor,” critiquing and praising the work.

“The fact that they discussed each chapter taught them not only how to rewrite, but how to be consistent and how to think things through,” he added. “How do you grab the reader? What can you write that will be logical but not too silly? How do you create a story arc? Having gone through this exercise, they now know more about how stories are created than they did before.”

Along the way, the class had help from parents Barbara Scharf and Patty Kelley, who coordinated the artwork, and from Jim Buckley, a local children’s author who helped the students understand the writing process.

“It’s all their work,” Buckley said. “We were just along to make sure they stayed on task and didn’t wander too far from the basic plot they had devised. I was really impressed with some of the writing. I think kids who read this will really have a lot of fun.”

The authors will be on hand at StoryFaire at 11 a.m. Saturday to sell and autograph copies of their work. Proceeds of the book beyond printing expenses will go to reading and literacy charities. Click here for more information on StoryFaire.

— Jim Buckley is a Santa Barbara-based children’s author and publisher of Beach Ball Books. As a parent of one of the authors of Wrath of the Rat, he helped with this class project.

Design Trends: Pinterest

I've started Pinterest boards for the design trends i've outlined on my blog to date. And, I am now updating the Pinterest Boards with all the images I find for each trend. I will compile Slideshare files for each trend periodically and send out blog post updates when they are posted on slideshare and you will be able to download or share the Powerpoint files with friends :-)

Katie (Castleberg) Hatch's Pinterest Boards

you can check out the Pinterest trend boards here


so far the boards are:


colors

• yellow
• greige
• lime , lime, lime, lime
• rainbow (coming soon to the blog, but already started on Pinterest)
• honeysuckle (pantone 2011 color of the year)

mod animals + images

• elephants
• birds
• owl, owl
• robots

patterns

• chevron
• modern patchwork

styles

• british pop (union jack)

function

• entry [way furniture]

Update from My Bud Kiersten - the Mod Mom of MMF

Mod Mom Furniture Founder Kiersten Hathcock, in her just released pre-shark tank interview

...check out the super 'on trend' styling... it's like the red-carpet 'who are you wearing' interview

1. Apparel- Wrap Dress
2. Accessories  Tool-belt - (all leather, natural finish of course), fab sky-high heals (she always wears those in the  factory/her garage) 
3. Finishing touches - Great manicure with wedding ring bling 

Local Product Development Imperative in Emerging Markets

As Mattel and others trying to expand in China and India have learned, the right blend of localization and globalization is tricky, write Gupta and Wang

Why Barbie Flopped in Shanghai

April 21, 2011 By Anil Gupta and Haiyan Wang, Bloomberg Businessweek, INSIGHT 

Mattel (MAT) opened its first free-standing Barbie store in China in March 2009—a giant, 36,000-square-foot edifice in a six story building on Shanghai's Huaihai Road, one of the most expensive shopping streets in the country. It was the second such store on the planet, after the successful launch of a pioneering, 7,000-sq.-ft. outlet in Buenos Aires in 2008. Barbie's Shanghai adventure didn't work out so well, though. Mattel shut its doors on Mar. 7 this year.

It's easy to dismiss this failure as a stark illustration of ignoring the well-worn dictum: "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." In our view, such an explanation is far too simplistic. You can never outdo the Romans at the fine art of acting like a Roman. Creating the right blend of localization and globalization is a much harder task than achieving either complete localization or zero localization. To succeed in dynamic markets such as China and India, managers need to learn rapidly what and how to localize—while avoiding the risk of catastrophic failure from inevitable mistakes.

Consider the differences between Mattel's experience in Argentina and China. The Argentine market was already Barbie-crazy; a Broadway-style Barbie musical had even been highly successful on the Buenos Aires stage. In contrast, Barbie was a relatively new concept to China. Mattel faced many more unknowns in China than it did in Argentina. Yet the company chose to start out with a store more than five times as large.

Despite the many unknowns, Mattel designed the Shanghai store to target both young girls as well as adult women, thereby significantly increasing the risk that a misconnect with either segment could doom the whole venture. The giant store size also meant that Mattel needed to have a very large mix of product and service lines in the store—900 display cases, a restaurant, a spa, a cocktail bar, and an adult clothing section, to name just a few. The large variety of products and services rendered it impossible for the company to figure out in advance which ones to localize, how much to localize, which of them would catch on with customers, and how much customers would be willing to pay.

HOW WAL-MART EXPERIMENTED

The company wasn't totally blind. It did launch Ling, a Chinese Barbie. Dealing with hundreds of moving parts in a very different, unfamiliar, and dynamic market such as China, however, guaranteed that the speed with which the company would discover its multitude of mistakes would overwhelm its ability to learn and adapt.

Compare Barbie's entry strategy into the retail sector in China with that of Wal-Mart (WMT). When Wal-Mart entered China in 1996, it took a far more experimental approach. It experimented with different store formats to figure out which would have the greatest customer appeal. Similar experiments regarding target customer segments and merchandise mix played a useful role in helping Wal-Mart reduce the risk of failure as it rolled out store expansion and ramped up investment. It is also critical to note that a large format store is a fundamentally lower-risk strategy for a multibrand retailer such as Wal-Mart than for a single-brand retailer such as Barbie.

Mattel itself has adopted a much smarter learning strategy for Barbie in India. Since its India launch in 1991, Barbie has developed an unrivaled brand presence in the country. The brand has been targeted exclusively at children and promoted via extensive advertising on television networks popular with kids. Further, instead of opening a free-standing large format store, MQuite recently, like Ling in China, Mattel has also introduced an Indian Barbie modeled after Katrina Kaif, a popular Bollywood actress. Mattel opened a large number of stores-within-stores, including an exclusive space in a highly successful Hamleys toy store in Mumbai. Such an approach reduces needed investment and associated risks while creating greater brand exposure. More importantly, it enables Mattel to learn and adapt at a faster pace on the road to learning where and how much to localize.

FIVE TIPS TO SUCCESS

As with Mattel and Wal-Mart, the challenge of learning how much and where to localize is universal to every multinational company. We offer five guidelines regarding how companies can meet this challenge faster and better than their competitors.

First, remember that you can never win in China and India (or any other foreign market) by either complete localization or zero localization. The trick lies in figuring out the right blend between localization and incorporating global concepts and standards. This will never be easy. Companies can significantly increase the odds of success, however, by starting with simpler products and services, engaging in lots of rapid and low-cost localization experiments, and adding complexity to their business models as they learn from these experiments.

Second, the localization-globalization question needs to be addressed at the level of dozens of variables pertaining to both strategy and operations. Coca-Cola (KO) is a grandmaster at this game. While the iconic cola is pretty much a globally standardized product, most of the company's sales outside the U.S. comes from products and brands created locally for the unique needs and desires of local customers. Even for the Coca-Cola brand, the company pays careful attention to localization along a host of variables such as package type and size, amount of sweetener, distribution channels, advertising media, and pricing.

Third, traditional market research, while useful, will often be woefully inadequate in helping companies figure out what to localize and what not. Like Wal-Mart's approach in China, active experimentation and trial-and-error learning will generally be the fastest approach to getting the most accurate answers.

Fourth, avoid the trap of superficial generalization. Like Mattel, many companies make the mistake of assuming that, because urban Chinese customers appear quite Westernized in their outward appearance, they will easily accept Western concepts, products, and services. Even in the case of premium luxury goods, companies are realizing they must understand and adapt to potentially important market differences. BMW (BMW.GR) owners in Europe or the U.S. love to drive the car themselves; their Chinese counterparts, however, sit in the back and rely on chauffeurs to do the driving. In Europe, the majority of Louis Vuitton (LVMHF) customers are women; in contrast, in China, it is men buying gifts for business partners, wives, mistresses, or girlfriends.

Fifth, keep your ears close to the ground. Emerging markets such as China and India are changing at three to four times the pace of developed markets. Thus today's perfect blend of localization and globalization could easily become obsolete three years from now. The trend need not always be toward greater preference for global brands and concepts. As China and India become richer, there is a rapidly growing sense of national pride. Also, as local products improve in quality, it is inevitable that local styles and brands will start acquiring as much cachet as global ones.

I would add a 6th point - be aware of current, past, and future government policies. Local policies regarding everything from building restrictions and incentives to transportation restrictions as part of urban planning initiatives can make or break a business. Ducati ($DMH.SG) opened a Shanghai flagship store in 2010, and quickly discovered that the customers faced major hurdles if they wanted to actually ride the motorcycles they purchased. Because it is Illegal to drive two wheel motored vehicles in Shanghai (read more here and here)I was told by the store general manager that in fact a rider would have to truck their bike 200km outside the city limit, and even then the speed restrictions are tightly controlled by the police. Another hurdle is that trucks are limited to late night and early morning hours (read more here) of operation within the city of Shanghai, so the escape time is also restricted.

Similarly, last year (2010) the government was providing massive incentives to consumers to purchase everything from refrigerators to new cars. Then, come 2011, the Chinese government put in place strict laws restricting the number of cars allowed in all Tier 1 and 2 cities (read more here). The result is that would be auto consumers have a slim chance of winning the car allotment lottery, and auto sales plummet.

Bloomberg Article Authors

Anil K. Gupta (anil.gupta@insead.edu ) is the Insead Chaired Professor of Strategy at Insead. Haiyan Wang (hwang@chinaindiainstitute.com) is managing partner of the China India Institute and an Adjunct Professor of Strategy at Instead. They are the coauthors of Getting China and India Right (Wiley, 2009) and The Quest for Global Dominance (Wiley, 2008).

........

and a follow up read from this week's Access Asia

Fear Not...Barbie Lives

It seems reports that Barbie had felt rejected, and had thrown herself under a bus on Huaihai Road, were premature. Barbie Towers has shut down, and Barbie has decided that regular retail is not for her. Yes, Barbie is now out their selling it on the streets.

Judy's, infamous Shanghai slapper bar of long note, and renowned for its ladies who charge (you know what we mean, any other way of describing them will never get past the puritan filters at most American companies!!) is selling nights out with Barbie. So, if you want a date with Barbie, forget visiting the Barbie Store (it's shut anyway), just buy her a Rum and Coke and she's yours!

And just in case you're reading the small print, we'd like to point out that in our long and deep experience there's no such things as a 'give away' in Shanghai!!

Live performances of what, exactly?