With the cold waves coming one after another this year, all kinds of down jackets are also on sale. However, a batch of down jackets from the brands of South Korea’s E-Land Group, which once became popular in China with the “Korean trend”, were punished as shoddy because of the outrageous difference in cost and pricing, and became the number one hot search!
Recently, according to information from Tianyancha, Yi Nian (Shanghai) Fashion Trading Co., Ltd., a registered company of South Korean E-Land Group in China, was fined for shoddy goods. The production cost of this batch of down jackets is 75 yuan/piece, but the price at the counter is as high as 1,598 yuan/piece. In response, the Beijing Xicheng District Market Supervision and Administration Bureau imposed a fine of 14,382 yuan on him.
In response, netizens also turned on the ridicule mode. “What a trap” “As long as you are poor enough, you are like a leek that a sickle can never cut” and so on.
Top Korean clothing brands are in decline, closing stores on a large scale and selling off assets
E-Land’s clothes should still have many “youthful memories” of those born in the 80s and 90s.
According to information on the official website, South Korea’s THE E·LAND GROUP was founded in 1980. It initially started with the women’s clothing business and has now developed into the largest fashion retail group in South Korea. Its brands include ELAND, SPAO, Prich, There are more than 40 brands such as Roem, Plory, and Paw in Paw. Most of these brands belong to the mid-to-high-end range and can easily cost thousands of dollars. One of its brands (Prich) once promoted its products as “the dream of 900 million girls.”
Some netizens once posted on Weibo saying, “YiLian is the dream clothes that I could never ask for when I was a kid.” Its iconic big red horn-button wool coat (priced at thousands of yuan) was once the “dream coat” that many students born in the 80s and 90s could not afford.
Public information shows that E-Land Group entered China in the mid-1990s and expanded rapidly with brands such as ELAND. At its peak, ELAND had more than 8,000 stores in major cities in China. Its subsidiaries such as SPAO, SCOFIELD, TEENIE WEENIE, etc. even contract C positions in major shopping malls.
But this 40-year-old multinational fashion giant has experienced its darkest moments in recent years. Market analysts say that it is “almost inevitable” that E-Land will begin to decline due to the ebb of the Korean Wave, aging brands, slow digital transformation, and competition from new brands that eat away at market share.
In 2017, E-Land Group sold its brand Teenie Weenie to China’s Vignas Fashion Co., Ltd. (later Jinhong Group). This was seen as a sign that it was going downhill and starting to sell brands. The transaction price is approximately RMB 5 billion. However, in 2019, E-Land also took Jinhong Group to court due to a dispute over the sales contract. It believed that the other party had not received the money and there was a dispute over the actual delivery ratio.
In May 2019, Xtep International signed a share acquisition agreement with E-Land Group through its wholly-owned subsidiary, and acquired E-Land’s K-Swiss and Palladium for a cash price of US$260 million (approximately 1.75 billion yuan). Paladin) and Supra and other brands.
In 2020, under the impact of the epidemic, E-Land Group’s sales experienced a double-digit decline for the first time. This was also the first time the group’s performance declined by a large proportion since its establishment. At the same time, E-Land Group also launched global store closing measures. In the first half of 2020, it successively closed many stores in Daegu, Incheon and other places in South Korea, and even sold the ten-year operating rights of more than 20 store parking lots. In this way, approximately RMB 700 million in working capital was raised.
In the Chinese market, SPAO also experienced large-scale store closures in 2017. Some stores in Shenyang, Beijing, Chongqing, Wuhan, Chengdu, and Qingdao were closed one after another, and the only store in Dalian was also announced to be closed. On April 25, 2020, SPAO officially closed its only store in South China located in Guangzhou R&F Haizhu City.
In the list of the top 500 Asian brands announced in 2020, E-Land ranked 494th, continuing to decline compared with 2019 and almost falling off the list. In the relevant lists in 2021, YiLian has already been hard to find.
Its brand products have been fined many times
In fact, the brand products of Yi Nian Shanghai Company have been fined many times. According to Tianyancha information statistics, the total amount of fines imposed on Yinian Shanghai Company in the past two years is 246,000 yuan.
According to Tianyancha information, at the beginning of 2021,The actual fabric and lining of a women’s wool coat, SPAO, a brand of ��Lian Company, are 100% polyester fiber and do not contain wool. This is false or misleading commercial promotion. The Shanghai Municipal Market Supervision and Administration Bureau was A fine of RMB 200,000 was imposed.
In February, March and April of the same year, Yi Nian Shanghai Company was fined multiple times. The reasons for the punishment involved adulteration, adulteration, passing off fake goods as genuine, passing off substandard goods, and passing off substandard goods as qualified goods; The performance, function, origin, etc. of the product are inaccurate or unclear.
Breaking it down, the company was punished for various issues almost every month last year.
According to the reporter’s inquiry, there are more than 100 complaints against YiLian on the consumer complaint platform Black Cat. The content is mainly about late delivery and non-refundable price difference.
Domestic down jacket brands successfully “counterattack”
In recent years, reporters have observed that domestic consumers increasingly prefer domestic brands rather than foreign brands such as “Canada Goose” and “Moncler”.
According to the Shangguan News investigation report, China’s domestic down jackets have a deep historical foundation, mature clothing technology, cheap raw materials and labor costs, but they have no bargaining power. This is almost a common problem in the Chinese clothing industry for a long time.
However, domestic brands have also been working hard to seek transformation in recent years, and have achieved certain results. According to data from the China Down Industry Association, the average sales price of domestic down jackets grew at a compound annual growth rate of 7.9% from 2015 to 2019, reaching RMB 596 in 2019. It can be predicted that the next few years will be a period of rapid growth for the expansion of the domestic down jacket market.
At the end of last year, when the cold wave hit, there was news in the market that orders for down jacket manufacturers, led by Bosideng, were extremely hot, and sales of some products increased by 300%.
According to the Zhiyan Consulting research report, the market size of China’s down jacket industry in 2021 will be approximately 156.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12.8%.
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