Huqiu Wedding Street in Suzhou (Suzhou hides a wedding city)

Text | Xu Yiting

Liu Yue stood on the huge stage and looked at herself in the mirror wearing a white trailing wedding dress. It's so beautiful, she thought. It's just that renting three wedding dresses in this studio costs 3288 yuan, which is really expensive.

As soon as she took off the wedding dress she tried on, she opened Taobao and idle fish, hesitating whether to buy a brand-new set or a few second-hand sets.

What she doesn't know is that both the photo studio and the wedding dresses on e-commerce mostly come from the same place: Huqiu Wedding Dress City in Suzhou, Jiangsu.

This wedding dress city, which covers an area of10.2 million square meters, was originally just a wedding dress street in Huqiu, and it grew wildly for 40 years. It eventually grew into the largest wedding dress production and sales base in China, with 70% wedding dresses coming from here and trading with more than 30 countries around the world.

In the past few decades, changes have taken place quietly. What remains unchanged is the fact of "buying a wedding dress to go to Tiger Hill".

Don't worry, girl, there is always a wedding dress you like seven days a week, and the sixth day is the most anticipated by more than 400 businesses in the wedding dress city. The change of people's flow is like the sudden arrival of a rich banquet after five days of clear soup and little water. This Saturday in early September is the same.

At nine o'clock in the morning, crowds from Suzhou Railway Station, buses and private cars flocked to Huqiu Wedding City from all directions.

When people enter from Area A, they first pass the shops in Chen Chen. A dozen mannequins in wedding dresses attracted some people's attention, and some people stopped there.

The runway in the wedding dress shop

The curtain was lifted, and the bride-to-be in a blue wedding dress walked to the end of the five-meter runway. She is in her twenties, with a ponytail and a slightly tired smile. This is the eighth wedding dress she tried on in the third store this morning.

There are more than a dozen relatives of parents, uncles and aunts sitting under the stage. They have their own opinions, or the wedding dress is too revealing and not subtle enough; Or the collar is too high and conservative.

"Don't worry, girl, there is always a wedding dress you like."

Chen Chen, the boss, is used to such a scene. After coming to Suzhou for 20 years, from making wedding accessories to opening her own shop, she understood the significance of the wedding and the weight of the wedding dress.

Once, a girl came here with a wedding dress because she was slightly fat and didn't fit. When we met again a month later, the girl had lost ten pounds and finally put on the ground gauze at the wedding.

Chen Chen said that this trip is happy because it is about beauty and happiness, which is very similar to her childhood love.

Under her recommendation, I tried the eighth set of unsatisfied girls and finally chose a wedding dress that satisfied everyone.

"As long as you want, there are" people moving forward. In the afternoon, two couples came to Le Ye's area B.

Le Ye is the second generation wedding dress. His parents' shop runs from the old street to the wedding dress city. After returning from studying abroad, he rented a shop diagonally across the street and ran it with his girlfriend.

The two couples who came in at the moment are both from Jiaxing. When they got married, they all came here to buy it. The two brothers also inquired about it and came by car with their prospective daughter-in-law.

In Yele's shop, the girls quickly selected two main wedding dresses. However, after that, they got into trouble because of He Xiu's different opinions.

Girls should be carefully selected and seek perfect cost performance; The boy's tired legs are numb, and he just wants to finish early. Finally, the girls went door to door, leaving him gaping at his brother's wedding dress.

Two hours later, the girls returned to their original place with a beautiful wheat grain in their hands.

If you really answered that sentence, you can have it here if you want.

"Don't bargain, I sold it at a loss." Customers walking in the wedding city are divided into three categories: the first category is the wedding hall, that is, the wholesaler; The second category is photo studio procurement, and the third category is individual fit. In the proportion of transaction amount, the three decrease in turn.

When more and more people know the existence of Huqiu Wedding City through explosive information, the number of individual suitors is gradually increasing. They don't doubt that they can find a favorite dress here, but they doubt whether they can buy it at the most suitable price.

The price watershed has a bright line between high-end customization and low-end retail.

Area C of the wedding dress city is a single-family villa area, and a building is a family. Jueshe, Yolanda, Dennis, many brands killed from the grass are located here. Many people come here to customize a wedding dress, starting from tens of thousands.

A family of three stood at the door of a villa. My father is absorbed in smoking, and my mother and daughter are talking about the price with the staff of a wedding dress shop.

"We sincerely want to buy it. Your price is too high. "

"Elder sister, you don't bargain, I'm here to sell. Why else did I just call you out and pretend to leave, and I'll discuss it with the manager myself? 12800 yuan is the reserve price. " The employees showed sincerity.

At this time, my father, who had been watching silently, suddenly spoke: "Little girl, don't spend so much time. I'm also in business. I can still see your tricks clearly. Almost the same clothes, thousands of dollars cheaper than your next door, you are still playing here. "

The two sides came and went, and finally the family entered the store again. The older, the wiser.

The customers in area C have clear goals, while the customers in areas A and B face more complicated situations.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, a well-dressed girl walked into a small shop in area B and picked up a wedding dress. "How much is this?"

The owner told 600.

"Little red book raiders said your home this retail 600 yuan. Are you fooling me? " The girl frowned.

The shopkeeper asked, do you take the goods or one?

The reason for his rhetorical question is that the people who get the goods are already familiar with the business, and no one will go to see the raiders.

Here, what kind of price you can sell or what kind of wedding dress you can buy depends on the ability of both parties.

Please don't take pictures. No one is allowed in. No couple will leave the wedding city empty-handed. If you don't buy it, there is only one reason: no.

At the door of Yele's shop, there are four characters "No taking pictures", which are particularly eye-catching on the clear glass.

"You don't know how thieves they are." He described the reasons for posting the reminder notice: a couple came in arm in arm, taking pictures in the east and in the west; Not only take pictures, but also try them on. Within a week, he found his own wedding dress style in the wedding dress shop next door.

It turned out that it was not a customer, but the "undercover" next door.

Some people are not so sneaky.

The door of the shop faces the two benches in the rest area. "The most people sitting in chairs are not customers. Well, it's the proprietress of those wedding shops. "

Whenever there are guests in the store, bosses will cran their necks to watch, for fear of not seeing which style of wedding dress the girl is trying on.

"Those eyes are wide open as if they were going to eat people." Le Ye described. As a countermeasure, he occasionally blocks the door with humanoid props to resist those who intend to infiltrate.

Le Ye is not the only country facing this problem. More shops have posted similar notices, such as "no entry for peers, no humiliation".

This situation comes from the stratification of enterprises.

As early as in Huqiu Wedding Street, it was called "imitation first". The aunts can make a wedding dress in a short time just by looking at the photos. You don't have to go abroad if you want to buy a foreign fashion. Huqiu Wedding Street remains exactly the same.

The wedding city keeps some low-end shops out of the door, and most of them have their own factories and designers. However, there are still many small businesses that can't sign contracts. They can innovate by copying online picture resources and imitating the style of Friends.

The rumble of machines indicates that Zone D is springing up, and hundreds of bridal shops are about to move in. It seems that competition will only increase.

"The key to change forever is to keep up with yourself." It is said that it is located in the wedding dress city, and the competition with other businesses is not so great. There is indeed an e-commerce district.

Yin Wanqi's Youkeshang Wedding Dress Co., Ltd. is here. He has been doing e-commerce for nine years.

In Yin Wanqi's view, the wedding dress city currently has two bottlenecks. First, popularity. Although there are more and more individual travelers, more people don't know that Suzhou has a Huqiu wedding dress city. Secondly, geographically, it is convenient for customers from Suzhou and surrounding cities to come, but for consumers in remote cities, even if they know, they rarely spend energy and time.

Yin Wanqi

But his Tmall shop can extend in all directions. The unit price of a wedding dress is six or seven hundred yuan, with an average monthly sales volume of 600,000. 80% of them are from our own store, and 20% are from other businesses in the wedding dress city.

Compared with single-minded e-commerce, wedding dress city is more about doing e-commerce business while doing entity. A two-pronged approach will not only make the physical stores in the wedding city famous, but also open up another income channel outside the offline stores crowded with food.

This also constitutes the nerve endings of Suzhou Wedding Dress City, which directly touches consumers everywhere.

"Originally, consumers could only go to the local photo studio or dress hall, all of which were purchased from the wedding city, which affirmed our own cheapness."

Consumer preferences can be transmitted through the nerve endings of the Internet.

Yin Wanqi said that his market sense of smell comes directly from the Internet: "Now many young people like to travel and get married, so short wedding dresses are particularly popular, and we will adjust the proportion of products accordingly."

Under the influence of people like Yin Wanqi, the Internet has gradually penetrated into the thinking of wedding shopkeepers. A boss who has been a wedding dress shop for 20 years recently learned to surf the Internet: "The times are always changing, and the key is whether you can keep up."

Buy a wedding dress and go to Tiger Hill. Every six o'clock, the wedding dress city is closed and empty. Some people miss the old street and tell its original story.

In the 1980s, the commercial tide surged. Li Lianhe, a photographer of a state-run photo studio in Suzhou, had the idea of management. After retirement, he opened a wedding photography shop called "Welcome Wedding Dress" in Camellia Village at the foot of Huqiu Mountain. As the name implies, the shop is full of guests. Money plays a very important role, and soon, wedding dress shops are all over the streets of Tiger Hill.

In just ten years, there are thousands of families. Ten years later, it nearly tripled.

Opening a shop on the first floor, producing on the second floor and living on the third floor lasted for many years. 20 15 came to an end because of dirty, chaotic and poor conditions and great security risks.

The new wedding dress city is clean and tidy, with high-end atmosphere, but the rent is high. There is no brand moat in the store, and e-commerce faces the problem of "only wearing once, high return rate".

Others only wear wedding dresses once in their lives. They have been doing business all their lives, and now they seem to have reached a new level.

Someone gave up and went back to the store to change the line; Some people rely on the barriers built by the customer relationship established in their early years to live a moist life; More people are crawling forward.

A new businessman remembers a couple who ordered a wedding dress and paid for it, but called to say that the marriage was not over, but the wedding dress was still in the store.

It's been three years. Recently, he called to ask the girls if they needed a ride.

She said, forget it.

Probably she still has some ideas about marriage, just as these businesses have the same ideas about the future of the wedding dress industry.