Small city a big player in market for down jackets

For the past few years, the Chinese down jacket brand Orolay has been among Amazon's best-sellers, with jackets for women among the most popular with American consumers on Black Friday.

"Affordable prices, together with warm and fashionable features" have laid the foundation for Orolay's popularity, said Qiu Jiawei, the company's founder.

Qiu comes from Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, a city well-known for its clothing industry — leather produced in Haining, wool sweaters in Tongxiang and down jackets in Pinghu. All are county-level cities in Jiaxing.

Supported by the complete industrial chain in Pinghu, Qiu founded Jiaxing Zichi Trading Co. In 2013, Qiu launched the brand Orolay on Amazon, becoming one of China's first cross-border e-commerce brands.

In the US market, sales of Orolay are increasing 300 to 400 percent on average year-on-year, Qiu said.

With a population under 700,000, Pinghu boasts annual shipments of more than 150 million down jackets, with annual sales reaching 30 billion yuan ($4.38 billion). More than 2,000 down jacket manufacturers here have their own R&D departments.

More than 1.2 million down jackets are shipped out of Pinghu every day during peak season.

"The development of Pinghu's down jacket industry not only mirrors the industrial upgrading process of the city but is also a microcosm of the reorganization of the regional industrial chain," said Wu Xuequan, executive deputy general manager of China Garment City in Pinghu.

"Its development represents the trend that low-end manufacturing with low added value is out of step. Enterprises should seek segmented markets with higher quality."

In 2014, with booming sales of down jackets nationwide, businesspeople in Pinghu found the potential of their industry. Helped by the local government, thousands of manufacturers decided to integrate their production lines and take advantage of emerging smart technologies, forming an industrial agglomeration area featuring down jackets.

Currently, the city has the largest market for down jackets in the country. Fifty percent of those made in China come from Pinghu.

Most of Pinghu's residents are connected to the down jacket business one way or another. Nearly 10,000 people are directly employed in various segmented markets, and 100,000 people work in related areas such as production, distribution and design.

Wu believes the keys to the fast-growing down jacket industry in Pinghu lie in its robust processing and manufacturing chains and in the fact that businesses in the city have also seized the opportunities brought by the exploding development of e-commerce, including livestreaming, in China in the last decade.

Fang Xiaoying in Hangzhou contributed to this story.