China’s manufacturers embrace ‘smart shops’ to address rapidly changing, and increasingly pickier, consumer tastes

Digital garment printers are helping China’s clothing manufacturers meet the demands of fickle young consumers who want it all in the era of internet shopping: unique designs, fast delivery and low prices.

Cntop, a subsidiary of the Hanglory Group in Shenzhen, is one such company making these printers. The devices are becoming increasingly indispensable in today’s garment value chain, as rapid printing helps clothing manufacturers respond to sudden changes in demand, with a garment’s design and colours determining whether consumers will buy it.

Meanwhile, the average order size is gradually shrinking for Chinese garment producers – a T-shirt factory may need to produce thousands of designs every year to test the market, and each design may result in a few hundred pieces, or even just a few dozen. Gone are the days when a factory could churn out shipping containers full of the same design.

Cntop, which was incorporated in 2016 by its parent company, a business created by a former Huawei Technologies engineer, is trying to capitalise on this shift from mass production to a new mode of faster and more flexible manufacturing.

To that end, Cntop is investing heavily in a new project with the aim of becoming a printing hub for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of clients. Stephen Zhang, the company’s general manager, told the Post during a recent visit to his factory that Cntop has connected 10 digital printers to a “digitalised” production scheme on a new platform called Xunxi, which translates to “fast rhino”. The platform was developed by Alibaba, and the factory eventually plans to increase the number of printers connected to the system to 300.