Forget K-pop and US missiles, Korea is back in fashion with China thanks to live-stream shopping

After Beijing boycotted South Korea for installing the US missile system THAAD, fashion retailers in one of Seoul’s biggest wholesale hubs suffered

But China’s hugely popular live-stream shopping hosts, or zhi bo, have started to turn the tide for the South’s struggling fashion trade

Reading Time:4 minutes

Ding Xiaoping showcases clothes for Dongdaemun Fashion Wholesale Market. Photo: Crystal Tai

Published: 2:54pm, 5 Jun 2019Updated: 11:03pm, 5 Jun 2019

Camera lights wash over Ding Xiaoping as she broadcasts herself across the internet from an iPhone, from inside a minimalist-style living room complete with an ornate faux fireplace. Sporting a trendy auburn hairstyle and bright coral lipstick, Ding speaks in rapid-fire Mandarin introducing 2,000 of her Taobao live-streaming channel viewers to the high-waist pink pastel shorts she’ll be wearing for the next 10 minutes – until she changes into her next look.

For many Chinese consumers and retailers, live-stream shopping is now a widely accepted – even preferred – virtual reality, with thousands of shows like Ding’s being made and watched every day. But Ding does not shoot her show from China – for the past six months she has been broadcasting from a studio in Seoul, South Korea.

Growing up while watching K-dramas and listening to K-pop in Taizhou, a coastal city in Zhejiang province, Ding always dreamed of working in South Korea. Her wish came true last year when she was hired to be a live-streaming host, or “zhi bo” as they are known in China, by a local merchant organisation. Today she is among the 600 or so Chinese zhi bo operating out of Dongdaemun, Seoul’s renowned fashion wholesale Mecca. Ding works with South Korean clothing brands and wholesalers to sell clothes that retail between RMB 98 (US$14) for a blouse, and RMB 150 for a dress.

China is the world’s biggest live-streaming sales market, with more than 100 million monthly viewers of such channels and US$4.4 billion worth of sales last year alone, according to digital research firm L2. And South Korean fashion merchants are cottoning onto the trend, trying to tap into the lucrative market amid a downturn in Chinese consumer spending – triggered by Beijing’s boycott over the South’s instalment of US-made missile systems.

Beijing from 2016 to mid-2018 restricted group travel tours to South Korea because the East Asian neighbour installed the US-designed Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system. Chinese visitors to the South fell from more than 600,000 in April 2016 to around 227,000 in April 2018.

While the ban was lifted in August 2018, Chinese tourism to South Korea has yet to fully recover, with visitor numbers reaching just 493,000 in April this year – a 34.5 per cent increase year-on-year, but not enough to revive Seoul’s fashion wholesale hub of Dongdaemun.

“We were hit hard during THAAD, this area’s retail markets have diminished significantly. Normally, this time of the year there are lots of Chinese buyers, but now there are almost none,” said Park Joong-hyeon, a member of the Dongdaemun Fashion Town Special Tourism Zone Council.

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