Written by Eric Meltzer
Thu, August 09 (13 years ago)
The final approach into Guangzhou’s airport took us right over a tangle of skyscrapers, brightly lit even at 1AM, many of them with cranes still hanging off the sides. We arrived at a generic modern airport, and I took a bus into town. I spent the whole ride looking out the window: mossy apartment buildings mixed with modern high rises, crowds of people lining up for other buses and trains, street hawkers selling delicious looking snacks. Like many major cities in Asia, Guangzhou in the middle of the night on a Monday feels Times Square at noon on a weekend.
The next morning, I woke up in the hotel, which is on a little island in central Guangzhou called Shamian. Shamian used to be a French concession, and it’s now full of vine-covered Western style buildings, ancient banyan trees, and a few former embassies which have been converted into hotels, offices, and at least one Starbucks. This morning, it’s unbelievably, eerily quiet for a neighborhood in a major Chinese city, but the concierge told me that on weekends it’s crawling with brides and grooms who use it as a picturesque background for wedding photos.
After breakfast, I took a cab from the hotel to a long avenue called Rui Kang Street. Bordered on the north end by Sun Yat-Sen University, and on the south by a famous Daoist temple, Rui Kang Street is the center of the apparel industry in China. Both sides of the street are lined with block-long indoor markets, each one containing hundreds of tiny one-room shops. The Penn-Station sized building closest to the north end of the street has a sign that explains that it specializes in fringes and frills, and a look in one of the side doors revealed an unbelievable number of tiny shops carrying every imaginable frilly fluffy material.
The street itself has very little car traffic, because its almost completely congested by, in order of fabric roll carrying capacity: pedestrians (1 roll), motorcycles (2-10 rolls depending on the daring of the driver), three-wheeled motor-trikes (5 rolls), mini-trucks (20+), and flatbed trucks (hundreds). All of these were coming out of a tunnel towards the end of the block that goes right through the largest building here, so I walked in that direction.
FASHION KIOSKS
The wide sidewalks have little kiosks every hundred feet or so that look like newstands but actually deal exclusively in second-hand fashion magazines, pirated DVDs of fashion shows, and CDs with scans of apparel catalogs. There must be hundreds of amateur video editors in Chinese internet cafes around the country, recording and ripping every catwalk show to feed this little library. Most of the DVD’s are organized by year and garment (“1999 Sweaters” for example) but others bespeak a much more careful approach, like “Supra Hi-Tops 2007-2010” and “Blue Dresses from French Houses.”
The breadth of printed material is equally impressive: in addition to the cheap copies of Vogue and GQ, there are pricey Japanese fashion mags from the 90s in huge piles, each one an encyclopedic take on an specific garment or subculture. The turnover seems to be pretty high, and I watched customers carry out entire stacks of particular magazines.
I talked to the owner of one of these shops, and she explained that many factories were loathe to hire a clothing designer when they could hire three or four pattern-makers for the same salary. These pattern-makers would choose outfits they like from the inspiration present in each little “newstand” and then cut a pattern by eyeballing the look. The results are usually third-rate knockoffs, but sometimes the mutant garments produced by this process can be surprisingly great.
When I get to the front of the market I came here for, I realize that what I thought was a tunnel is actually just one aisle of the market. It’s so ridiculously giant that the interior aisles aren’t walkways but two-way roads, clogged with every imaginable type of wheeled vehicle. The top floor of the market has huge exhaust fans to deal with the fact that there are four city blocks worth of automotive traffic driving around inside it. I mistakenly thought this was a shirting market, but it actually seems to carry everything from denim to wool, and I found myself standing in an aisle of shops with rolls of thick hempy looking stuff. I walked up to one of the showrooms for the hempy looking stuff and ask one of the attendants if she knows where tee-shirt cloth is. She started giving me directions in Cantonese-accented Mandarin, and then broke out in a grin when she realized that there was no way anyone who didn’t work in the market could possibly follow them, so she motioned for me to follow along.
We went left, then right, up an escalator, past a 7-11 built into the 2nd floor of the market, into a huge elevator with some poles in front of it to prevent people from trying to ride motorcycles into it, and down to a huge hall of the same little rooms, but this time full of shirting fabrics. Once I made my way over to the knit section, it didn’t take long to pick out a nice thick-but-not-too-thick heather gray cotton, and I arranged for 20 meters to be sent to the factory that would be manufacturing the shirts, so that they could begin making samples.
NOT SHOPS
I keep using the word “shops” to describe the small rooms full of products that each market is made up of. That’s not entirely accurate–they’re actually more like showrooms. Each one represents the entire manufacturing capacity of a single factory somewhere in the greater Guangzhou area. You don’t actually buy material from the “shop” itself; you find something you like, and then you pay them to have the factory ship it directly to your manufacturing location.
Taken as a whole, the Rui Kang Street markets are like an aggregated showroom for the larger part of China’s apparel manufacturing sector. The existence of this kind of place is a less talked-about reason so many people choose to do their manufacturing in China. In the same way that the sheer density of talent and funding sources make it easier to start a tech startup in Silicon Valley than anywhere else, the sheer density of manufacturing infrastructure make it easier to make clothing in Guangzhou than anywhere else.
After I finished up at the fabric market, I walked back up the street to Sun Yat-Sen University, where I sat in a nice cafe and wrote down the notes that I used to write up this first day account. Tomorrow I’ll post the story of going to the factory, and of the tee-shirt prototyping process. If you’d like to try out one of the tees, they are for sale on our site. If you’d like to be notified when the next part of this post is written, please follow us on twitter.