RTCPODS - China English Podcast Hub

We do fashion that is fast. With a pair of big frame glasses and a grey flat hat, Benoit Auger brims with confidence, fashion and good will. Managing his business and taking care of a family with two little kids, the middle-aged man is fully occupied every day. And he says he really enjoys his current state of life and business. The speed of China is very interesting. So there's a lot of things to do every day. And the city never sleeps, nearly never sleeps. It goes, everybody's busy. Starting from 2006, together with his wife and sister-in-law, he grew their family fashion brand to 15 stores by 2018. After three challenging COVID-19 pandemic years, he's pivoted to exclusively selling online. 20 years ago, everybody was paying by cash and it has to be in a physical shop. So we opened 15 shops in South China. We had shops in Dongguan, of course in Guangzhou, while we had shops covering the whole Guangzhou area. And in a few years, there were payments on the phone and then nobody came to the shops. They all wanted to buy online because it was easier for them. They didn't have to drive, to go to the shop, to part their car, to spend the whole afternoon to try. They just wanted to stay home and it's an evolving thing. So we need to be on the road with this. So from the 15 shops we had, we just right now decided to be a fully online brand. To bring his business online, Oje and his partners have opened shops on e-commerce platforms and set up a studio, live-streaming to reach customers. So we do live-streaming every day. We have maybe a few thousand customers that would watch live-streaming. He thinks the well-developed and superb courier and logistics industry here in China helps make his online business possible. And it's so easy right now, not even for clothes, but to get delivery, for food, for anything, just in a few clicks. The logistics is so advanced in China that you get it in the afternoon or the day after, in the morning you open your door and your things are here already. So it's very convenient for the customer. Oje calls his fashion brand Single Life, targeting urban women customers who pay a lot of attention to the tastes and style of their dresses. On average, one piece of clothing under the brand sells for about 1000 yuan or 140 US dollars, a middle-level price for the clothes market. It doesn't mean that you have to be single, it means that you have one life only and you need to enjoy it and dress beautifully for yourself. Focusing on the domestic Chinese market, his business has enjoyed fairly good development over the past two decades. Serving as a director and shareholder, Benoit Oje oversees the whole process of the family business. It's not a big company, so we kind of do a little bit of everything. So what we do is from really A to Z, from the beginning, from the design, to the sourcing, to the manufacturing, to the selling, to the after-sales. In a competitive market and industry like clothing, how can this fashion brand stand out and succeed? The entrepreneur says knowing the customers is the first step. When you make clothing, you need to think about who's going to wear it. So, for example, if we want to sell in the north of China or the south of China, it's totally different. The proportions of the ladies, maybe they would be taller in north China, a little bit shorter in south China. So when we create some designs, we need to think about the end customer. So we want it to focus really on China and particularly south China. Meanwhile, he spares no effort to make his brand known for its good quality and service. From the beginning, what we decided to do was really focus on service. At that time, there was not a lot of, there was none actually buying on internet. So we opened the shops and we focused really on service. When you go shopping, somebody will pour you water or coffee or tea or something like this. You will have a nice interaction with the sales people. They will check and see what's your body shape and what color will fit you more and what accessories make you look good. To make good quality and popular clothes, designing is key and is the most challenging task according to this French businessman. The most challenging part is to be right when you design something. So we need to be on time and correct with our designs. Of course, we can push, we can influence the market, but we cannot be too avant-garde. Benoit Auger says they have a design team and often work with fashion designers from France, Japan and South Korea. They also do surveys and research to see what the customers really need. Over the past two decades, Auger notes that customer taste and preference has been changing all the time and his business has to follow the trends and grasp the opportunities. The fashion market evolves a lot. When we arrived in South China, I will not speak because China is so big. So I will not speak about Shanghai or Belgium, but in South China, they were really influenced by Korean fashion. So we had to work with this after we moved a little bit more to European fashion. So some things that were simpler and less bling-bling and focused on the cutting. And right now, I see a lot of big comeback of Chinese traditional fashion. So it's good because there's always waves. The traditional clothing of China's Han ethnic group called Hanfu has made a comeback nowadays as an increasing number of young Chinese are adopting it as part of their everyday and public wardrobes. The style of clothing often features a loose flowing robe, wide sleeves and a decorative belt sash. To follow this market trend, Benoit Auger says his brand has tried to incorporate some of its elements. For example, in one piece of clothing, he adds a decorative part called a happy Chinese knot to its collar. The knot is completely hand sewn thread by thread. Now, with some 20 years experience in China, Auger says the country's business environment is good and fair, although market competition is fierce. There's a lot of competition. Everybody is working really hard. The environment is quite stable and legally speaking, it's fair. And it's fairer than it was before. So it's just up to you to see if you get correct in the opportunities that you take and the people you work with to get to the point that you're successful. The Frenchman's story of success in China can be traced back to the year 2000 when he met his wife-to-be while they were studying in England. Benoit Auger was born and grew up in a small town in central France. I was born in Géré, which is a small town that has, I think, 12,000 people. So it's very, very small. And I lived there until I was 19 years old. The place is great. We have beautiful sceneries and lakes and everything, but there's not a lot of opportunities. His ambition to see the bigger world led him to study in England where he had a rendezvous with what he calls fate. I had to find an accommodation to live and I rented a place with three Chinese, two guys from Shanghai and my wife-to-be from Guangzhou. I think it's fate, really. We were quite lucky to find each other a few thousand kilometers each way from our hometown. And we found each other and we stayed together for 24 years now. Two years after that fate-changing meeting, Auger came to China for the first time to see his future parents-in-law who were living in Guangzhou. What he saw on that trip left a deep impression on the young man. It was a huge eye-opening experience. Guangzhou in 2002 wasn't the same as Guangzhou I know today. A lot of the parts were not built yet. There were more bicycles and taxis than private cars. It was a huge working place. Everything was building everywhere. They were building the metro building, big buildings in the Tianhe area. So it was a huge eye-opening experience because I was not used to this and it was totally different to what we saw on TV at that time about China or what we could hear or learn about China at that time in 2002. But it was very, very interesting. I fell in love with the pace and everybody was busy and it was really, really interesting. Although he couldn't speak fluent Chinese at the time, the young man got a glimpse of China and could feel the warmth and friendship of ordinary Chinese. More importantly, his meeting with his future parents-in-law was successful. At the time I had a dictionary and an English-Chinese dictionary and I used this to speak with my mother and my father-in-law and word by word we went through the dictionary. They were quite welcoming and very open-minded about our relationship. One year after the meeting, he got married to his sweetheart, whom he only reveals as Callie. Then he worked briefly in France after finishing his studies in England. Seeing the market potential of China and longing for a more dynamic life, the couple decided to move back to China in 2006. We decided to really come here and start opening a brand and start selling clothes because I saw every year it was back here. The market was so big and I thought there was a big opportunity for me and to come here and to develop something. And it was really, really exciting. Romance with a Chinese lady, learning the Chinese language and culture, and then moving to live in China. For more than 20 years, Benoit Auger has never stopped in his footsteps of getting involved with the Asian nation. Now he can speak fluent Mandarin and the Cantonese dialect. He shares his secret of how to master these seemingly complex and difficult oriental vernaculars. By listening, reading and learning and being out with friends, I slowly caught up and by trying to speak, that's it, I tried, I tried every day, I tried to speak. Now the couple have two children, a daughter and a son. Every year, Auger takes his wife and kids to France to see his parents. Or the other way round, his parents travel to China for a family reunion. He says the 15-day visa-free policy for French citizens, which took effect in December 2023, is great not only for business, but crucially for person-to-person relationships. Right now, if you have a business here, you just can go on a plane and tomorrow go to China and stay here for 15 days. It's really, really, really great. 15 days is a lot of enough time to be able to see factories or to go and see the market. For the family, it was great because my parents, they came here during Chinese New Year last year. They could take advantage of this policy, new policy. They were quite scared at the beginning because they came like 6 or 7 times in China already and they planned really carefully to get the visa. Then I had to write them an invitation letter and then write a lot of things. So they were quite scared about, you're sure we don't need anything? I said, sure, no need for visas. I just come and that's it. And they came and it was great. They went through the immigration line very fast. So it was great. They can come whenever they want. A well-established business and a loving and growing family, Bunua Auger really enjoys what he has achieved so far. Now in his early 40s, he feels energetic and full of hope for the future. I fell in love with the girl first and then I fell in love with the country. For the future, as long as I find that we have the opportunities to be here and that, of course, we'll stay here.