Winter artifacts are all made in Chinese counties .

Visual China.

Text |Outside the Fifth Ring Road, by |Zhou hippie, edLiu Yiran.

Keeping warm is a survival skill that residents in the south must master, and in the south, where the cold scene is beginning to extend from outdoor to indoor, compared to the northern areas where indoor heating is available.

With the rare snowfall in the south this year, people's demand for warm products has been turned up.

Experience is accumulated in life, Ren Yun, who lives in the Yangtze River Delta region all the year round, has relied on "human body self-heating" for countless winters to slowly survive, take a bath and wash vegetables into the bed, in the past it took courage and a lot of psychological construction.

With the development of the Internet to bring about information equality, knowing that northerners can "spend the winter indoors" without injury, but also learned the unpopular knowledge of "selling things to see the place of delivery".

These artifacts to protect southerners all originated from "made in Chinese counties".

Down jacket is a proposition that can't be avoided every winter.

With the white duck down ** rising all the way this winter, the ** down jacket ** is also rising. "Domestic down jackets are sold for 7,000 yuan", "Canada goose with more than 10,000 yuan" and a series of hot topics about down jackets** have caused heated discussions.

As a must-have item for winter, the warmth of breaking thousands of people at every turn is daunting, and in a scolding that can't afford it, the county down jacket has gradually been favored by the public, waking up a group of dreamers who pursue cost-effectiveness.

The three typical county brands of Yaya, Yalu and Flying in the Snow were born in the county, rooted in the county, and benefited the county.

These three brand stores are gathered in the county, the price is only three or four hundred, no gimmicks, no premium, the ultimate cost performance and functionality, and become the most down-to-earth county down jacket in the mouth of consumers.

According to relevant data, in 2022, the e-commerce turnover of duck duck down jackets will exceed 10 billion yuan;In 2021, Xuezhongfei entered the short ** platform, and the number of fans increased by more than 400,000 in the first 3 months of broadcasting, and the sales volume of a single platform increased by 206% year-on-yearAt present, the Yalu brand has opened more than 2,000 ** on major e-commerce platforms, and online sales are expected to exceed 12 billion yuan this year.

"County down jacket" relies on cost performance and successfully stands firm in many people's wardrobes.

Data**: Feigua data).

Yaya comes from Gongqingcheng at the southern foot of Lushan Mountain in Jiangxi Province and on the west bank of Poyang Lake.

In 1955, 98 Shanghai educated youths came to the shore of Poyang Lake to reclaim the wasteland, and they started waterfowl farming with the help of the vast water surface. In the 60s of the 20th century, they were not satisfied with raising ducks and selling ducks, and built a plate duck factory and began to try to process agricultural products.

The plate duck is selling very well, and the "brain hole" of the Komsomolsk people who have tasted the sweetness is getting bigger and biggerCan a mountain of duck feathers be turned into treasure?

Few people can imagine that the predecessor of the current county down jacket is a cross-border master, in 1972, the establishment of the Gongqing Down Factory, from food to clothing, the best use of "duck duck" was born.

In the same year, another "county down jacket" Yalu was established as a village-run garment factory in Luhe Town, Taicang City, Jiangsu Province.

The main purpose is to help local garment companies to divide orders, relying on the processing fee of a few cents earned per piece.

In 1987, the founder of Yalu keenly captured the information that "tweed fabric jackets in the south may be popular", and worked overtime to produce 120,000 jackets and put them on sale in Renli Store on Nanjing East Road in Shanghai, which immediately received a warm response from the market.

made a fortune on jackets, and watched the jacket market weaken. In 1997, Yalu borrowed the resources of the original jacket to enter the down jacket industry and established its own sales network without much effort.

In 2019, Yalu alone has hundreds of brand stores in Hubei, and many stores have even opened in the township, and some of the basic styles in the store are discounted, which can be as low as 99 yuan for two pieces.

In 2020, there will be more than 1,000 stores in third- and fourth-tier cities of duck duck down jackets, and even the official ***99 yuan can get a thin down jacket.

Duck Duck official *** the highest selling down jacket.

When high cost performance has become a common demand for consumers to buy down jackets, county down jackets are also quickly occupying the market with the sales positioning of "cheap and practical, cost-effective".

At the 2022 Winter Olympics, when China's Gu Ailing won the championship with a 1620-degree difficult movement, she won the cheers of the world, and at the same time, it also brought the sport of skiing to the fire, and many skiing enthusiasts began to emerge.

Ski gloves are an essential part of when preparing ski equipment. As everyone knows, the vast majority of them come from a small county in Lunan Province——Jiaxiang County, Jining City, Shandong Province.

It has a history of more than 30 years of glove production, with more than 300 glove production and processing and supporting enterprises, more than 1,500 processing households, more than 50 auxiliary materials production and equipment and other supporting enterprises, and the production and sales of ski gloves rank first in the country.

Jiaxiang ski gloves are exported to more than 60 countries and regions around the world, forming a "world gloves look at China, Chinese gloves look at Jiaxiang".

An employee of a glove manufacturer in Jiaxiang County introduces glove products to customers (Source: Xinhua News Agency).

In the early days of reform and opening up, the demand for gloves in mining areas and construction increased significantly. In 1988, Jiaxiang County introduced the first foreign-funded glove production plant - Jining Sanyuan Industry

Since then, the gears of fate in Jiaxiang County have begun to turn. According to official data, 80% of the glove entrepreneurs in Jiaxiang County have three rounds of work experience, known as the "Whampoa Military Academy" of Jiaxiang glove industry.

In addition, a large number of skilled sewing practitioners have been trained.

A pair of ski gloves may look like only the palm, the back of the palm, and the five fingers, but the production process is far more complicated than ordinary clothing. Depending on the style and function, a pair of ski gloves can require up to fifty or sixty types of surface accessories. The requirements for workers' splicing and sewing skills are much higher than those of ordinary garments.

Employees in the workshop of a glove manufacturing company in Jiaxiang County are processing gloves (Source: Xinhua News Agency).

The establishment of "Three Circles" has laid a solid technical foundation for Jiaxiang's glove industry, but the advantages of Jiaxiang County's own "cotton planting county" have added another fire to the development of the glove industry. Jiaxiang's perennial cotton output is more than 5 million quintals, which solves the problem of raw materials.

Later, the state-owned glove factory underwent restructuring, and many cadres and workers set up small glove processing factories in the city.

Partly because of the "marriage talk", the sewing workers who returned to the countryside brought the glove sewing technology back to the countryside, opened a glove processing workshop at the door of their homes, and organized the eldest sisters and aunts in the neighborhood to train them to become skilled handicraft practitioners.

Factories in the cities send some of their orders to small and medium-sized factories and handicraft workshops in villages and townsTherefore, the production mode of "headquarters + satellite" is formed.

The cost of employment is much lower than that of glove processing factories in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, so some foreign trade orders are slowly transferred from the coastal areas to Jiaxiang.

In 2008, Jiaxiang formulated the first industry standard for ski gloves;In 2015, China successfully bid for the Winter Olympics, and Jiaxiang enterprises have declared and registered their own domestic and foreign brands, and carried out cross-border e-commerce businessIn 2022, during the Beijing Winter Olympics, a number of Jiaxiang glove factories reached a cooperation with Anta Group, the official sportswear partner of the Winter Olympics, to "specialize" for the Winter Olympics ice and snow sports gloves, making Jiaxiang's ski gloves break the circle.

At the Winter Olympics, Jiaxiang glove company cooperated with Anta ski gloves.

Jiaxiang has used more than 30 years to develop "small gloves" into "big industries" and become a glove leader.

The cold of winter makes "the place outside the bed far away", but before going to bed, the place inside the bed also belongs to the distance, and the electric blanket is an artifact that immediately turns the bed into a warm nest.

More than forty percent of this artifact that saved the southern winter came from Xinle City, Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province, located at the eastern foot of Taihang Mountain.

This city of less than 500,000 people can sell 16 million electric blankets a year, and is known as China's "hometown of electric blankets".

Electric blanket is a labor-intensive industry, the first chain behind it includes switches, non-woven fabrics, heating elements, power cords, etc., the industry started in Shijiazhuang Xinle City, in the 80s of the last century.

The electric blanket in the production workshop is being produced (Source: Xiaohongshu).

In the eighties and nineties of the twentieth century, the industry of Shijiazhuang City, which was managed by Xinle, had a considerable scale and foundation, and the industrial categories were complete, forming a comprehensive industrial structure with textile, medicine, electronics, machinery, chemical industry, building materials, and light industry as the main body and a relatively reasonable layout.

Xinle is close to Shijiazhuang International Airport, to Beijing, Tianjin, Xiong'an New Area, can be reached within 2 hours by car. In addition, several railways, high-speeds, and national highways run through the north and south, and across the east and west, creating good transportation conditions for Xinle, and also laying a solid transportation foundation for its electric blanket industry.

Xinle City has obvious transportation advantages (source: Xinle City People**).

Relying on Shijiazhuang's industrial base and its own transportation advantages, the electric blanket industry has become one of the traditional industries in Xinle City.

As early as 1988, one of the earliest professional manufacturers of electric blankets in the country - Wuyang Electric Appliance was established in Xinle City, Hebei Province, starting from the production of traditional electric blankets and accessories, and gradually developing and upgrading products, such as microcomputer timing temperature control, constant temperature, digital display and other intelligent control.

The gradual improvement of the industrial chain has allowed electric blanket enterprises to form an agglomeration effect in Xinle, and a number of brands such as Arctic People, Wangfeng Technology, and Oriental Great Wall have gradually grown and formed a competitive advantage in the industry.

Up to now, Xinle City has 44 electric blanket manufacturers and 5 electric blanket accessories manufacturers that have passed 3C certification, with an annual output of 16 million electric blankets and 1 employee10,000 people, to achieve an output value of 19800 million yuan.

In Hebei, Xinle City is not the only "warm industrial belt". Based on the advantages of Hebei's upstream and downstream industries, Cangzhou, Hebei Province has expanded a new branch of warm products in recent years: plumbing blankets. Cangzhou's first batch of plumbing blanket merchants [Huanding Plumbing Blanket] has been deeply cultivated in the industry for ten years, and this year's Double 11 achieved a GMV of more than 2 million in Pinduoduo.

The number of businesses producing plumbing blankets has also expanded from one or two to seven or eight, and the formation of industrial belts in third- and fourth-tier cities has also expanded employment opportunities for more locals.

This year, many of the hot blanket orders that have brought a warm winter to countless southerners have been sent from Hebei, and practitioners in this industrial chain have also lived a warm winter.

In winter, it is not the leader who takes care of most of the white-collar workers in the office, but the heating artifact - the little sun. They occupy the offices of white-collar workers in the Yangtze River Delta and have become a "plug-in" for office workers to insist on fishing.

As one of China's heater production bases, in 2021, the output value of Cixi's smart home appliance industry has exceeded 100 billion. Public data shows that in the first three quarters of 2022, Cixi heater exports were 406.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 126%。Cixi's export volume accounts for one-third of the country, and it can be called the "City of Little Sun".

There are 518 heating equipment enterprises in Cixi, accounting for about 78 of the total number of enterprises in Ningbo82%。

The number of heater equipment manufacturing enterprises in Cixi City accounts for 78 in Ningbo82% (Source: Sina Finance).

In the mid-80s of the last century, Cixi completely transformed from a cotton planting base to a small household appliance production base, and began to produce household appliance supporting products for foreign enterprises, but the scale was relatively small.

At that time, the overflow orders for small household appliances such as Shanghai electric fans would also fall to Cixi.

It all started in the late 90s of the last centuryCixi gradually shifted from supporting enterprises to complete machine manufacturing, and at the same time took samples and orders from Guangdong and other places, from the domestic market to foreign trade exports.

After decades of development, the city has not only cultivated brands such as Bull, Fotile and Pioneer, but also is one of the three major appliance bases in China, gathering more than 200 home appliance enterprises and nearly 10,000 supporting enterprises.

The production workshop of a heater enterprise in Cixi (source: Sina Finance).

One saying is, "If you make small household appliances in Cixi, you can find 99% of the parts within half an hour."

Ningbo Cixi has formed a complete home appliance industry chain, with the synergistic advantages of industrial exhibition, as well as the advantages of raw materials, such as the production of an electric heater, from the packaging carton, to the internal heating element, motor, electronic control, power cord, etc., basically can be self-sufficient locally.

In addition, Cixi is strategically located. With the opening of the Hangzhou Bay Bridge in 2008, the transportation distance between Cixi and Shanghai has been shortened from 330 kilometers to 168 kilometers, making it an important transportation hub for the coastal corridor. In addition, Cixi is less than 100 kilometers away from the port of Ningbo-Zhoushan, the world's largest port.

Cixi "Little Sun" is generally exported through Beilun Port in Ningbo Zhoushan Port. Thanks to the geographical location, it is easier for Cixi to do exports.

Under the energy crisis last year, Cixi's "Little Sun" successfully became one of the eight major thermal artifacts bought by Europe, and the shroud of China's thermal artifacts became wider and wider, and a considerable part of them started from this small county on the coast of the East China Sea.

"Made in the county" has already provided more possibilities for winter. The collection of these industrial belts, which summarizes a variety of factors such as time, location, and people, has arisen in the county, and is currently going out of the county and even to the world, which is being seen by everyone.

But "made in the county" also has its own predicament, product grade and added value is not high, the brand advantage is not obvious, homogenization competition is serious, many enterprises are mainly foundry, although the output is relatively large, but the independent brand is few, the technical content is low. Therefore, it is always inevitable to question the labeling and quality.

With the expansion of the pursuit of cost-effective groups, people have gradually begun to show a preference for "made in the county", and these county brands are also trying to ensure that consumers' money is spent sparingly and worthwhile.

Born in a small workshop, it has been integrated into a large industry, and the predecessors of the county industrial belt seem to come from the same story template.

In 2023, China's GDP will increase to 54 counties with a GDP of 100 billion, and these once unknown county industrial belts will break through the constraints of geography through the Internet.