Crafts have no price but can only be second-class goods

The exquisite handicrafts at the 9th ICIF made it possible for all visitors to stop and appraise. The sculptures are lifelike and natural. It is no exaggeration to say so much to the public. There are literally hundreds of millions of jade carvings and wood carvings everywhere. The price of a Suzhou embroidery silk scarf is 2,000 yuan. When a gift is visited at the scene, a citizen faces a price tag of 2,000 yuan worth of Suzhou embroidery scarves. "If you are so expensive, you might as well buy a LV scarves."

Do some people wonder if these traditional handicrafts are worth the price? Personal opinion, I think the absolute value! This embroidery, regardless of workmanship or touch, absolutely beats foreign luxury brands.

However, what we have seen is that people in China are rushing to LV, but they do not see the people pursuing traditional embroidery. Why? Is it really a round moon abroad? Looking at the history of these international luxury goods development, we can not succeed without the three elements of "technology + marketing + market". Technology is hardware, good manual and excellent material; marketing is software, good strategy and excellent promotion; market is terminal purchasing power.

Compared to technology, these carvings and embroidery are all hand-made and meticulous, and the materials are excellent. A hand-embroidered silk scarves will cost a woman worker nearly one month before and after, which is far more time-consuming than a LV scarves. Lack of purchasing power? According to data from the Shenzhen Technology & Gift Industry Association, only Shenzhen craft gift companies have exceeded 3,000 and annual sales have exceeded 27 billion yuan.

Many technologies, many markets, and only a few have marketing. The experience of many marketing gurus tells us that the most successful marketing lies in the establishment of a brand.

Looking at the market with 10 billion yuan in detail, do the people know a few brands? A luxury market, street vendors can say LV, GUCCI, but the craft market, only know that this is a wood carving that is a jade carving, which is the embroidery that is filigree, who knows which company produced?

Those handicrafts are often tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, but the people do not know where their value lies. Can only see the brand, when a brand is cured, the value naturally emerges. For example, when people talk about a LV scarves of 3,000 yuan, they think that this is a luxury consumer product. But when talking about traditional embroidery at the same price, the people will only think that this is a traditional handicraft. Obviously, traditional handicrafts are now only a kind of Folk symbol is not a commercial brand. As Gao Xiaokang, deputy director of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Research Center of Sun Yat-Sen University, puts it, if the bat pattern only expresses blessings due to the homonym of the word “Fu”, how much difference can this pattern have from mold suppression or hand sculpture?

The price has become the only manifestation of the value of handicrafts. It cannot form an intrinsic brand. This is the reason why Shenzhen and even the country cannot produce LV. Thousands of words, there is a price without license can only become second-class goods.

Many solutions have been proposed, such as grants to protect inheritors, tax relief companies, policy preferences, and product innovations. These solutions are palliative, and the key is how to convert price handicrafts into branded products. Looking forward to the emergence of more sophisticated arts and crafts at the Wenbo Fair in the coming year, more craft brands will emerge.