Chinese Apparel Brand You Should Know: Handu Group
Handu Group (韩都衣舍) is an online fast fashion apparel brand established in 2006 with headquarters in Jinan, China. Over the years, the company has gone from an unknown seller on Taobao to become a leading Chinese apparel brand, most recently announcing its design partnership with leading Korean singer and actress IU.
About Handu
Handu is well-known for its Korean style. In fact, many Chinese consumers think this is a Korean brand. The majority of its customers are young girls such as university students and people who just start their career after graduation. Prices of the brand’s products range from 39 to 1,299 RMB ($5.8 – $193).
Collaboration with IU
IU is a famous Korean celebrity with many Chinese fans. She is cute and known for being very fashionable and trendy. In China, many people love to buy the same items that their favorite celebrities wear, so the news that IU had co-designed Handu’s latest collection made me want to open Handu’s Taobao page and have a look, maybe even get the same items IU wears in the announcement video!
In the video, the first and only sentence that IU says is “年轻一点，穿韩都”. You can interpret it as “if you want to look younger, wear Handu”, targeting not only younger consumers but also women in their late 20s and early 30s who want to appear trendy and youthful.
Other Brand Ambassadors
Other than IU, Handu is also working with young idols including Zhu Zhengting (朱正廷), who is also the spokesperson of Perfect Diary, Liu Yuxin (刘雨昕), leader of the popular girl group THE NINE, and Yu Shuxin (虞书欣), who is also in the same girl group.
Global Ambitions
When the brand first founded, it didn’t have professional designer teams nor did the company have any apparel storage. What they did was to appoint university students from design school and pay them to learn to speak Korean. Each of students was assigned 25 Korean apparel brands and in total, there were around 1,000 brands for them to look at.
They were acting as buyers, and picked up whatever they think is good and post them on Handu’s Taobao store. After a customer placed an order, they bought it from those Korean brands and had the clothes shipped to China. They were like Daigou or overseas personal shoppers. After a year being like this, Handu finally started to design their own apparels.
Well, they never stop learning from the Korean style. The brand founded a design studio in South Korea, which attracts many excellent Korean designers. Handu has also appeared at New York, Milan and Seoul fashion weeks. On top of that, in an effort to become more international, Handu has worked with designers from Hermes and Gucci on previous collections.
Read more:
