Market Union | Building World-Class Design and R&D Iron Army

On March 17, the Kick-off Meeting for Building World-Class Design and R&D Iron Army was held via video link between Ningbo and Yiwu. President Tom Tang, group leaders Sam Zhu and Amanda Chen along with all 220 colleagues from Design Department attended the meeting.

Silin Shi from Operation Design Department shared the design strategy for the European market. For large-scale supermarket customers, they reduce costs and improve quality by disassembling competing products and conducting consumer insights. For small and medium-sized customers, they create popular products by transplanting cross-category e-commerce hits. They vertically focus on four major product areas: home storage, pet supplies, travel luggage, and beauty & personal care. By assigning dedicated product managers and establishing a trend database, they aim to penetrate specific customer groups.

Elroy Sun from Operation Design Department believed that design services for middlemen and retailers should focus on the “Four Channels”. For middlemen, a full-link service is constructed with modular design technology, and cost-effectiveness is improved through neutral packaging. For retailers, they capture consumption trends relying on “online big data + offline research” and provide customized services with high conversion rates.

For private brands, they build differential competitive advantages through strategies such as patented designs, affordable alternatives to big-name products, and the integration of cross-field elements. In the context of weakened purchasing power of end-customers for daily necessities exports, they create a design paradigm with high aesthetics and low costs, upgrading inexpensive products into symbols of high cost performance to win over customers.

King Wang from ARTCOOL Design Department shared the design and R&D of the cultural and creative product line around “Design – Driven + Global Layout”. He systematized the successful case database of the European market, focused on innovations in craftsmanship, materials, and structures, incorporated the Lifestyle design concept, and expanded diverse product selections for boutiques.

He collaborated with American designers to capture market trends, utilized AIGC batch-generation technology to enhance overseas implementation capabilities, and established design production lines for paper products and party supplies leveraging Southeast Asian production capacity, turning tariff barriers into a combined advantage of “design and R&D + low-cost manufacturing”.

Anby Wu from Operation Design Department explained AI-empowered design cases to address the pain points of traditional design, such as low efficiency, high costs, and limited creativity. AI accelerates project cycle reduction, the improvement of designers’ capabilities, and the transformation to ODM. They have overcome challenges in multiple scenarios, reconstructing the product design and packaging design processes with AI support, from solution generation to die-plate production.

They are also building an AI talent certification system, a design element tag library, and exclusive models for sub-categories. Through the “AI Iron Army Forging Plan”, they aim to standardize tools and visualize results, striving to become a benchmark for AI transformation in the industry.

Leo Le from Operation Design Department shared the “Full-Life-Cycle System” for product design of major customers. In the initial stage, they use combined designs, such as cross-style sets of home and kitchen products for customer attraction. In the middle stage, they collaborate with the supply chain to accelerate the iteration of best-selling products and the development of new products. In the later stage, they deeply explore specialized product lines, constructing a three dimensional sub-category framework of craftsmanship, price, and function, applying successful experiences from similar major customers to create a value ecosystem for major customers.

Rex Zhao from BRIGHT MAX Design Department shared the transformation methodology for the lamp product line with “Technical Barriers + R&D Investment”. They established an annual technical trend learning system, deployed an AI patent offense-defense system to achieve full coverage infringement early warning.

They reorganized special teams for Europe and the US in electronics and structural engineering, promoted intelligent manufacturing with “3D printing + rapid prototyping”, reducing the sample cycle by 40%. They segmented the market into four major areas: home, outdoor, industrial, and festival, formulating different R&D routes to ensure that the conversion rate of new products at exhibitions is over 60% and the customer adoption rate is over 35%.

Fae Chan from Operation Design Department focused on the design for the Russian market. She will seize the dual opportunities of the withdrawal of Western brands and online growth to build a breakthrough path for self-owned brands. She drives popular products with data, pays attention to addressing user pain points, and positions market demands based on the sales data of products like wild berries on Ozon and trends on VK social media.

Taking the optimization of the leaking problem of spray mops as an example, she analyzed differential selling points. She also reduces logistics costs and increases the repurchase rate through lightweight structures and consumable bundling, and promotes scene-based product display and three dimensional market penetration by stratifying shelves (low-price attracting products / mid-price innovative products / high -price gift products).

Sonia Wang from the TOLEAD Design Department shared the cross-border e-commerce design system centered around traffic conversion. She achieved precise positioning by analyzing product physical objects, profiling target groups, and disassembling the styles of competing products to establish a differential visual tone.

The main image of products follows the principle of “product prominence-texture enhancement-scene immersion”, making selling points visual to achieve instant information delivery and using logical layout to enhance readability. The design and operation teams have real time interactions, dynamically optimizing based on consumer feedback. They prioritize click-through rates and then conversion rates to build an e-commerce design team with high conversion rates.

Yuze Wang from Operation Design Department introduced the product shooting strategy. First, it is market-adaptable. For mid-high-end platforms (such as Amazon and independent websites), it highlights the scene-based high-end feel; for mid-to-low-end platforms (such as Temu), it focuses on practical visual presentation; for the female-oriented market (such as SHEIN), it emphasizes cost -performance appeal.

Second, it uses AI for efficiency improvement. ComfyUI is used for automatic image cropping and scene building, and WeShop generates models in multiple styles, shortening the shooting cycle by 85%. Third, it aims to transform into a comprehensive photography unit of “technical creativity” in video intelligent production.

Andrew Ren from Operation Design Department introduced the “Design and R&D Plan for the Yiwu-Featured Agency Model”. The plan is advanced in multiple stages. In the primary stage, they create momentum by using multilingual brochures and short videos to lower the threshold for product selection. In the intermediate stage, they improve efficiency by promoting lightweight cost-reduction and cultural adaptation through packaging classification.

In the advanced stage, taking the temperature-measuring storage box as an example, they iterate popular products with the “1 + N” combination. At the same time, they give full play to the advantages of the Yiwu supply chain, focus on the price range of $0-10, develop culturally customized products such as Ramadan-themed series, and deepen the product development path of “trend capture-rapid implementation-cost control” to help agent customers shift from following the market to leading it.

Chris Liu, the head of the Design Department, stated that the team will benchmark against the design and R&D standards of world-class enterprises such as Apple and Xiaomi. Using the “Customer × Market × Product” strategy matrix as a powerful tool, they will break through with the help of AI technology and reconstruct design competitiveness. They will conduct matrix-style agile operations, forming cross -field and cross-regional design and R&D project teams to achieve synchronous operations in market research, design, and procurement.

For complex projects and key market challenges, they will form special-attack teams, concentrate superior resources for breakthroughs, and apply the experience to different product lines and markets. They will also accelerate the improvement of the internationalization, digitization, standardization, and process-orientation of design work, cultivating designers with six dimensional integrated capabilities including “design insights, product positioning, intelligent application, trend judgment, value creation, and product selection planning”.

At the meeting, individual and team awards such as Excellent Newcomer Award, Model Worker, Youth Model Unit Award, Best Operational Service Award, Excellent Business Award, Annual Best Operational Service Style Award were presented, which was an affirmation and encouragement for the design work of the past year.

President Tom Tang pointed out that building a world-class design and R&D team cannot remain just a slogan or be equated with holding meetings and assigning tasks. We need to clearly distinguish between false and genuine needs in our design work and continuously explore the balance between creating momentum and delivering tangible results. Design and R&D, which aim to create value for customers, should not remain theoretical; we must focus on meeting genuine needs and continuously refine the granularity of our work. Excellent experiences and case studies need to be continually summarized, generalized, and replicated. Given the surplus of goods, we should learn from and emulate the successful cases of world-class companies, combining them with the actual circumstances of our customers. We need to shift from competing on price to competing on design, enhancing product aesthetics, creating surprises and bestsellers, while also pursuing the most competitive prices.The design and R&D capabilities of our products are the moat for our company’s profits and an effective defensive measure in the competitive process. There is a significant gap between us and world-class companies in terms of design and R&D, but this also means there is a lot of room for improvement. Our company’s product positioning should avoid direct competition with world-class companies and instead aim to become a world-class fashion group in the small commodities sector. Building a world-class design and R&D team is a long and challenging journey, and we all need to work together. Thank you, everyone!