Personalized consumption matches production and sales, boosts customer satisfaction

Personalized products and services are gaining traction in China in recent years as there are various consumption scenarios, and the market keeps expanding.

This shows that consumers' demands have become personalized and diversified amid consumption upgrading, and they come as a result of efforts taken by product and service providers to develop innovative business models and coordinate supply and demand.

Consumers choose fabrics for customized clothing inside a fashion clothing market in Yudu county, Ganzhou city, east China's Jiangxi Province. (Photo/Zhu Haipeng)

SEMS, a personalized shoe manufacturer in Putian city, southeast China's Fujian Province, uses a foot scanner to capture accurate foot data and recommend suitable shoes to customers. With the equipment, consumers can choose the colors, patterns, signatures and other elements of their shoes. It takes as quick as two hours to produce a pair of custom-made shoes at the shoe factory.

Experts said using personalized products and services is a way for young consumers to express themselves, noting that personalized consumption accurately satisfies consumers' needs and promotes supply-demand matching.

Today, it's easy to find a lifestyle platform that offers a wide range of products and services, including cakes, flowers, formal clothing, hairdressing, wedding banquets, team building activities and birthday parties, indicating that personalized consumption has become a trend.

Custom-made clothes are more comfortable to wear. The Lotus Pond Market in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province used to be a wholesale market, but is now known as a production base of high-end customized clothes in western China. Many cutting-edge designers have settled in here and there are 14 million kinds of fabrics for customers to choose from at the market.

Experts said that people who were born in the 1980s and 1990s have become major consumers of home decoration services. As they have rising demands for high-quality services and experience, customized and one-stop home decoration services have become an option for these people.

An electronics company based in Dongguan city, south China's Guangdong Province adopts the customer to manufacturer model, or C2M, which allow consumers to place orders directly to the factory for customized decorative phone cases. After the phone cases are produced, they are immediately packaged and sent out from the warehouse. This model reduces the whole logistics time by five hours and lowers logistics costs by an average of 15 percent.

Workers assemble custom-made wooden handicrafts and jigsaw puzzles at the factory of a cultural and creative products company in east China's Jiangsu Province. (Photo/Tang Yifang)

The views on further releasing consumption potential and promoting the continuous recovery of consumption released by the General Office of the State Council in April 2022 showed that efforts will be made to enhance connectivity between manufacturers and internet platforms and between production and sales, and encourage C2M and customized production.

Industry insiders pointed out that an advantage of the new type of production and sales is that it can identify the needs and preferences of consumers through big data and enables manufacturers to produce products based on such needs and preferences. It can also reduce costs and increase the cost-effectiveness of the products.

For instance, an e-commerce platform has helped more than 2,000 brands develop the C2M model, helping reduce the time it takes to roll out new products by 67 percent.