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By Hart Hagerty
In a drafty shipping storage building south of the Bund, Susan Heffernan is afraid to turn off the lights. With its creaky floor planks and rusted ceiling pulleys, the spacious studio is the headquarters of Soozar, Shanghai’s premiere producer of retail displays and home to a brood of mannequins.
The Australian businesswoman still gets spooked by the eerie presence of her fiberglass friends, but it hasn’t deterred her from burning the midnight oil. After six years of producing visual merchandising goods for luxury brands like Miu Miu and Montblanc, her global success keeps growing as foreign brands turn to Soozar for mannequins and more…
Why do fashion brands approach your business?
We produce anything that goes into a retail shop - coat hangers, carpets, sofas, shelves. Basically, anything but the clothes. Our mannequin side of the business has expanded a lot in the last year. Our other expertise is making a design concept become real. That’s the hardest part. High-end brands already have their own top designers who know how to make their shop look amazing. Where we come in is to show how to make their concept drawings technically possible. We’re in the middle, so to speak.
What makes your mannequins so special?
Of course, you can buy a mannequin off of Taobao for RMB1,000, but we only use the highest quality raw materials like fiberglass and solid wood and employ premium craftsmanship. A layman’s eye may not be able to see the difference at first, but our mannequins are special because they look better for longer. These days, brands really want to differentiate themselves, so we offer them the chance to develop their own unique mannequins. In Europe, it would be so expensive and would take such a long time, but we’ve got a pretty good formula now where we can work with a client to help create a real signature to their brand.
What’s the hottest mannequin trend of the moment?
It depends what country you’re in. In Hong Kong people really doesn’t seem to like heads as they feel they’re ugly.
And the mainland?
It’s pretty new here. China hasn’t had much respect for visual merchandising until now. Top luxury-brands aside, general fashion shops are just now starting to realize what a huge difference a good mannequin can make in terms of sales.
What was the mainland market like when you started your business?
Just five years ago the big luxury brands didn’t care about China. In the past, most brands franchised out their stores to distribution companies and would give them the design concept, allowing the franchiser to find their own supplier and do whatever they liked. They thought, ‘Oh it’s China, everything is made there so you can just the create displays yourself.’
And how has the industry changed as China’s buying power for luxury items has strengthened?
Now they realize, ‘Hey, hang on a moment, this is our most up-and-coming market. Let’s try to take back control of the business.’ They’ve paid off their franchisers, they’ve cancelled their contracts or are waiting for the contracts to end so that they can take power back and handle the company themselves. For example Ermenegildo Zegna, who used to franchise out their brand, recently became a WOFE (Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise).
Will more foreign brands produce their retail displays here in the future?
Many of those brands are thinking, ‘China is a production-based country, so why are we producing retail display goods in Europe and sending the goods back to China?’ I heard a story where a company had their display production in Europe. But they’re probably sourcing the materials from China, assembling them in Europe and then sending the goods back to distribute them in their Chinese stores. It’s inefficient, but that’s the way large organizations have been set-up, and trying to break the old procedure to let people buy directly from China means they need to change their processes and systems.
What makes for a ‘good mannequin’?
It’s all about how the clothes look on the mannequin. We recommend a brand use their house model, the live model they originally use to fit the clothes. That way, the clothes will fit the mannequin perfectly. Of course, we can also find another model of the same size - usually a size four - but she’s not going to be the same.
A size four? Most mannequins look like malnourished aliens…
Some modern high-end brands like DKNY only want the smallest size possible. They’ll use a really skinny man because that’s their brand image. For those companies which don’t care about women larger than a size four, they’ll use the smallest mannequin they can because that’s the image they want to portray. But if they’re smart, the company will use their fit model.
Who comes up with all those crazy poses?
First of all it’s about the company’s culture - who’s their target market and what’s the attitude they’re trying to portray for their clothes. We’ll take hundreds of photos of the brand’s house model in different poses and then the brand’s creative director selects which poses he likes for our sculptor to replicate. Some top brands use a very specialized people called ‘fashion brand visual merchandising consultants’ or ‘mannequin consultant.’ It’s a niche field.
Learn more at soozar.com.
This article first appeared in the January 2011 issue of That's Shanghai. To see more Throwback Thursday posts, click here.
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