At the end of July, the China Ceramics Network research team was fortunate enough to interview Su Yang, the design director of Wuxi Nanzhu Space Design Office, while doing market research in Wuxi. As a young designer born in the 1980s in China, Su Yang has always adhered to his own ideas in design creation and team operation. With his early design experience, he frequently entered into large-scale public decoration projects and has unique insights into the market. During the entire interview process, the research team ( I will use "Zhongtaojun" below) and benefited a lot. The following is a compilation of part of the interview content:
Current situation of Wuxi market: Single store area is gradually shrinking
Su Yang:Nowadays, the entire market has an increasing demand for personalized design. More and more design directors and young designers with design capabilities are opening their own studios. , this phenomenon has been particularly prominent in the past three years. We clearly feel that the commercial projects we receive are becoming smaller. The reason derived from the analysis is that the increase in operating costs such as rent has put increasing load pressure on small owners and chain store owners strong>. For example, a case I did before - a chain restaurant in Toronto, has been reduced from a single store of 900-1000㎡ to a single store of 500-600㎡ last year. This is a relatively large chain restaurant. In fact, almost all small and medium-sized restaurants are in Reduce area to reduce operating costs.
Zhong Taojun:This is similar to the ceramic industry’s reduction of exhibition hall area, and this phenomenon is even more obvious in Wuxi. Two or three years ago, most of the exhibition halls in Wuxi Zhongchu Market were more than 500 square meters, but now we visited and found that the relocated brand dealer stores are reducing the exhibition hall area. The first reason should be store rent. What do you think are the other reasons?
Su Yang:Another reason is that changes in national policy (vigorously promoting the fine decoration of real estate) have caused the entire market to adjust spontaneously. Since getting involved in real estate projects, we have discovered that real estate is becoming more refined at a very fast pace, which has had a great impact on local dealers and decoration companies. There is no doubt that the impact of finely decorated houses on local dealers, and since the overall design capabilities and implementation of decoration companies are still weaker than the finely decorated house teams of high-quality real estate developers, it is inevitable that decoration companies will be affected.Avoided. At present, the sales of many local dealers are plummeting. Wuxi is not a particularly severely affected city. The sales of local dealers in "hardest-hit areas" like Hangzhou have dropped by nearly 70%-80%.
Zhong Taojun:The small public buildings similar to those in the catering industry you just mentioned are also gradually shrinking in size. Why is this?
Su Yang: First of all, as property rents and personnel operating costs skyrocket, the cost of opening a store is getting higher and higher. Considering from the perspective of chain catering companies, business operations require cash flow, so store opening iterations need to be faster. Based on this consideration, the company will overall reduce the store area. The cost of streamlining multiple stores will make it possible to open another store. The multi-store layout is very beneficial to the company. Secondly, Party A owners of domestic chain companies are becoming more and more professional. They have gone from selecting a single brand to directly approaching suppliers to sign strategic cooperation. As long as there are 50-100 enterprises in the chain, professional design companies will recommend them to control costs through strategic cooperation. In this way, they can find manufacturers to ship directly across the country, and centralized procurement further controls the opening of stores. cost.
Zhong Taojun:In fact, this kind of public decoration is also similar to the centralized purchasing of real estate...
Su Yang: Yes, the real estate projects we deal with are all centralized procurement. After completing a project, a material form will often be given to the real estate party, and they will push back some business brands. We Centralize purchasing directly from business brands.
Wuxi’s high-end owners can’t find a suitable designer?
Zhongtaojun:What do you think are the characteristics of the design needs of Party A owners in Wuxi?
Su Yang: On the one hand, there is a relatively large space for private residence design in Wuxi. Because the design market in Wuxi is not professional enough - the service system is mainly based on marketing and supplemented by design. The entire service system is lacking.;The design system is not solid, systematic and professional enough; professional design services for customized private residences are extremely lacking. 10 years ago, I worked in a first-tier company in Shenzhen, and the entire system and service model of customized private home design I was exposed to was very sophisticated and in-depth. Until now, Wuxi has not reached the level of Shenzhen 10 years ago, so I think there is room for development in customized private residence design in Wuxi.
On the other hand, due to information asymmetry, some high-end owners in Wuxi are unable to find a suitable design unit. The units with equal information are mainly decoration companies, because decoration companies have been established in Wuxi for more than ten years, invest a lot of manpower and material resources in marketing and brand building, and have a prominent reputation among the owner groups.
Furthermore, from the perspective of a wide range of owners, the popularity of Wuxi home decoration designer directors far exceeds that of public decoration designers. The main reason is that decoration companies operating under the enterprise model focus on promotion and packaging, and cooperate with brands and have frequent activities. Owners can get their information in the media and customer groups. At the same time, most public decoration designers reject excessive brand promotion or media reports, and owners cannot understand them through general information channels.
Zhong Taojun: Do you think there is more room for development in Wuxi to design customized private homes for high-end owners? Then I would like to know how these owners in need find it when the information is unequal. The right designer?
Su Yang:They will ask friends or consult supplier brands, and also search and learn from some media channels. The Internet has brought about earth-shaking changes to consumers. When it comes to this aspect, I feel that we have taken advantage of the dividends of the Internet era. I can say directly that if we had started our business 10 years earlier, we might have failed in the first two years. ” (laughs). According to the previous model of a decoration company, it required a large investment of capital in the early stage to operate, and the design director team required at least about 10 people. However, now that consumers are active on the Internet and changes in the way media information is collected, young people have more and more advantages in starting a business. The bigger. We don’t need to spend too much money to search for our fixed customer base on the Internet through various media platforms, designer live events, etc., so that more media and more platforms can recognize us, and let the brand have more awareness. Big premium.
Zhong Taojun:All platforms and activities now are inclusive.There are many opportunities for young designers.
Su Yang:Yes, in fact, everyone “endorses” based on their professionalism, and there are many opportunities. If you want a professional platform for output, there are many such platforms on the Internet for "endorsement"; if you want to be more "popular" and rely on marketing for activities, there are also such social platforms and media on the Internet. This shows thatthe entire market is now becoming more tolerant and more diversified.
Brand designer activities should be refined rather than formalized
Zhong Taojun: In the past, designers may have thought that "the aroma of wine is not afraid of the depth of the alley", but as the younger generation of designers born in the 1980s, they still have to "jump out" and "go out" . At present, many brands’ designer activities are aimed at young designers born in the 1980s, and the forms of activities are also very diversified. In your opinion, which form of designer activities is more attractive to you?
Su Yang: Combined with our own team creation and operation, we will be more sensitive to designer activities in both directions and are willing to participate. On the one hand, it is of a management nature. We hope that it will be a small salon or a domestic front-line team to share designer activities. It is best to take into account both design management and team management while penetrating brand marketing operations. On the other hand, it is a purely professional section, hoping to be an exquisite salon where differentiated domestic and foreign first-line masters can share their views. Based on our experience in participating in events in the past few years, we have found that large-scale designer events are used by brands to build momentum. Their professional attributes and the amount of technical information you can absorb are relatively small.
In the past two years, we have been participating in some small salons that gather domestic designers, and this kind of activity will be more active. Some top designers have also said that in this type of small salon we can discuss some industry conditions that are not open to the public. Both the younger generation of designers and established designers are more willing to communicate with each other and penetrate all aspects of industry information. Social networking is rampant, we need to socialize, but socializing also requires selective socialization.
In fact, there is another direction. We are also more interested in hosting forums or pan -cultural lectures for piano, chess, calligraphy, alcohol, religion, music, and living categories to popularize. Because this information is very important for designers to reshape and relearn the team's design in the future. In fact, the commercial projects we do will involve the business operating model, which is beyond the scope of design. If we rush into a commercial project without learning about commercial brand operations, delving into catering real estate and other categories, then the design is likely to be just an overly technical space.
Doing a good job in aesthetics is only the basic skill of a designer
Zhong Taojun:You think design is a technical job, but you still need to continue learning to improve your understanding of life.
Su Yang:Yes! The teacher who taught me when I was a student said that we should do a good job in design and aesthetics. This is the basic skill of practitioners. Participating in business events allows us to communicate more with people from various industries. The business paradigm is different now. The sales offices, boutique supermarkets, and new retail supermarkets we are building are all versions 2.0 and 3.0. If we still follow the previous model, it will basically be eliminated as a display of space in first- and second-tier cities. So we are constantly learning and improving, and our team is younger, and a younger team will have more active thinking.
Modern people overlay information too quickly. In the past, we could sit down and spend hours reading a book. Now people use Douyin to "refresh the screen" and the time to obtain information is between 10-30 seconds. , this change determines our adoption point when doing physical projects. First of all, everyone focuses on vision, so our vision cannot lag behind, this is the basic skill; secondly, we must express the spatial sense, because if the design only has visual sense, the final effect will definitely not be ideal. In fact,the design sense is carried out in addition to the sense of space. We do visual sense just to help owners divert customers in the Internet era.
Zhong Taojun:Is it necessary to not only meet the visual needs, but also have a sense of space?
Su Yang:Yes. When we do projects that require customer flow, we will use space decoration language such as product color and space color to attract customers. After attracting customers to walk in, our space should allow customers to "stay" or feel that this space is not just a surface. It is necessary to ensure that the commercial space has a usability of two to three years. It can’t just be an “Internet celebrity store” – it just looks good in photos, and customers won’t come back after one visit or there are a lot of negative reviews on the Internet.
Zhong Taojun: That is to meet functional needs.
Su Yang:Yes, in fact, the core is that the functionality of space is particularly important. For example, the main purpose of catering projects is: good-looking and easy-to-use to serve delicious food. Because a good-looking and useful store cannot compete with a delicious one. In fact, everyone is willing to go to a delicious "fly shop" to eat. There are different categories of commercial projects, and each category has its particularities.
Popular styles in the eyes of designers
Zhong Taojun: Modernism is our design language, so how do you understand modernism and modern minimalist style?
Su Yang: Several of our partners basically studied architecture and are obsessed with space design. As far as the longevity of architecture is concerned, what ultimately makes a building move or attract people is the temperament of the space and the light and shadow. When designing interior spaces, we can find that owners generally attach great importance to space decoration and are willing to "work hard" on decorative materials. However, the practical life cycle is very short. Houses that have been basically renovated for 5 years now seem to be very old-fashioned and unsuitable. This shows that people may pay too much attention to the surface, rather than the functional practicality of life itself. We think this is not the direction we want to develop. We hope that when an owner comes to us, the house we design for him will have a relatively long life cycle. Even if he has a child at home and the child gets married again, even 10 or 20 years later, the material relationship of the entire space of the house, including the flow lines and functions of the space, can still be used, instead of being overdone.After using too many decorative languages, it became "red, green and purple", and after 10 years it felt particularly "earthy".
Zhong Taojun: Modern simplicity may have become popular in the past few years. Recently, there is a concept called "light luxury". Have you studied it in depth?
Su Yang: Most of the light luxury products on the market are made of reflective materials, or some metal materials are added to the decorative surface. They are converted from the original European and American styles. Its emergence and evolution actually stemmed from the fact that when Chinese people who had accumulated a certain amount of capital wanted to show off themselves or enjoy life, the first styles they saw were European and American styles. Then after European and American styles passed away, everyone found that European and American styles were too exposed. , too "rustic" or failed to achieve the most classical European and American style. I felt that the entire proportion of the European and American style seemed a bit "weird", and then I found that the simple style seemed to be very good, and everyone "swarmed" towards modern simplicity, and then A group of owners gradually felt that the construction, quality, design and other aspects of the simple style were "too simple". Finally, they found that a bit of metal texture in the simplicity would "cover up" the flaws, which was called "light luxury". Light luxury is more suitable for the aesthetics of most owners.
Wuxi’s high-end owners lack brand awareness, and design fees are gradually standardized
Zhongtao Jun:Because we do a lot of customized private homes, and we deal with high-end people, will they take the initiative to ask for a certain brand of ceramic tiles or imported tiles?< /p>
Su Yang:In factthe owner knows very little about the brand. His understanding is limited to one city. If a city can meet his needs, he can understand Partial information; if this city does not even have this brand, then it is basically impossible for him to understand this brand, because their information channels are very narrow. For example, Wuxi has been importing more and more furniture since last year, but our high-end owners were the first to knowThe best imported brand is NATUZZI. Because the best imported brand in Wuxi in the past five years was NATUZZI, the owner felt that NATUZZI was very good and high-end. In fact, his financial and material resources could support higher-end brands, but he had no information channels and could not understand that the surrounding owners also bought this product. Brand, because there is information asymmetry. It's possible that he didn't find out until he finished decorating the house that there were other high-end brands.
Zhong Taojun:I would like to know whether designers or owners play a more leading role in Wuxi?
Su Yang:There are two situations here. If a director-level designer does not have a very good reputation in the market, he basically only serves the design field and cannot order materials. The materials will ultimately be ordered by the owner himself. This is a problem left over from the original service system of decoration companies. In the original service system, designers made profits by drawing commissions, and design fees were not the mainstay. Therefore, if we do not collect fees in the form of management fees, it will be a vicious cycle, and our reputation in the market will be relatively poor. This problem is relatively serious in Wuxi. Another situation is that the decoration company or design director mainly charges design fees, supplemented by management fees. By doing the whole project design in this way, all materials can be specified, and the owner basically does not participate. After the designer calculates everything and gets the total price, he will check and negotiate with the owner's quotation. In the first round, the selection of brand products will begin.
Terminal research team interviews Su Yang video
