Taobao factory is a platform linking Taobao sellers and factories, a platform of Alibaba's 1688 division. Taobao factory is Alibaba's bridge between e-commerce sellers and high-quality factories, aiming to help factories realize the transformation of factory e-commerce, to build through the entire online clothing supply chain of the ecosystem. It is a processing and customization service that connects e-commerce sellers and factories, and brings together e-commerce sellers who understand e-commerce but don't understand the supply chain, and factories who understand the supply chain but don't understand e-commerce.

It was born from the development of e-commerce, when the development of e-commerce accelerated, the back-end of the supply chain management exposed many problems. Alibaba Group Chief of Staff Zeng Ming publicly spoke of: "the Internet as the business infrastructure, driven by consumers, to achieve mass customization and even personalized customization of the C2B (Consumer To Business) business model, in China's apparel, bags, shoes, home appliances, home furnishings, and many other industries and enterprises have begun to Rapid development. Its three main supports are personalized marketing, flexible production and social collaboration in the supply chain. The evolution of flexible production, is a part of the industry, part of the enterprise workshop is happening in China, a quiet production revolution", "with the main field of innovation of Chinese enterprises, is from the first 10 years of the "WTO + external demand" quickly shifted to today's "Internet + domestic demand", "the Internet + domestic demand", "the Internet + domestic demand", "the Internet + domestic demand", "the Internet + domestic demand", "the Internet + domestic demand". "Internet + domestic demand", this new field is expected to give birth to a truly Chinese characteristics of the production mode, business model, organizational model. If this is the case, this will be the United States Ford system and Japan Toyota system, Chinese enterprises to the global business civilization to make a huge contribution.

Taobao factory with the special mission of the times, hand in hand with factories, e-commerce sellers together to create a flexible supply chain, to promote the development of the retail service industry.

The following are the respective introductions of 1688, Amoy Factory, and the flexible supply chain in the apparel industry.

Founded in 1999, 1688 - China's leading online wholesale platform (formerly known as Alibaba China Marketplace) is China's leading online wholesale platform covering buyers and sellers in a wide range of industries, including general merchandise, apparel, electronics, raw materials, industrial components, agricultural products, and chemical products. 1688 provides merchants operating businesses on Alibaba Group's retail platform with a channel to source products from local wholesalers. 1688 is a business of Alibaba Group.

1688 takes wholesale and procurement business as its core, and optimizes the business model of enterprise e-commerce in a comprehensive way by professional operation and perfecting customer experience. At present, 1688 has covered 16 industry categories such as raw materials, industrial products, clothing and apparel, household goods, small commodities, etc., providing a series of supply services from raw material procurement - production and processing - spot wholesale.

1688 after more than a decade of development, has become:

Its main products are mainly:

Taobao factory has been in October 2013 to start trial operation, and in mid-December officially online. Taobao Factory is a platform linking Taobao sellers and factories, solving the problems of Taobao sellers who are difficult to find factories, test orders, flip orders and develop new models. A solid bridge for e-commerce sellers and high-quality factories.

Taobao factory through the aggregation of massive factories, covering the consumer goods industry categories, to help e-commerce sellers to solve the difficult to find factories, small single test single difficult, turn the single difficult to prepare the material difficult, new product development difficult problem. By meeting the e-commerce flexible supply chain start, gradually penetrate to the offline brand, penetrate to the neighboring countries, and cover the entire supply chain in the future.

In the face of the common problems of e-commerce such as the difficulty of finding factories, the difficulty of trying out small orders, and the difficulty of developing new products, Amoy Factory mainly solves the problem through the following five aspects:

Flexible Supply Chain: When the market or consumer demand changes, the supporting supply chain's agile response to such changes and the subsequent adaptability are called "flexibility". And a supply chain with this capability is called a flexible supply chain.

Use of background : In the fast-fashion brands and netroots, e-commerce brands on the market under the fierce impact of the emergence of the urgent need for the traditional supply chain to reform to adapt to this fast production, the rhythm of rapid return orders.

Characteristics : Sensitive response to fashion factors, strong development capability, sufficient supplier resources, short production cycle, return orders are more common.

The difference with the traditional supply chain in the apparel industry is shown in Figure 3.1 and Figure 3.2.

In the traditional apparel supply chain, the core is B (brand owners), through large-scale production and sales to achieve cost reduction and improve profits, although the brand owners take the initiative to develop online channels to reduce the flow of goods, improve the efficiency of the supply chain flow, to bring more affordable goods and services to consumers, but the essence is still scale.

The flexible supply chain flowchart of the 1688 platform is shown in Figure 3.3.

In fact, the flexible supply chain is the integration of branded apparel companies, apparel processing factories, and fabrics and accessories factories into a platform to achieve platformization, as shown in Figure 3.4.

First of all the platform will be on the website traffic statistics, analyzing big data. Big data analyzes the current popular elements, consumer spending habits. These data are fed back to the apparel company, which applies them to the current design; at the same time, the apparel company can refer to the new models developed on the platform to determine the style. When the models are finalized, they are handed over to the platform for production division. Based on the platform's strong supplier development ability and new product support ability, the platform will quickly find a model to high-quality fabric factories and professional garment factories. In such a cycle of supply chain, the platform with the help of the Internet to become efficient, high quality.

There are also two more successful flexible supply chain platforms for apparel.