Prospects rosy for Lu'an wedding dresses

"By 2010, my plant had nearly 50 workers, in contrast to seven at the beginning," said Xu. "In around 2010, the monthly salary for a worker had climbed to about 7,000 yuan, while back in my hometown it would be less than 5,000 yuan."

Xu later returned to Dingji and established the town's first wedding clothes plant. And just as Xu had brought many fellow townspeople to work in Suzhou decades ago, they have followed Xu once again.

In 2018, Suzhou launched strict fire control regulations in the area known as the Street of Wedding Dresses. As a result, many businesses had to move out of the densely packed, owner-constructed buildings. The move pushed many business owners back to Dingji.

The township currently has nearly 2,000 plants and shops related to the wedding clothes industry, which has attracted thousands of workers from other regions.

"Now half of the township's 54,000 people are engaged in the wedding clothing business, either in Suzhou or locally," said Zong Qiyan, deputy Party secretary of Dingji.

The wedding clothes industry in Lu'an reported an annual output value of more than 3 billion yuan in 2021, with Dingji accounting for more than 2 billion yuan of that.

The local government has been building a specific zone for the industry, a project that will require a gross investment of 2.1 billion yuan.

Now about 5,600 people have moved from Suzhou to the zone. Upon the zone's completion in three to five years, the local government expects it could provide 50,000 jobs, with annual output value reaching 10 billion yuan.

"Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, sales have dropped significantly in the past two years, while we remain bullish on future growth," said Xu.

He kept an outlet for sales in Suzhou for his son to manage and set up a team of three designers in Guangzhou, Guangdong province.

In both the domestic and overseas markets, "designs with traditional Chinese elements such as mandarin collars and embroidery have been increasingly popular", he said.

Xu said his company produces mainly middle and top-grade wedding dresses, priced at about 1,000 yuan each for wholesale.

"Nowadays, more and more young couples prefer to buy rather than rent their wedding dresses so that they can keep the dress," he said.

Wang Jifeng, owner of the shop that Sun and his fiancee visited, switched from selling regular clothes to exclusively wedding dresses in March. She said Western and Chinese styles are equally popular.

While Wang runs only a brick-and-mortar store, Yu'an district's wedding dress industry association said about 80 percent of local companies operate solely online.

Zheng Xianjun, a local businessman, said, "E-commerce can reach more people, so as a result, being located in a small inland city like Lu'an is no longer an obstacle."

Locals said the industry has changed their lives.

"Before the emergence of the industry, the elderly would usually gather to play cards, but now they would rather work from home to make embroidery for wedding dresses," said Zhang Wenwu, deputy government chief of Dingji township.

Yang Xiuling in Lu'an contributed to this story.