Prospects rosy for Lu'an wedding dresses

Township's bridal gown industry reaches annual output value of over 2 billion yuan, offers more job opportunities in Anhui province

Editor's Note: This series of stories looks at local enterprises in specialized sectors that have a share in global markets.

One day in early May, Sun Xiaolong and his fiancee walked into a wedding dress shop in a township in the city of Lu'an in East China's Anhui province.

About two hours later, the young couple walked out with three bridal gowns of Western and traditional Chinese styles.

"The dresses cost merely 1,500 yuan ($215), while renting from a wedding service company would require much more," said Sun.

With thousands of wedding dress factories and shops, the township of Dingji is one of the largest manufacturing and sales hubs for bridal gowns in China.

Lu'an generally sells about 25,000 wedding dresses and other apparel each day, according to Yang Xuejun, president of Yu'an district's wedding dress industry association. He said most of the dresses are produced in Dingji.

The export value of the township's wedding clothes industry reached $40 million in 2019, according to a local official.

Xu Changying, a businessman, said his products have always been available in overseas markets, especially in the United States and Europe.

"But it was very hard to know the trade volume, as the export business has been mostly done by intermediary companies from cities like Suzhou and Guangzhou," said Xu.

Suzhou, in neighboring Jiangsu province, is the largest trade center in China for wedding dresses, with a domestic market share of about 70 percent. But Xu estimates that 60 percent of the products sold by Suzhou-based traders are made in Lu'an.

"About 70 percent of business owners and workers in Suzhou are from Lu'an. In recent years, an increasing number of plants have moved from Suzhou to Dingji as more industry activity shifted there," said Xu, who moved back to Dingji in 2010.

Xu, a Dingji native, migrated to Suzhou in 1992 to work as a bridal gown factory worker. After accumulating production and sales skills, he invested more than 50,000 yuan in establishing a workshop in Suzhou in 1994, when the country's annual average per capita income for urban residents was merely 3,179 yuan.