About 70% of false eyelashes in the world come from here.
Everyone has a love of beauty. Especially for ladies who love beauty, false eyelashes are an indispensable cosmetic product. Maybe you don’t know, a small false eyelash can also make a big industry. In Pingdu, Qingdao, there are hundreds of false eyelashes enterprises with design and production capacity, and about 70% of the false eyelashes in the world come from here. In 2021, the annual output value of the false eyelashes industry reached more than 7 billion yuan. Pingdu also has the reputation of "the hometown of false eyelashes in the world". How much technical content can a small false eyelash have? How did it become a big industry?
03:25
In the office of Qingdao Tengdu Eyelash Co., Ltd., Dai Fu You is designing a new type of false eyelashes according to the requirements of customers.
"We received an order from the United States, demanding that the effect of (eyelashes) be more fluffy. We call it messy. The current domestic production technology and messy models are just beginning to become popular." Chairman Dai Fu You said: "The distance between eyes in Europe and America should reach 3.5 cm, and the distance between eyes in Asia should reach 3.3 cm. Although the difference is 0.2 cm, the customer experience is much worse."
Qingdao Tengdu Eyelash Co., Ltd. has more than 3,000 kinds of false eyelashes, which can produce tens of thousands of pairs every day. Most of these false eyelashes will be labeled with famous trademarks at home and abroad and sent to all parts of the world.
In front of the company’s display cabinet, Dai Fu You showed various representative false eyelashes to reporters: "This kind is chemical fiber wool, and it is also fluffy and exaggerated in appearance, which is suitable for the African market. They often send our eyelashes to friends and relatives. Europe and America like some good mink hair, which looks similar to high imitation, but its material has changed and the technology has increased the difficulty. These are only suitable for foreign countries, and the makeup abroad is relatively strong. This kind of Asian, which is suitable for China, is supernatural and slim. This kind of explosion has already formed in China. "
Like many beginners, Dai Fu You, who majored in art design, also went through a strange, familiar and even confused stage when she first entered the business. Because he didn’t understand the core technology of false eyelashes manufacturing, his peers refused to visit the production workshop. He had to rely on traditional manufacturing technology and all kinds of hearsay information experience to make the first generation of false eyelashes through repeated experiments and groping.
The diameter of a false eyelash is about 0.05 mm to 0.1 mm, and the weight is even negligible. Even so, we have to go through more than ten processes, such as sewing, curling, setting and loading, before we can go out of the workshop and enter the hands of consumers.
Dai Fu You thinks that the style of eyelash, bringing forth the old and bringing forth the new, is a great reason to attract customers, because girls’ love for beauty is also popular. If they keep the same style for several months and years, they will be aesthetically tired. Therefore, styles are introduced very quickly, including some popular models. In fact, the life cycle is three months to six months, and style design is the main driving force for a company’s survival and development.
Although false eyelashes have certain technical content, the investment threshold is not high. Although Pingdu’s false eyelashes occupy 70% of the global market, due to the particularity of the industry, the production mode is still dominated by manual workshops. Facing the fake eyelash factories and sales companies all over the street, Dai Fu You is also thinking about a problem: while filling the domestic eyelash market, how to make it heavier in foreign markets and make the output value higher? Therefore, Fu You set up its own foreign trade company to deal directly with foreign customers, which broke through the bottleneck of sales and launched its own brand of false eyelashes in due course.
"There is definitely no problem in quality, but we need to make some efforts in brand building, including the reputation of the company, to win the love of women all over the world and make women all over the world more attractive."
Nowadays, Pingdu is making great efforts to build an online new economic industrial park for beauty cosmetics, with an industrial park platform facing and serving the whole country to promote industrial digitalization, build a world-class beauty gathering center, and promote the transformation of Pingdu eyelash industry into a "10 billion pillar industry".
Lightning journalist Shang Shichun reports from Qingdao
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