YIWU, China, Nov. 2, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Yiwugo.com, the official website of the Yiwu Commodity Market, is the largest commodity wholesale market in the world. According to statistics from Yiwugo, "umbrella" is one of the most popular categories on Yiwu's market, ranking within the top 20 search keywords on the platform as of October 2024. Real Star Umbrella, a market leader both of this industry and on Yiwugo, has gained renewed vitality with the addition of fresh talent.
With a legacy of three generations and a commitment spanning half a century, Ms Zhang Jiayuan, the inheritor of Real Star Umbrella, is bringing fresh perspectives to the company by assisting her mother with daily business operations, infusing the shop with a unique new energy.
Starting from her grandparents, Real Star rose to prominence from the Umbrella City in Shangyu, Shaoxing, and has long engaged in international trade. Its products are now popular across Spain, Germany, Dubai, South America, and Asia. Ms. Zhang Jiying, Jiayuan's mother and the previous owner, transformed Real Star into a leading enterprise in Yiwu's umbrella market and was among the first to embrace e-commerce in the region.
As the daughter stepped into the business, new e-commerce models like livestreaming surged, the domestic market gained momentum, and brand-oriented strategies became essential. She started exploring a branding path by strengthening the company's unique style, enhancing fashionability of its products, and establishing an ingenious brand image.
To meet the high demands for fast product updates, high design expectations, and strong acceptance of premium products in the Chinese market, Real Star has collaborated with various independent illustrators in the country, in addition to its "RS" (Real Star) brand registered in over 100 countries and regions. It also recruits fresh visual arts graduates annually to maintain an active, original design team that participates in various domestic and international competitions, using these opportunities to showcase its brand to global buyers while learning from other industry experts. Additionally, the company has integrated the personal image of its owner, into product design as a fusion of company and personal branding, which has significantly strengthened its impression among both domestic and international clients, forming a unique and sustainable brand style and company culture.
Real Star umbrellas are not only highly original, with a considerable speed of new product release, but also feature targeted theme designs catering to the preferences of different cultural elements. In the Chinese market, designs reflect a love for national and traditional culture, while in the international market, there is a range of regional styles. The design team's attention to umbrella cases and packaging helps position their umbrellas as not only a functional item but also a gift and cultural creative product, attracting orders from well-known brands and cultural organizations. In a matter of years, Real Star has transitioned from a purely export-driven enterprise to one with balanced growth, with about 30% of sales now in the domestic market.
Two years ago, influenced by the trend of Dunhuang-inspired art, Real Star's Dunhuang-themed series became an instant hit. Other distinct original series, such as "Abundance of Prosperity," saw over 20,000 units sold at the retail level within a month of launch, despite a high price point. Many customers chose these items as gifts for friends.
As Real Star's creative design capabilities have become more recognized within cultural and creative fields, it has signed partnerships with institutions like the China Umbrella Museum in Hangzhou, Lishui Cultural Tourism Investment Development Co., Ltd, Ningbo Foreign Affairs School, and the Yuwangtai Park Scenic Area in Henan. The company has also maintained a longstanding relationship with China Daily, one of China's leading media agencies.
Zhang Jiayuan shared that in addition to its strong design capabilities, Real Star's craftsmanship honed over more than fifty years remains excellent. Take their ultra-light carbon fiber umbrellas as an example: creating a foldable umbrella that is wind-resistant and durable is challenging. While industry standards generally achieve a weight of 300g-500g for umbrella frames, Real Star has managed to create an ultra-light version that weighs around 100g without compromising wind resistance and durability, a series particularly popular with young people.
Real Star also retains a group of skilled artisans dedicated to producing high-quality umbrellas. It takes them more than six times longer to hand-sew an umbrella than with machine processes, yet the intricate craftsmanship and unique ribbing techniques rely on their expertise. Today, these artisans, together with Real Star Umbrella, are experiencing renewed vitality, supported by the e-commerce platform Yiwugo, and embodying the spirit of a flourishing modern enterprise.
** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **
Real Star Umbrella: An Umbrella That Opens for the World
BEIJING, Dec. 3, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- A report from China Daily
Innovative approach spurs expansion of tourist industry
Limitless potential for revamping tourism is created when a city melds its dazzling culture with cutting-edge technology. Such is the case in Changsha, capital of Central China's Hunan province, where a whirlwind of "culture plus technology" is sweeping the city, spurred by concerted efforts to blend industries with culture and shape new paradigms for tourism.
New business modes
Located on the bank of Liuyang River, Changsha's Malanshan Video Cultural and Creative Industrial Park is home to more than 60,000 professionals who are excelling in the field of audio and video creation and production. With the support of technology, new cultural business modes have emerged there, forming a complete digital cultural industry chain that encompasses links such as content production, creativity, storage, broadcasting and trading.
At Skymedia, a large audio and video multimedia model released by Wondershare at Malanshan park, users can upload a photo and get a dynamic 3D effect video, or input text commands to generate music. The model boasts a wide variety of functions, including text-to-video generation, image-to-video generation and soundtracks, and is in commercial use. With the Skymedia model, creators can complete audio and video content production and editing more efficiently, significantly enhancing both the efficiency and quality of their creations.
As part of another project at Malanshan park, two people far apart don special pairs of "glasses" to become "close neighbors" in a virtual scene. Zou Jun, who is responsible for the project, said: "We define it as the next generation of communication, enabling real-time face-to-face interaction for remote business meetings, family communications and educational activities."
The deep integration of culture and technology has led to the continuous emergence of new business modes and new scenarios at Malanshan park. According to statistics, over the past two years, more than 60 percent of leading enterprises attracted to the park are engaged in new business modes.
The animation and video game industry has become one of the fastest-growing new cultural sectors in recent years. Thanks to new infrastructure such as a video cloud platform, a supercomputing center and shared production center, Malanshan park has reduced the rendering time and costs for animation and game production by 30 percent. This has led to a strong trend of enterprises clustering together and scaling up capacity in the three-dimensional animation industry.
Currently, Malanshan park focuses on new technologies, new applications and new industries. It has established 16 scientific and technological innovation institutions and attracted 3,000-plus upstream and downstream enterprises.
By deeply applying digital technologies such as panoramic scanning, virtual reality and glasses-free 3D into the field of cultural heritage, other Changsha projects have brought precious historical relics back to life.
In August, Hunan Mango Digital Art Intelligence Technology launched a digital cultural museum application called Shanhai. This platform uses digital technology to present museum relics in a 3D form, allowing people to explore exhibitions anytime and anywhere on their mobile devices. The app offers vast digital collections and integrates functions such as 3D artifact appreciation, AI interaction and personalized museum experiences. It has quickly become popular online.
Digital technology helps relics be "reborn", allowing audiences to seemingly travel back thousands of years while gaining an immersive understanding of the history and culture behind them. This year, Hunan Museum released a 3D digital image of Lady Xin Zhui, a woman whose remains have been well preserved for more than 2,000 years. Through the integration of advanced AI technology, motion capture technology and multiple disciplines including medicine and archaeology, the "sleeping beauty" has been brought back to life.
Besides relics in the museum, heritage in the wild can be "revived" with the help of high-tech solutions. The Wuxi site of stone tablets in Hunan's Qiyang city is a large open-air site that preserves stone inscriptions from the Tang Dynasty (618-907), making it a rare treasure trove of calligraphic carvings. Due to natural causes, the surfaces of the inscriptions have experienced varying degrees of weathering, rendering many characters blurred and difficult to discern. The Malanshan cultural digitization innovation center, in collaboration with a team, utilized various digital technologies to rejuvenate the historical and cultural heritage, collecting images of each stele, employing techniques to achieve high-precision digital imaging, and forming a stele database.
Today, the database stores basic information about the inscriptions, which have been made clear and distinguishable, and provides things such as original photos and micro-trace images, as well as calibrating relationships between several hundred steles and hundreds of famous individuals. In the future, it could facilitate secondary creations around the inscriptions by experts, scholars and design teams.
Cultural tourism
Changsha's innovative integration of culture and technology has given rise to new cultural tourism scenarios and business modes. From traditional real-world sightseeing to immersive experiences that blend the real with the virtual, new technologies can be found in the creation and dissemination of cultural content and interactive methods in cultural tourism, providing visitors with entirely new experiences.
In September, a digital exhibition hall, located next to Tianxin Pavilion, officially opened. The hall houses a vast collection of relics related to figures from Hunan history and also offers an immersive cultural experience via new digital and intelligent technologies. In one example, a digital image of Zhu Xi, a renowned philosopher from the Song Dynasty (960-1279), appears on a screen and can answer questions asked by visitors. The "digital human" Zhu Xi was created based on national supercomputing. Through AI technology, the great scholar's attire, expressions and movements have been interpreted and he can engage in precise conversations with visitors. They can ask him abstract questions such as the meaning of "seeking truth from facts", as well as trendy enquiries like "What are some of the best foods in Changsha?" or "What drinks did people in the Song Dynasty enjoy?"
** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **
Changsha polishes blueprint for tech-culture integration
