Blog, Consultancy, Shop
Beijing-based artist Wang Nanyi is the latest talent to contributing to Pawnstar’s Upcycled series. These necklaces, earrings, and other pieces are conceptually interesting, but also promise to be commercially viable.
Wang displays a keenness for materiality, shape, and texture with these designs in which she burns the edges of pieces of leftover wool fabric provided by leading Chinese fashion retailer JNBY. This series is called heixiang (黑香） or “Black Wave”.
Among the many women’s bags on offer at Pawnstar are these Valentino rockstuds.
Here’s one of Pawnstar’s best clients, Cherry Sun wearing a scarf and dress from our shop.
Pawnstar is finally on google maps, so we can start to reduce a little of the confusion regarding the address. Our official address is No. 6, Lane 64 Fenyang Road, but the challenge is that the actual door is on Fuxing Middle Road, though it is just three doors down from the Union Trading Company, the creation of Yao Lu and one of the World’s 50 Best Bars.
Street style website Traffique held a street style event at Pawnstar the other day.
The Traffique Shanghai launch celebrates the re-emergence of China’s most cosmopolitan megalopolis as a major style influence on global fashion, often by way of its street style. There could be no better location for such a launch than the designer resale and vintage platform Pawnstar, with its seven story shop in the middle of the French Concession on Fuxing and Fenyang Roads.
Based in Spain, Traffique is a street style and ecommerce website, that allows customers to purchase that they see worn by the most edgy, stylish people of cities like London, Paris, Tokyo and now Shanghai. Photographer Jose Maria will be at the shop to catalogue the looks and do mini-interviews of his subjects.
Stylites was of course there at the start of street fashion photography in China – maybe it was the start in terms of blogs in this area – and is very pleased to see that the subject remains a very interesting one.
This frequent Pawnstar customers says that most of her style influences come from Japan.
Jordan Taylor, host of Travellight and youtube star, featured Jane and Pawnstar in her Magnificent Shanghai youtube video. Here is a link to the full video.
I’m delighted that my friend and frequent Pawnstar client Juliette Gustavsson is hosting “The Devil Wears Zara” at Pawnstar. This was the title for a paper that she wrote about the sustainability and fast fashion. It could have been H&M, Forever 21, or C&A but Zara sounds better in the title. The quality and design of Zara is quite variable but they often do come out with some very nice pieces.
Juliette founded Mrs. Jet-Set, which offers luxury shopping tours here in Shanghai.
Pawnstar has a lot of fun bags!
Wang Zi is a stylist that works with Pawnstar on some projects and also consigns with us. He is of Mongolian descent and from Inner Mongolia originally. He used to be a doctor but is now in fashion, which I think makes more sense in the Chinese context than it might elsewhere.
Vestiaire Collective is entering China following three years of fast growth in Europe and the US. The question for Pawnstar will be how we collaborate or compete. Olivier Marcheteau, Vestiaire Collective’s COO made the following statement that was part of this piece on digiday:
“In China, it’s critical that we establish the brand DNA in the right way. There’s major opportunity: low competition, a growing market, and young luxury customers. We’re an entry point for luxury. We’re investing in this customer because that’s the magic of a global network. If you can open up the closets of luxury shoppers all over the world, you’re going to win.â€
This Paris-based c-to-c secondhand luxury market with a twist offers an authentication process and sits on USD 130 million in funding. It is the main global competitor for San Francisco-based realreal.com, which has USD 40 million earmarked for expansion in Australia, Canada and Hong Kong. With six million members in 47 countries, Vestiaire will be bringing a huge body of overseas product from which Chinese users can select, though they will have to deal with shipping and customs costs in that case. The main priorities for Vestiaire will be “onboarding Chinese sellers, office in Hong Kong, opening a logistics hub in China, both of which the company plans to complete by early 2018.”
Here’s a cool photoshoot they did with a blogger in Hong Kong.
Photos from the Transformers of the City - a sort of Shanghai answer to Tedx - last week at Dahlia!
My speech included a short video and then a simple presentation of my ideas on challenges and potential opportunities for secondhand in China.
Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post is the “paper of note” in the English language for the Greater China region. Pawnstar was recently featured in this article on the development of secondhand in China by Robynne Tindall.