Mapping China: Design - A Dutch Story: STOREAGE

Swimming in China

Text/ Kang Li, Chief Represent vie of Asia Pacific, STOREAGE

Kang Li is a typical cross-culture designer who was educated in Holland and went back to China to develop the design business. I hope his view and story about Dutch Design in China may give you some enlightenment.

Chinese always say society is a huge dye vat; you will be dyed into different colors when you jumping in. But to us, a foreign retail design agency from Holland, China is more like a swimming pool, after jumping into the pool, we noticed its specialty, the water is different from Europe and we try our best swimming to survive.

We, Storeage is a retail design agency starting from 2000, with years of experiences and several highlighted projects, we build our own reputation on branding, marketing strategy, and store design for retail brands in Europe, especially in sport, banking and telecom industries.

Back to 2010, through our networking in European in sport industry, Li-Ning, the number 1 sport brand in China, invited us to develop its new flagship stores in Beijing and Shanghai. These two flagship stores are in total 10,000 sqm, and both located on the main commercial walking start in the cities. It is such an interesting project to us, not only because its big project scale, but also it was a very nice starting to re-enter Chinese market. (We did several individual Chinese project like HP in the old time, but quit this China during the economic crisis in 2008)

For this project, we designated a design team of 5 people from Holland, stayed in the headquarter of Lining in Beijing for 3 months to finish this project and got quit some success in terms of reputation and showcase project. With this starting, Storeage gradually received more and more invitation from brands in China from sport, electronic, and food & beverage industries.

More over, we got lots of chances in fashion and cosmetic brands, which we seldom touched before in Europe. This brought our totally new experience and noticed that China is such a different market comparing to Europe – a market full of opportunities and risk.

Working with different Chinese client, one thing is very new to us is the high awareness of hierarchy in Chinese company. This hierarchy system hugely effects the decision making process and how clients evaluate our work. The result is, in a meeting, once the leader shows his/her attitude on positive or negative; his/her team will follow this attitude immediately, you can hardly hear any different voice. And the conversation will lead the whole project to various ways. Therefore, how to satisfy the leader is one of the keys to run project smooth. His/her needs means not only the visual design requirement on how store look like, but also might be the needs in terms of PR, marketing financial, management or even political. We have to understand why this company / the leader needs to do this project? What does this company / the leader need to achieve by doing this project?

Once we successfully cut into a project, in the beginning stage we always have an amazing starting. Be considered as a Dutch company, in the begging of each project, we have lots of advantage in communication and voice power. Due to the traditional hospitable culture, Chinese clients always show very polite attitude towards European companies in the first stage. Asking direct questions will be considered as professional and efficient.

Also, when presenting the concept design proposal in the first round, if the presenter is a westerner, the voice power will be much stronger and client offers more appreciation. Moreover, if we are working on an interior design project, presenting render to the Chinese client is always needed. The Chinese client will never understand the hand-sketches or collage without renders. Because they cannot or naturally they do not want give imagination based on the hand-sketches, they consider it as unfinished work; but if they see render first and then see hand-sketches, they will understand more of the design process and feels the high professionalism of the design team.

Like I said, projects always start with a fantastic atmosphere. But after working together for one or two month, when we need to offer more detail not only concept design, the process might become tougher and complex.

One of the major issues is about communication. Communication can go wrong in various ways: the contact person does not translate the correct information from the top manager; the Chinese way of communication is too indirect but we understand too literal. To avoid this, asking direct questions and make sure the translator translates directly is very important. To have a senior Chinese colleague in the meeting is also needed, he/she will be able to hear the underlying messages.

On the other hand, how to close up a project in the end might be also tricky. Unfortunately, the fact is, we only have less than 10% projects received the final payment. Client is always able to list out lots of excuse why they do not want to pay for the last payment. Could be some problems occurred in the project process, could be they feel the final result is not exactly the same as they imagining, could be they want to keep the final payment as a discount and offer next new project opportunities. But in one word, they do not want to pay for the last payment because they do not need any help from us on this project. Then it becomes a problem to us in terms of business, we do not want to loss margin, but also we do not want to spend too much time and energy to fight with client and ruin our relationship for new business. It is a tough topic especially when you know go through the legal way also does not work that well.

Thinking smarter, budget the last payment out, do not expect to receive it in the beginning might be the only option we have so far.

In this swimming pool called China, we have been swimming for almost 5 years. We noticed the water here is different from Europe, no matter the color, temperature of the water or material of the pool itself. However, there is one thing in common is we are always swimming in water. Knowing how to swing could keep you survive, but if you want to swimming toward the target and swimming fast, understand the swimming rule and wear proper swimming gear is a big help.

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