“Sales this year have so far not been good, I hope they will recover a little in the second half,” Ma Li, the owner of the Hua Qing Yu Wedding Dress Store in the mall told Reuters as she dressed mannequins.
Wedding market sales in China surged from 923 billion yuan to 1.64 trillion yuan from 2014 to 2018, according to Frost & Sullivan, and the annual compound growth rate reached 15.5 percent. By 2023, the industry is expected to be worth 3 trillion yuan. “We basically have no clients,” Zhu Yuan, the chairman of Romen’s Wedding Dress, speaking from her showroom where dozens of embellished ivory dresses were crammed against each other on clothing racks.
But the escalation of the virus to a global pandemic saw foreign orders, which used to account for a tenth of the company’s sales, all but disappear.Article content continued Jiang Xin, a representative of Hermosa Trading, said increasing costs of transportation because of the pandemic made exporting gowns expensive.