, Liu and her team were quarantined for the entire month of February; they closed the doors to their shop, and Shanghai Fashion Week—set to take place from March 24-30—was canceled. Here, she explains how her team adapted to the crisis and used new technology to keep their customers feeling hopeful.
We were officially quarantined for an entire month, and we stayed inside the entire time. The only time I went outside was to fetch deliveries or food we had ordered. My husband is Labelhood’s CEO, so even during the quarantine, we talked about work every day. As founders of a start-up, we can’t afford to stop even for one day. We reviewed what we’ve done over the past year, and how we can prepare better for next year; it was a good time for us to do a lot of thinking.
Still, people have been shopping less [than they did before], for sure. Many of our customers are self-employed, and in this tough time, their businesses are being badly affected. So some of them don’t want to spend money on new clothes. But a lot of our customers still want to support young designers and support Labelhood as a platform, and we were able to survive February because of the efforts made by my team to increase online sales and host the livestreams.
I think by the end of March, Shanghai will be 80% functional again, but the big factories are going to be shut down until the end of April, so designers will have to [adjust] how they produce their collections. All of Labelhood’s designers are independent, so their businesses aren’t very big, and hopefully they can work with individual workers or smaller factories that are able to reopen. I don’t think we’ll have a total recovery until May.