[TechCrunch Beijing] Trends Group VP Jeff Chang: It’s Time for Chinese Entrepreneurial Environment to Change

TechNode’s founder Gang Lu took stage at TechCrunch Beijing in a fireside chat today with an old friend of ours Jeff Chang, VP at Trends Group.

Fashion addresses the problem of user’s desires for a better life, while most current Chinese products are solving basic pain points of clients, according to Jeff.

He illustrated his opinion with an example like this. Both Uber and apps like Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache are on-demand car-hailing services, but the difference between the two kinds of services are: Uber celebrates a fashionable lifestyle in addition to providing car-booking services, on the other hand, the likes of Didi Dache is more focused on solving users’s transportation problems.

Jeff thinks startups engaged in fashion and Lohas-related fields should try to gain recognition from users as luxury brands do by spreading positive values.

“The key point here is not the technology itself, but how to promote the cultural backgrounds behind the technology.” Entrepreneurs are putting too much emphasis on Internet mindset, he said.

Only startups with their unique features or markets can prevail in the future. Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese startups have sensed the transition and are entering a stage to solve different demands for various user groups, while Chinese mainland entrepreneurs are still addressing more general demands of the mass.

As the boundary between technology and fashion is blurring, Trends Group funded a bunch of startups focusing on fashion or digital marketing. One of the group’s latest endeavors in the field is an incubator program named FCamp, which aims to provide guidance to startups that are working at the intersection of fashion and technology.