Alibaba’s Group forth Taobao Maker Festival 2019 is set to step up its experiential retail efforts this year, appealing to shoppers’ senses with more than a thousand of works from emerging and established merchants trading on the marketplace.
Taobao Maker Festival is an annual celebration of China’s young creatives, showcasing sellers’ goods that dedicated to “street fashion, cultural heritage, technology, food and novel designs and curiosities.”
This year will see the festival extending to four more days of festivities, starting from the 12th of Septemebe
r – and spanning across two venues of the Taobao’s home city at the Hangzhou Boiler Factory and the West Lake – for two weeks to give consumers an opportunity to enjoy the fine works of the most creative traders on Taobao.
Taobao Maker Festival 2019 debuts top brands
The world’s top luxury and designer brands will debut at the festival, opening the celebration with a fashion show alongside China’s emerging fashion talent and streetwear brands. Taobao promises to reveal the line-up in the coming weeks.
Last year, saw Alibaba transforming West Lake’s picturesque “Broken Bridge” into a high-fashion runway, showcasing some of China’s leading fashion innovators, such as Wan Yifang. The bridge is best known for its role in Madame White Snake, a classic Chinese tale about two star-crossed lovers.
The event serves as an opportunity to bring shoppers closer to their pureplay brands, giving them a chance to build a one-to-one connection offscreen, get to know business owners personally and understand deeper brands’ values, ethos and vision – which may serve as a connecting point in solidifying the seller-merchant relationship.
As the industry has already experienced shopping bonanzas exclusive to a big shark player such as Amazon who ‘sensed the blood’ in the importance of wooing shoppers with members-only discounts, Taobao are turbocharging this move with an offline tactic, mixing omnichannel experiences in a bid to get to know shoppers in a 360-degree manner.
