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Chino Nakagome, CEO of Seiundo Co., Ltd., in Tokyo, Japan, was named Sales Education Leader of the Year in the sales awards categories of the 2010 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service for her role as a fashion educator in China. The final entry deadline for the 2011 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service is December 31.
 During the past decade, more and more apparel companies from around the world have flocked to sell their products in the rapidly expanding Chinese market. Many of these companies have suffered losses, however, simply from a lack of understanding of the Chinese staff working in their retail stores. For the past few years Chino Nakagome, CEO of Seiundo Co., Ltd., has been providing a solution by developing educational programs for the fashion retail industry in China.
While people outside China tend to think that the Cultural Revolution happened a long time ago, its influence is still deeply felt in China. As a result, Chinese retail workers in general don’t have a strong sense of service. Their main task for many years was to prevent robbery, not necessarily to know much about fashion.
Persuasive Logic
Nakagome developed a “Manager Course” to define the shop manager as the most important position and role model for the retail sales team. This training course has succeeded in changing the perception of their true role for retail shop staff in China.
Persuasive logic is the essence of education for the Chinese. To address this, Seiundo prepared textbooks with photographs to explain the logic.
First, Nakagome held a trial class intended for the graduates of Ximan Color, a training school in China that has been operating for over ten years. After that, Nakagome looked into the actual program with the students who applied: a lot of people who are interested in fashion attend this program despite its steep cost of 8,600 Chinese Yuan (approximately $1,300) for seven days.
The Customer is Always Right
Nakagome emphasized several points in the Ximan Color education course, starting with explaining what customer service is all about. The program also provided a basic knowledge of consultative sales. Nakagome ensured that the program’s subject matter was persuasive and would be instantly effective in order to resonate with Chinese students.
Nakagome created a textbook and role-playing methods for students on the course that would best convey the following messages:
- To understand that shops are stages, where staff have to display cleanliness and basic good manners;
- To learn how to establish trust with the customers, and how to turn walk-in customers into clients;
- To acquire a basic knowledge of styling, and learn how to use fashion awareness to persuade the customer to purchase multiple items;
- To acquire a basic knowledge of visual merchandising display (VMD) and learn how to use it to increase sales.
Key components for Success
Chino Nakagome and her company Seiundo thoroughly understood the importance of the location of a business and its consumers’ demands, and have been highly successful in training retail staff in China to understand these key components to success in the fashion retail industry.
About Chino Nakagome:
Chino Nakagome founded Seiundo Co., Ltd. and became CEO in 2003. She has been the representative in Japan for Ximan Color Co., Ltd since 2009. Nakagome also works to coordinate new projects for the Chinese-language version of the Italian magazine Oggi (with a Chinese circulation of 488,000), and with the Chinese fashion publication Rayli (circulation 760,000).
Nakagome has been a stylist, a fashion editor, and a fashion director, and has over 14 years experience as a successful marketer in fashion, interior decoration, and the Internet, both in Japan and around the world. Nakagome recently helped co-ordinate the launch of New York designer Jill Stuart’s 2011 collection at the GLAMOROUS NIGHT fashion event in Beijing, sponsored by Rayli.
About Seiundo
Seiundo Co., Ltd. is a consulting company whose core business is serving the fashion industry. The company offers comprehensive services, such as contents production of EC sites, education, web site design, brand consulting, and sales support. Seiundo’s strength lies in the company’s ability to understand the consumer's demand from the perspective of fashion, and it proposes solutions from an objective point of view.
About Moon Cake
Chino Nakagome recently founded a new company based in Hong Kong to assist business development and a strategic approach to the fashion industry in China. Moon Cake Limited started up in January 2010, and subsidiaries in Tokyo (??????????) and Beijing (Moon Cake (Beijing) Co., Ltd Cultural Arts) opened in May and September 2010 respectively. |
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