Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1768
In the preparatory stage six years ago, An Ko Rau brand had a logo “0” before its name was determined.
The parent company is naturally a women’s clothing company, and has never made sportswear before. The founder of Suran, Wang Yiyang, asked designer Yuanyuan to buy clothes from various sports brands on the market and study their structure and characteristics. In the end, I found a very simple difference. Sportswear is placed in women’s clothing companies, and the logo is particularly eye-catching, while “fashion has no logo.”
In the end they found the number 0, inspired by the timing of sports stopwatches. The brand name was also born from it – An Ko Rau, which means “perpetual motion” in Esperanto.
Not long ago, the brand updated its logo, and “0” was symbolized, “expressing from stillness to movement, continuous development and progress”.
Among the many sports brands that pursue “faster, higher and stronger”, An Ko Rau conveys a different sports attitude to consumers: “Don’t pursue winning or losing, enjoy the process”, “Sports is to play”.
“We are not serving athletes, and we don’t want to be higher, faster, or farther.” Brand Manager Jiang Yuan told “LatePost”.
An Ko Rau was founded in Shanghai, and its parent company, Suran ZUCZUG, is a local women’s clothing company with a history of 22 years. Founder Wang Yiyang is the first Chinese fashion designer to be featured in Vogue China. Around 2017, Suran launched several independent sub-brands in one go, including Klee Klee, An Ko Rau, WHM, Extra One, etc., covering environmental protection, sports, bag accessories, and designer brands.
At present, the sports brand An Ko Rau has become one of the sub-brands that contribute the most revenue to the company.
Most traditional outdoor products tend to reject decoration, and the designs are all functional services. An Ko Rau is different. It cares about functionality, but it is not extreme, and aesthetics is also important. The product line includes both common sportswear and accessories suitable for niche urban sports, which makes it priced in a wide range, ranging from a hundred yuan to a thousand yuan. Unlike lululemon, which focuses on elite lifestyle brands, An Ko Rau has richer colors in design, and radiates a variety of sports lifestyles in brand content, so as to capture and explain the new connotation of current urban sports: freedom is freedom without physical and mental restrictions.
In 2019, the brand opened its first street store on Uruma Middle Road, Shanghai. During the renovation, the declarative words on the fence posters were impressive: “Don’t Let Cities Restrict Us.” (Don’t Let Cities Restrict Us.)”.
This is a brand that can capture the subtle changes in ordinary people. In the past, when Yuanyuan and her colleagues mentioned outdoor sports, they meant at least “climbing a 6,000-meter snow mountain”. Now the concept is relaxed. With the growth and diversification of sports enthusiasts, the types of sports that are currently accepted and even popular are also expanding. Not only hardcore ones, hiking around the city and river tracing will now be classified as outdoor sports. Like the emerging sports enthusiasts in the city, An Ko Rau’s team includes surfers, boxers, hikers…very diverse.
The An Ko Rau team in Shanghai currently has more than 30 people. There is no meeting room on the entire floor of the office. The “meeting room” is a gym. When it was time to hold a meeting, everyone took off their shoes and went in, sitting on the ground for the meeting. There is a shoe rack at the entrance, and everyone puts on slippers when they arrive at the office. At An Ko Rau, employees are allowed to bring their pets to work.
Shanghai, Angaoruo Shangsheng Xinsuo Store. The brand’s office is just above the store.
The staff at An Ko Rau are passionate practitioners of the lifestyle they advocate. After intensive work, employees are allowed to take vacations, sometimes up to 1-2 months. The brand’s attitude towards work and life is embodied in the words of the manager Xin Yuan: “If I have to work overtime one day, I will find an extra day to go hiking.”
Large or small table, infinitely extending canvas
“The biggest feature of our side is these desks.” Yuan Yuan turned around and pointed to the original black desks behind him, which were more than one meter long and looked nothing special. But for a fashion designer, the 2-meter long table is more common.
In An Ko Rau, every time it is time to collide with ideas, multiple small tables are moved and put together. Yuanyuan hopes to flatten the management, so that the team can share a creative working atmosphere. “Everyone uses small modular tables. The table can be made bigger or smaller.”
Whether it is a traditional fashion company or a sports brand, there is already a mature system. When An Ko Rau wanted to offer a different product, the concepts and skills of designers and marketers were faced with new challenges. And these tables seem to guarantee that they will reach agreement quickly.
At the same time, when the designers of An Ko Rau are going to have a meeting, their electronic canvases will be put together like a table, and the ideas and iterations of each quarter are clearly visible.
She asked designers to build their own product genealogy in the infinite canvas, and design continuously according to the first, second, and third generations.
Similar flexibility can be found in An Ko Rau’s latest “Shanghai Shangsheng Xinsuo Store” and “Chengdu Yuanye Store”. The walls of the store are composed of a grid system that can be flexibly changed. Posters, racks and decorations can be replaced at any time. Display units can be freed up for events when required. Change, update, arrange and combine at any time, just like Lego blocks.
Chengdu Angao Ruoyuanye Store
“A good idea is worth pursuing”
An Ko Rau captures a growing middle market. In the new outdoor trend, people pay equal attention to sports performance and visual effects. In order to allow the team to achieve multiple goals – aesthetic, rooted in sports life, functional and sustainable, An Ko Rau encourages employees to cross boundaries internally. Store managers in charge of retail can also participate in design and operation if they are interested.
Behind the innovation of An Ko Rau is a design manual written by Suran founder Wang Yiyang 15 years ago. The garden still has an electronic scan of the handbook. She still remembers when Wang Yiyang interviewed her in 2008, he said that fashion design is long-distance running, not sprinting. There will be many design inspirations, but “a good idea is worth going deep into”.
“It has been 16 years, and the company has followed the direction written in this brochure.” Yuan Yuan said, “This reflects the depth.”
The official independence of the brand was in 2017, but it actually took longer to be born. From this, we can already see the way the team does things: things are done slowly and well prepared.
In 2008, Wang Yiyang, who founded Suran for the seventh year, recruited many young designers to train them from scratch. That year, Yuan Yuan was a freshman at Raffles International Design Institute of Donghua University. Wang Yiyang went to the graduation design exhibition. Among the many graduation designs of men’s and women’s clothing, Yuanyuan made functional sportswear rarely. He thought the young man’s design was very interesting, so he left his phone number for Xiang Yuan.
Before joining Suran, Xin Yuan worked as an intern in a well-known clothing company. “I think they are wasteful. For example, for a T-shirt, the designer will ask the designer to make 100 styles, and the dealer will choose among the 100 T-shirts, many of which are only slightly different. I really don’t like this company. It not only wastes fabrics, but also wastes my personal energy and time, and also sacrifices my health.” As for another clothing brand that gave her an offer, the business card is a delicate thin piece of wood. She said, “It doesn’t match me at all.”
Later in An Ko Rau, Xin Yuan liked to make T-shirts with cotton-polyester materials. Compared with pure cotton, cotton polyester is not deformed, easy to take care of, and can also be worn during sports.
“In terms of performance, we pay attention to moderation—the moderation of resource utilization. For example, if you can adjust the floor heating to 20 degrees, don’t adjust it to 28 degrees.” She said.
The style of “take your time, don’t overdo it” took them nearly 10 years to make the “0” series, which focuses on sports, officially independent as a brand.
The design of the 0 series, the predecessor of Angoruo.
They will invite amateur testers and partners to be models. Although they are not professional, the brand hopes to present and convey that they are real and unique individuals.
They are also willing to design clothes for people that ordinary brands can’t think of. During the World Cup last year, An Gaoruo and the grassroots football club ANAR FC jointly released a capsule series, which sold surprisingly well. The members of this team come from different countries and nationalities, and their occupations are also different. There are professional musicians, filmmakers, firefighters, barbecue shop owners, etc. During the cooperation process, Shanghai United Club, another women’s football club in Shanghai, also found a brand and hoped that they could design team uniforms for themselves. The designer of An Ko Rau discussed research with them and finally made the team uniform.
An Gaoruo and the grassroots football club ANAR FC collaborated in the capsule series, mainly men’s wear.
From the perspective of the brand, the local sports community will drive the development and diversification of a sport. Working with them is a way to contribute to the development of local sports and a way to meet new fans.
Many people think that An Ko Rau is too expensive, and Yuan Yuan said that this is “the next step that needs to be explored in a more diversified way”.
The scale of An Ko Rau is not large, which also limits the bargaining power of the brand in the upstream supply chain. In addition to selling through Suran ZUCZUG channels, the brand currently only has independent stores in Shanghai, Beijing, and Chengdu.
But they are not in a hurry either. When considering the next step of business, this brand is always used to consider people first. Xin Yuan said: “When entering a new market, we must also consider sustainability. Making a pile of inventory is also traumatic to the designers themselves. Let them grow happily.” This attitude may be the secret of Angoruo’s vitality.
Source of title map: provided by the interviewee
“LatePost” launched a weekend edition, hoping to expand its sights to all kinds of creators. To put it simply, we want to know who is creating and using it to influence the surroundings; we not only look at the present, but also look back at the past, looking for the source of shaping today’s world; we pay attention to technology, business, history, and humanities, and look at the emergence of the intersection of these fields.
What we pay attention to may be a product, a store, a packaging design idea, or a certain work philosophy, product concept, management method, an interesting and novel way of life, or even an ancient idea that still shines today.
“What has been created is insignificant compared with what is yet to be created.” Those were the words of Victor Hugo — and we hope Late Weekend confirms that.
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