Teahouse links entrepreneurs with companies

Fashion designer Lu Lyuzhu spent much of the first two decades of her career traveling around the world for business, attending exhibitions and fashion shows.

"Then I just wanted to settle down somewhere," said Lu, 42, whose hometown is in Baotou in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

Lu became a woolen garment designer in 1995 after graduating from Tsinghua University.

The hope for a slower pace of life led her to Wuzhen in Tongxiang, Zhejiang province, a riverside town with a history of more than 1,000 years.

In Wuzhen, which is the permanent host of the annual World Internet Conference, the designer soon found huge opportunities. Tongxiang has long been the country's largest production center for woolen garments and other types of clothes.

Woolen clothes from Tongxiang currently account for about 70 percent of the domestic market share.

"In earlier years, the clothes produced here were considered of high quality mainly because of their wool content," said Lu.

Most of the local garment makers are family firms.

"People didn't pay much attention to design at first because they could still make their businesses profitable without such efforts. In recent years, they realized that design has become increasingly important in their operations," she said.

Some larger companies now attach greater importance to design and have built their own design teams, while most of the small producers cannot afford to employ their own designers, according to Lu.