With a few pieces of samples to show our competitiveness, we firstly visited to the Donna Karan headquarters in New York. Positive responses to quality, price, and trade terms were initially expressed by the marketing manager. That being said, they didn’t want to initiate the trade because all the bags were made in Korea, not made in Italy or conventional origin of fashion products. To make matters worse, a trade with Simone who has limited experience manufacturing luxury handbags never took place between us. Disappointed, but not defeated, we didn’t give up. We kept on persuading them by explaining that Asia will take much of the share for the manufacturing base in the handbag manufacturing market, and we conveyed to them that currently long haul Italian atelier started its history from virtually nothing, so why not us? Finally, we succeeded in receiving the very first order of 120 pieces of handbags. It was a very small volume at our inception that allowed us to become a center of handbag production in Asia. Eventually such a small seed planted momentum so that we could grow concurrently with the emergence of accessible luxury in the US market.

Simone, the First Mover to ODM from OEM Started to Develop Product Designs and Materials

Donna Karan’s designers travelled to Simone headquarter for the purpose of developing product design. We proactively suggested new material sources to our customers after anticipating potential problems in material handling when designers followed up on samples.

The utmost care was devoted to our customers in order for us to become a unique ODM company in global market.

Production Base Shift to China

Ever since our story spread among customers,various luxury fashion brands approached us to looking to do business with Simone. We persuaded our buyers to supply our products to consumers in China and moved our production base there as well. We sent Korean craftsmen to the production base to maintain quality control and pass along our extensive experience and expertise in handbag manufacturing to demolish the stereotype of products that are “Made in China.”

Simone’s Capabilities Captured the Mind of Several European Luxury Brands

The president of LVMH and their company representatives held a blind test to distinguish the difference between products made in Italy and handbags made by Simone. The result of the test was 50:50. This gave our company the chance to spread awareness about our world-renowned quality, breaking the perception that Italy was by default the best in the industry. As a result, several European brands as well as American brands began looking to work with Simone.