Luxury shoppers call in the tidy teams

Housewife Chen says her walk-in closet, which brims with brands from Louis Vuitton and Chanel to Prada and Gucci, used to cause frequent arguments with her husband

Beijing: The discovery of a Burberry jacket she does not recall buying proved to Chen Rui that she was right to have brought in experts to manage her out-of-control luxury wardrobe.”How did you find this?” the 32-year-old asked the crack team of “home organisers” who unearthed the jacket from a heap of clothes pulled from her closet in a slick Beijing apartment.

So far the pandemic appears not to have dulled their desires, but “Single’s Day” on November 11, the world’s biggest shopping day, will be closely watched for an idea about the state of Chinese consumer sentiment.

Housewife Chen says her walk-in closet, which brims with brands from Louis Vuitton and Chanel to Prada and Gucci, used to cause frequent arguments with her husband. “I never abandon any of my collection, I just add to it,” the former art teacher admitted, saying she just loves to indulge. So in desperation, she hired a four-strong team of home organisers to rescue her wardrobe.

The experts in smart black uniforms whisk around her high-end apartment, emptying more than a thousand pieces of clothing and dozens of luxury handbags from her closet.The team is led by Yu Ziqin, one of thousands of graduates from a home-organising school called Liucundao, which teaches the art of bringing order to the chaos of China’s rich shoppers.

School founder Bian Lichun said there were now more than 3,000 professionals in the emerging industry, which state broadcaster CCTV has projected could reach 100 billion yuan ($14.9 billion) this year in terms of market turnover.

Home organiser Han Yonggang says his clients — who pay upwards of $2,000 each for a process that can take a couple of days — usually have annual income exceeding one million yuan a year.

“I’m earning more than I did when I was a graphic designer,” Han explains. They teach “the way to retain”, Bian says, through storage and canny design — such as extra-thin coathangers.
“There is nothing useless in the world.”