In Qiaotou Town, Yongjia County, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, a giant button-shaped sculpture stands majestically.
Buttons are the dazzling business card of Qiaotou Town – this is the “Button Capital of China” famous at home and abroad.
Since its establishment, in the face of the ever-changing market environment, the local button industry has transformed, upgraded and developed innovatively step by step. Let us go into Yongjia and explore the market pulse of small buttons.
In March, the Qiaotou Button Market was busy, with button packages piled at the door of each store to be shipped to all parts of the world.
Wang Suinai, 79 years old, is one of the earliest pioneers in the button business in Qiaotou Town. He is also a witness to the development of the local button industry over the past 40 years.
In the late 1970s, the people in Qiaotou basically made a living by farming.
Wang Suannai accidentally learned that several Hunan manufacturers had a backlog of buttons of excellent quality, so he mustered up the courage to buy these buttons and set up a stall on the stone bridge in front of his home. They were quickly sold out, and the money he earned in one week was equal to his family’s previous year’s income.
After the first taste of the benefits, Wang Suannai is determined to continue the button business.
She scraped together 500 yuan and traveled to Jiangsu, Shanghai and other places with her family to buy dozens of kilograms of buttons from manufacturers.
As a village cadre, she also led women who were living in poverty to bring goods for sale.
Soon, the number of button stalls in Qiaotou Town grew from two to more than 40. Shibanqiao and surrounding streets gradually formed a “button street” and became a famous button distribution center.
In 1983, Qiaotou Button Market, the first professional small commodity market in rural my country, was born in Qiaotou Town. 42 households setting up stalls on Shibanqiao received the first batch of business licenses.
Since then, the Qiaotou button industry has developed vigorously, once occupying 90% of the national market share, and the scope of industrial radiation has continued to expand.
Foreign trade also started. In the late 1980s, a Southeast Asian businessman came to Qiaotou by chance. He was attracted by the wide variety of buttons on the market and ordered a batch of goods on the spot.
Since then, more and more Qiaotou merchants have taken the initiative to contact foreign trade merchants, and later even organized groups to go to the Canton Fair and foreign exhibitions to promote products.
The small buttons start from Qiaotou and are sold across the ocean to overseas markets.
In 2025, the industrial output value of the clothing accessories category represented by buttons in Yongjia County will exceed 1.2 billion yuan, with 23 regulated enterprises, more than 300 button production, processing and sales enterprises, and nearly 20,000 employees.
In Qiaotou Town, companies produce approximately 100 billion buttons every year.
In Yongjia, buttons’ foreign trade journey has experienced a period of growth pains.
Chen Haihua, general manager of Zhejiang Xincheng Button Jewelry Co., Ltd., a leading local button company, has deep feelings. The button industry has been stuck in a bottleneck. Production technology cannot be improved and the process model is simple. It can only be trapped in the market of low-end and cheap products.
Today, in Xincheng Button’s production factory, the high-speed AI (artificial intelligence) industrial vision inspection machine is quite eye-catching, and the inspection efficiency has increased by at least 50%.
There are also companies that are “trying” 3D printing technology, which reduces research and development costs and makes designs more creative and high-quality.
The increasingly perfect industrial chain cluster has become an important advantage for Yongjia Button to participate in global competition.
From raw material supply to design and R&D, production and processing, to testing and inspection, and logistics and distribution, the complete industrial chain allows enterprises to realize an efficient transaction model of “viewing samples on site, placing orders on the spot, and delivering goods immediately” in Yongjia.
To produce a button, from core raw materials such as resin to ancillary materials such as electroplating, printing and dyeing, all can be assembled in Qiaotou Town within half a day, and the deployment of all categories of raw materials can be completed in as fast as 2 to 3 hours.
Yongjia people have significantly increased the added value of buttons through technological improvements and creative upgrades.
Xincheng Button’s “rainbow buttons” change color with the sunlight, adding to the wearing experience. Many foreign clothing brands have expressed intentions to cooperate.
The new Chinese style, national trend, and Hanfu trend have driven batches of personalized and customized buttons to become popular. The buttons of Wenzhou Hengmeihe Clothing Co., Ltd. are like works of art. An artistic button can be sold for 120 to 200 yuan, and it has a stable customer base.
Services are also being upgraded. The button industry in Yongjia County has advanced from selling products to selling services, and the upstream and downstream integration transformation has accelerated.
Zhejiang Malida Group Co., Ltd. provides customers with customized services, enhancing the company’s competitiveness.
At the same time, Yongjia County attaches great importance to patent protection. In 2025, the Yongjia Branch of the national Wenzhou Intellectual Property Protection Center was officially established, accelerating the speed of patent authorization.
Ye Manman, member of the Party Committee and Deputy Director of the Economic and Information Bureau of Yongjia County, said that the next step will be to promote traditional buttons to become fashionable, functional and digital, and to polish the golden sign of “China’s Button Capital” even brighter.
