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, how has the local button industry transformed, upgraded and developed innovatively step by step?
Let us walk into Yongjia and explore the market pulse in small buttons.
Starting from Qiaotou street stalls, buttons began their journey across the ocean and sold around the world.
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.
79-year-old Wang Suinai 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 Hunan manufacturers had a backlog of buttons, so he bought 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 was equal to his family’s income in the previous year.
After getting her first taste of the business, she scraped together 500 yuan and traveled with her family to buy buttons. She also led women to bring goods to sell.
Soon, the button stalls in Qiaotou Town grew from 2 to more than 40, forming a “button street”.
In 1983, Qiaotou Button Market, the first professional small commodity market in rural my country, was born in Qiaotou Town.
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.
In the late 1980s, foreign trade began, and more and more Qiaotou merchants took the initiative to connect with foreign trade customers. The buttons started from Qiaotou and were sold 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, Button’s 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 that the button industry has been stuck in a bottleneck in the past.
Nowadays, Xincheng Button has introduced a high-speed AI industrial vision inspection machine, which has greatly improved the inspection efficiency.
Wenzhou Pengbo Knitted Button Co., Ltd. “tried early adopters” of 3D printing technology, reducing research and development costs and shortening the proofing time.
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 research and development, production and processing, to testing and inspection, logistics and distribution, the complete industrial chain allows the company to achieve an efficient transaction model.
The division of labor among enterprises is clear, forming an industrial ecosystem with efficient upstream and downstream linkage and complete supporting facilities.
Nowadays, to produce a button, the required raw materials can be collected in Qiaotou Town within half a day, and the deployment of all categories of raw materials can be completed in 2 to 3 hours at the fastest.
Yongjia people not only rely on technological progress to reduce costs, but also focus on increasing the added value of buttons.
Metro Button’s “Rainbow Button” is inspired by UV-resistant dimming sunglasses and has received cooperation intentions from many foreign clothing brands.
The new Chinese style, national trend, and Hanfu craze have made batches of personalized and customized buttons popular. Wenzhou Hengmeihe Clothing Co., Ltd. specializes in Chinese-style buttons. Traditional handmade artistic buttons are expensive and have a stable customer base.
Services are also being upgraded. Zhejiang Malida Group Co., Ltd. provides customers with customized services and realizes the interaction between upstream and downstream related industries.
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 Yongjia County Economic and Information Bureau, said that the next step will be to promote traditional buttons to become fashionable, functional and digital, and polish the golden sign of “China’s Button Capital”.
