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 gradually transformed, upgraded, and developed innovatively.
Let’s go into Yongjia and explore the market pulse in 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 this year, is energetic and energetic. From time to time, she grabs the merchants she knows well and tells them: “Only with good quality and reasonable prices can we retain customers.” She is one of the earliest pioneers in the button business in Qiaotou Town, and is also a witness to the development of the local button industry for more than 40 years.
In the late 1970s, the people in Qiaotou basically made a living by farming.
By chance, Wang Suannai learned that several Hunan manufacturers had a backlog of buttons of good quality.
“People can’t live without clothes, and clothes are indispensable for buttons. There must be a market for them.” She said that she mustered up the courage to buy these buttons and set up a stall on the stone bridge in front of her home. As expected, it was quickly sold out. “Within a week, the money earned was equal to the family’s income in the previous year.”
After enjoying the first taste of the benefits, Wang Suannai was determined to continue the button business.
After collecting 500 yuan, she and her family traveled to Jiangsu, Shanghai and other places to buy dozens of kilograms of buttons from manufacturers.
As a village cadre, she also took the initiative to encourage 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 families who set up stalls on Shibanqiao received the first batch of business licenses.
“When business was booming, thousands of people purchased from us every day.” Wang Suannai recalled that the local government built a simple market with nearly 300 stalls, and the “Qiaotou Button Market” was officially born.
In the following decades, Qiaotou’s button industry developed vigorously, once occupying 90% of the national market share, and its industrial radiation scope continued to expand, extending from Qiaotou to Yongjia County and surrounding counties and cities.
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.
This foreign trade order allowed Qiaotou people to see the potential of overseas markets.
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.
“At first, we asked fellow villagers working in other places to take orders for us.” Zou Lixiao, general manager of Wenzhou Fangyuan Metal Button Co., Ltd., recalled the first foreign trade order.
Subsequently, the company took the initiative to participate in the Canton Fair, and met foreign customers from India, South America and other places in the 9-square-meter exhibition hall. Over the past 20 years, it has established stable cooperation with foreign merchants through domestic and foreign exhibitions and other platforms, relying on the well-established domestic clothing accessories industry.
The small buttons started from Qiaotou and traveled across the ocean to be 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.
As a leading local button company, Chen Haihua, general manager of Zhejiang Xincheng Button Jewelry Co., Ltd., has deep feelings: “After the street stall economy and extensive development, the button industry once fell into a bottleneck – the production technology cannot be improved, the process model is simple, and it can only be trapped in the market of low-end and cheap products.”
Now, when walking into the Xincheng button production factory, the high-speed AI (artificial intelligence) industrial vision inspection machine is quite eye-catching.
In less than 30 minutes, a batch of 30,000 buttons completed product quality inspection.
“Visual inspection equipment was purchased a few years ago, but it was useless for a while.” Chen Haihua said frankly that there are thousands of button styles. In the past, parameters had to be constantly adjusted, and the visual inspection efficiency could not be improved.
“In October last year, the equipment was upgraded and six cameras were added.” Chen Haihua said that AI needs to undergo a lot of training, and the hundreds of millions of button products in the factory have a “purpose”.
After repeated training, the detection efficiency increased by at least 50%.
Some companies are “trying” 3D printing technology.
In the production workshop of Wenzhou Pengbo Knitted Button Co., Ltd., various 3D printed molds have unique shapes and fine textures, which have become a “weapon” for companies to open up new markets.
Lin Pengbo, the general manager of the company, said that in the past, it cost at least 400 yuan to open a mold for a button, and the process from design to sample production could take as little as a few days or as long as a week. “Some small-batch, multi-style orders were so thankless that I didn’t dare to accept them.” Now, relying on 3D printing technology, the same mold costs only 50 yuan, the proofing time is greatly shortened, and style modifications are more flexible.
Today, 3D printing has become a standard tool for R&D, proofing and production of button companies in Yongjia County.
“The new technology greatly reduces research and development costs, and can directly form three-dimensional textures on the surface of buttons, making the design more creative and textured,” said Lin Pengbo.
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.
“There is a clear division of labor among enterprises and each performs its own duties. Some focus on the supply of raw materials, some are deeply involved in production and processing, and some focus on production services such as testing and logistics, forming an industrial ecology with efficient upstream and downstream linkage and complete supporting facilities.” Jin Enyi, executive vice president of the Qiaotou Button Chamber of Commerce, said that the Yongjia Button Industry Chain Cluster makes production more convenient, costs more controllable, and products more competitive.
Nowadays, to produce a button, from core raw materials such as resin to supporting auxiliary materials such as electroplating, printing and dyeing, all can be assembled in Qiaotou Town within half a day, and the deployment of all raw materials can be completed in 2 to 3 hours at the fastest.
How did a seemingly ordinary button develop into a large industry with an output value of hundreds of millions of yuan?
The answer of Yongjia people is that in addition to relying on technological progress to reduce costs, they also need to think about increasing the added value of buttons.
In Xincheng Button, a “rainbow button” aroused everyone’s curiosity.
With the sunlight, the originally plain white buttons gradually turned into various colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.
When the button was taken back indoors, it gradually turned back to white.
“This is a new product we developed last year, inspired by anti-UV light-changing sunglasses.” Chen Haihua said that thanks to continuous investment in technology, this button took only three months from the initial inspiration to production.
What is the market prospect?
“Many foreign clothing brands have expressed their intention to cooperate, mainly children’s clothing brands.” Chen Haihua said, “Nowadays, consumers care more about emotional value. Such a color-changing button can add a lot of wearing experience.”
In recent years, new Chinese style, national fashion, and Hanfu craze have continued to “out of the circle”, and batches of personalized and customized buttons have become popular.
In the exhibition hall of Wenzhou Hengmeihe Clothing Co., Ltd., several buckles are like works of art.
A red horse with ingots hanging on its body and red tassels exudes Chinese elegance, which means “get rich immediately”; a magpie holds plum blossoms in its beak, standing on the treetop, with a framed scene behind it, which means “overjoyed”…
“Isn’t it hard to imagine that these are also buttons?”
Xu Sunqiu, general manager of the company, said that since the company landed in Yongjia County in 2017, the company has aimed at subdividing the track, focusing on Chinese-style and other styles of buckles, adhering to traditional hand-made production, and an artistic button can be sold for 120 to 200 yuan. It has a stable customer base of more than 50,000 people online and offline, at home and abroad.
Services are also being upgraded.
Today, the button industry in Yongjia County has advanced from selling products to selling services, and the upstream and downstream integration transformation has accelerated.
At Zhejiang Malida Group Co., Ltd., general manager Zou Qingqing is leading a team to research the systematic development of excipients to provide customers with customized services.
“The company’s business includes traditional button design and production, but also provides a complete set of design solutions including zippers, decorative logos, etc.” She said that this not only realizes the interaction between upstream and downstream related industries, but also enhances the competitiveness of the company.
The higher the added value of a product, the more urgent the need for patent protection.
In 2025, the Yongjia Branch of the National Wenzhou Intellectual Property Protection Center was officially established to explore fast pre-examination and trademark acceptance services, which can usually be completed in 7 working days.
Zhang Zhirong, director of the Yongjia County Intellectual Property Service Center, introduced that the Yongjia County Intellectual Property Service Center has been officially put into operation. The button and zipper industry will have 156 new design patents in 2025, of which 72 have been quickly authorized through the fast pre-examination channel, and the authorization time has been shortened by 90% compared with the conventional process.
“Next, we will focus on key links such as design and research and development, brand cultivation, and intelligent manufacturing to promote traditional buttons to become fashionable, functional, and digital, and polish the golden sign of ‘China’s Button Capital’ even brighter.” said Ye Manman, member of the Party Committee and Deputy Director of the Economic and Information Bureau of Yongjia County.
