Niche Market Defined

According to Phillip Kotler, a niche is a narrowly defined customer group. Niche markets primarily consist of market segments within the larger market place who have similar demographic, psychographic, buying behavior and/or lifestyle characterics. The Fenix Group started with two entrepreneurs, Anthony Keung (Chinese) and Masaaki Ogino (Japanese) who shared the same business philosophy, which is aiming at niche markets, that most times are left untouched or under-served.

How did Fenix identify and tap into different niche markets?

Knitwear Manufacturing Niche Market

The Group first niche was knitwear manufacturing after which they diversified into fashion and general merchandise retailing. Fenix identified every new niche market out of experience and knowledge gained from previous business opportunites. For instance, knowledge gained from working at a yarn manufacturing supplier enabled them them to move from trading imported Japanese yarn to Hong Kong knitted factories to expanding into knitwear manfacturing and setting up their own manufacturing company in Hong Kong. This venture was successful in the Japanese market due to increasing demand for high quality knitwear due to increased labor cost of local production. Fenix opened knitwear factories in South and Central China to minimize cost and improve their competitiveness by concentrating only on high quality knitwear due to increased price competition. This strategic move to China laid the foundation for the duo future development in knit wear manufaturing which earned them a value of US$ 100 million from producing nine millions units of knitwear per year. The company also exported to the US and developed relationships with European brand such as Armani and Maxmara.

Fashion Retailing Niche Market
Fenix first experience with brand retailing was in the early eighties when