As early as the early 1980s, Qiaotou has formed a professional market for clothing accessories. The main products are clothing accessories such as buttons and zippers. After years of development, it has gradually formed a clothing accessories production and sales base. Now it has formed an industrial group with buttons and zippers as the leader, complete upstream and downstream products and various accessories, becoming the cradle of the private economy, a model of "small commodities, big markets", and a model of the Wenzhou model, which has aroused widespread popularity at home and abroad. Attention, known as "Oriental Brussels", was named "China Button Capital" and "China Zipper Hometown" by China Hardware Association.
"Bridge-head businessman, carry the burden and go everywhere". Historically, the bridgeheads had few people and many people, developed handicrafts, and had a tradition of doing business. In the early days of reform and opening up, the Ye brothers from Qiaotou Town accidentally picked up a bag of discarded buttons from a garbage dump in a factory when they were playing cotton in Suzhou, and brought them back to the town to set up a button stall, and they made hundreds of dollars. dollars. So under the leadership of the Ye brothers, many people followed suit, and the button business in Qiaotou became a climate at once. In the second year, there were more than 100 button stalls in the town. In 1983, the scene of farmers spontaneously setting up stalls to make their business prosperous deeply inspired the Yongjia County Government at that time. The county government took advantage of the situation and approved the establishment of the first small commodity wholesale market in China - Qiaotou Button Professional Market. , has become a nationally renowned button trading center. Hong Kong "Wen Wei Po" called it "the largest button market in the East", and "Ban Yue Tan" magazine called it "the Brussels of the East" (the capital of Belgium, Brussels, is the national gem center). By 1993, the entire market had grown to 1,030 booths, employing more than 1,200 people, with a daily turnover of 220,000 yuan. Merchants from all over the country flocked.
The button industry in Qiaotou was mainly based on the sales and sales of plexiglass buttons and plastic electroplating buttons at the beginning, and gradually transformed into the establishment of a family button factory, producing and marketing plexiglass buttons and plastic electroplating buttons. In 1998, Qiaotou appeared as a manufacturer of unsaturated resin buttons with novel styles, heat resistance and colorfastness, etc., and quickly developed into a large-scale button enterprise. These enterprises have increased investment in technological transformation and introduced a large number of Italian advanced button-making equipment. Since then, the technical level and management level of button production have been greatly improved. Now the varieties and patterns of bridgehead buttons are complete and everything is available. Button production, output, and output value increase at a rate of 20% every year. On December 30, 2002, Qiaotou Town was awarded the title of "China Button Capital" by China Hardware Products Association. According to statistics, by the end of 2004, there were 560 button enterprises in Qiaotou Town, with 290 enterprises with an annual output value of more than 5 million buttons, of which 12 were between 5 million and 10 million, and 17 were over 10 million. The number of employees is 8,535, the annual output is 118,500 tons, the annual output value is 1.384 billion yuan, and the direct export value is 150 million yuan, accounting for 33% of the town's total industrial output value.
