Interview | Wu Li: Leading Jack Technology to Break Through the Downturn with the "Three Victories Strategy"

Jack Technology President Wu Lizheng employs the “Win with Heart, Win with Strategy, Win with Victory” system to help companies break through growth boundaries and embark on a new journey of intelligent manufacturing.

Uniqlo’s collaborative T-shirts, UR’s dresses, SHEIN’s seasonal new arrivals… supporting these global fast fashion giants’ year-round new product release rhythm is a vast fashion production industrial chain.

Within this fashion production industrial chain, a “hidden champion” company has already established dominance. Out of every three industrial sewing machines worldwide, one is produced by a Chinese company—Jack Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Jack Technology).

To date, Jack Technology has ranked first in industrial sewing machine sales for 14 consecutive years, with a market share exceeding 30%.

So, how did this Chinese company grow and develop its industrial advantage? To explore this, “Manager” magazine conducted an interview with Wu Li, President of Jack Technology.

According to publicly available information, Wu Li joined Jack Technology in 2002 and has been refined through multiple roles within the company. In December 2025, she officially took over the presidency from founder Ruan Jixiang, becoming the new leader of this global sewing equipment leader.

The focus of this interview is to analyze two questions: from the company’s perspective, how does Jack Technology continuously push forward its breakthrough advantages? From her personal perspective, what are the secrets behind Wu Li’s growth from an ordinary professional manager to a corporate leader?

From Finance Department to Decision-Making Table

“Actually, a few years ago, Mr. Ruan Jixiang, the founder, hoped I would take over the CEO position.”

In the interview, Wu Li revealed that her delay in taking over was mainly because she “lacked a business perspective at the time and was afraid to accept.”

Previously, Wu Li had worked at Jack Technology for over twenty years, excelling in every functional area—from finance to strategy to human resources.

In 2023, Wu Li pursued an EMBA at Zhejiang University, which she considers an important step to systematically fill her skill set. She believes that the structured courses at Zhejiang EMBA can help her elevate fragmented management experiences into a more complete cognitive framework. These learning experiences further reinforced her core philosophy of “management serving operations.”

In 2024, Wu Li took over as Chief Marketing Officer. She said that before becoming CEO, she wanted to complete the last piece of her management puzzle—marketing.

Unlike other management roles, marketing requires direct data-driven communication. This real-time market feedback finally provided a testing ground and practical application for her over twenty years of accumulated management experience.

Wu Li began leveraging her resource integration skills to mobilize the entire company in support of marketing. She disclosed that in her role as CMO, she was already “50% involved in coordinating other departments.”

This approach essentially involves using CEO-level thinking in marketing. So, when she officially became the company’s president later, the role transition was smoother than expected.

Looking back on this year’s marketing efforts, Wu Li considers her most successful achievement to be realizing countercyclical growth amid industry contraction. Behind this is her “Win with Heart, Win with Strategy, Win with Victory” system.

“Winning with heart” is placed first. During industry downturns, team morale is especially critical. To this end, she organized expedition meetings, quarterly market conferences, distributor meetings, and global customer strategy alignment meetings, using phased victories to reinforce the team’s spirit.

Boosting morale took up 30-50% of her time. “No marketing leader would spend so much time on this.”

So, how are “strategy victory” and “battle victory” achieved?

Treat External Partners as Internal Teams

Wu Li is extremely decisive in personnel management. She flattened the marketing organization, directly managing nearly 20 battle zones and five central departments.

Wu Li’s management philosophy is straightforward and clear: provide battlefield authority, empower, and incentivize, while also demanding tangible results. Positive incentives come quickly—winning battles lead to immediate promotion; negative incentives are also strict—if no improvement in a cycle, personnel are replaced. Among the twenty battle zones, she replaced nearly one-third.

“This will definitely inspire the team’s fighting spirit.” Her words are full of conviction.

There are tens of thousands of clothing factories worldwide, ranging from large-scale companies with tens of thousands of employees to small enterprises with only dozens. Jack Technology’s leadership relies not only on product performance but also on a vast network covering over 8,000 global distributors.

How to keep this large and complex network fighting effectively is a core challenge for marketing leaders. Wu Li’s approach is: treat distributors as her own marketing team.

Wu Li believes they also need “battlefield authority, empowerment, and incentives.” Some distributors have been operating in a territory for ten years and want to grow bigger. The company grants them larger regional targets. Management is layered and graded, with different rights and benefits for different levels of distributors.

She directly integrated Jack’s internal marketing management system into distributor management. Distributors are required to hold quarterly market meetings and monthly battle reports; those performing well expand their territory, while poor performers see their territory shrink or are eliminated. Over the past year, she replaced 10% of distributors from China to overseas.

Elimination is not the goal; activation is. Wu Li said the company’s business school also conducts regular training and combat exercises for distributors, extending from product capabilities to service capabilities. This pressure-and-incentive logic is consistent with internal teams.

It is this management philosophy of “treat external partners as internal teams” that has kept Jack’s distributor network resilient during industry downturns. Wu Li attributes this to an “all-staff marketing” spillover—it’s not just about pushing products onto distributors but enabling them with the ability, motivation, and methods to win.

Hundred-Billion Revenue: Strategy Planning and Action

Wu Li’s goal after taking over as president is clear: to surpass 200k in revenue, and not just that.

How to achieve this? In the interview, she systematically broke down the growth path.

Currently, the company’s revenue of 6-7 billion mainly comes from small and medium-sized clients and single-product sales, while large client strategies and integrated intelligent solutions will bring at least 2 billion in additional space.

“Large clients are not yet our main force, but the potential is huge,” Wu Li said. Moreover, the company is deepening joint innovation with world-class clients in R&D, with over 50% of technical projects being co-developed. At the same time, Jack Technology is expanding through acquisitions to fill industry chain gaps, such as embroidery and printing fields.

Many companies have decision-making chains that are too long, with frontline information passing through multiple layers before reaching senior management, often resulting in distortion or obsolescence. Wu Li advocates for “customer voices reaching the top directly.” For 150 global top-tier clients, senior executives communicate and visit deeply with at least 8-10 clients monthly, spending about one-third of their time on client visits.

This system’s most immediate effect is that frontline teams dare to take orders. Wu Li gave an example: some clients want products still in development and not yet mature, so frontline salespeople hesitate to make decisions. But if senior management approves, they can secure the order—because competitors lack such differentiated products, Jack can seize the opportunity. Dealing with major clients like Anta and Bosideng, selling mature products alone is not enough; joint innovation and decisive decision-making are key to winning large clients.

Additionally, Jack Technology’s increasingly solid global layout is noteworthy, especially in Southeast Asia, South America, Europe, and Africa. Currently, export revenue accounts for over 50%. In major garment-producing countries like Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh, Jack has established local teams numbering hundreds.

Looking further ahead, the potential includes AI sewing and humanoid robots. Wu Li believes that labor shortages will be the industry’s biggest pain point in the future, and filling this gap with robots is inevitable.

Currently, Jack Technology has formed ecological alliances with five or six external companies, including Variable Robotics Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., to jointly develop robots for the apparel industry. This year, the company will launch humanoid robots for clothing, with iterative updates over the next five years, ultimately aiming for 70% of factory processes to be robot-operated.

Regarding the return on investment in robotics, Wu Li rationally assesses, “The direction is correct, but the road is bumpy.” Jack Technology invests 8-9% of annual revenue into R&D, with about one-third allocated to robotics.

She explains that this is a “continuous egg-laying” process: small breakthroughs and outputs each year, rather than waiting five years for results. For customers, a 200k-yuan robot working 24 hours can recoup its cost in a year; for Jack Technology, this also accumulates strength for explosive growth over the next three to five years. Notably, on April 10, the headquarters project for Jack-ART humanoid robots in Linping, Hangzhou, broke ground.

Breakthroughs of the Ceiling

Looking back at Wu Li’s career, a clear thread runs through: she has always proactively sought change. Every transformation broadens her skill set and challenges her “can I do it” mental limits. She says she “dislikes work with a ceiling,” which is her source of self-motivation.

Outside work, Wu Li maintains systematic input of management knowledge. She particularly highlights Professor Han Hongling’s① finance courses at Zhejiang University, which left a deep impression—viewing company operations through financial statements, not just financial data. This “see management through results” perspective has been her consistent way of thinking.

In Jack Technology, a learning-oriented organization, Wu Li’s career trajectory also reflects the company’s core—constantly breaking boundaries and self-iterating.

Starting from a sewing machine, ranking first globally for 14 years, and now advancing into AI sewing and humanoid robots, Jack Technology is seeking new growth curves; from finance to HR, from marketing to CEO, Wu Li has been continuously breaking her own career boundaries.

This stems from a shared belief: not satisfied with existing achievements, but eager to undertake more challenging tasks.

①Han Hongling is a professor and doctoral supervisor at Zhejiang University School of Management. Research areas include capital markets and information disclosure, internal control and auditing theory, corporate governance, and corporate finance.

About Jack Technology

● The company’s predecessor, Zhejiang New Jack Sewing Machine Co., Ltd., was established on August 27, 2003. When it was reorganized into a joint-stock company on June 29, 2007, it was named “Zhejiang New Jack Sewing Machine Co., Ltd.” In April 2010, it was renamed “New Jack Sewing Machine Co., Ltd.” In August 2014, it was renamed “Jack Sewing Machine Co., Ltd.”

● The company was listed in 2017, with stock code 603337.SH.

● In December 2021, “Jack Sewing Machine Co., Ltd.” was renamed “Jack Technology Co., Ltd.,” with the English name changed from “Jack Sewing Machine Co., Ltd.” to “JACK TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD.”

● Main business: R&D, production, and sales of industrial sewing machinery, including industrial sewing machines, cutting beds, fabric spreading machines, and other industrial sewing and pre-sewing equipment, as well as key components like motors and electronic controls.