In Yiwu, there is a couple of business owners. Their secret to getting rich is: drawing talismans.
Drawing talismans is not difficult either. There is no need to master Taoist knowledge or rush to follow the rules. All you need to do is buy a stack of A4 paper and write the amount in Chinese characters on it.
When they first started their business, they pasted the "200,000" talismans all over the room, and they could even see them when going to the toilet.
More than ten years have passed, and the amount on the talisman has been getting larger and larger.
Nowadays, on the glass curtain wall of their company, the amount has become "10 million"
The suffix is "USD", US dollars.
Another dropout who started a business
When he was a child, Lai Guorong's family was well-off and the richest man in the village. His grandfather had accumulated a solid foundation for the family in his early years. New things like televisions, refrigerators and motorcycles were already available in their family in the 1990s.
Perhaps inheriting this bloodline, Lai Guorong has been somewhat "unconventional" since his school days.
More than two decades ago in the summer, Lai Guorong was in his second year of junior college. He heard that Yiwu was a place of wealth, so he made an appointment with his classmates to do a summer job there.
Image source: Chao News
The summer vacation was coming to an end. When the classmates were getting ready to pack up and head back, Lai Guorong suddenly said to them, "I want to stay in Yiwu."
A classmate asked him how he would attend classes if he stayed in Yiwu.
He said, "I'm going to drop out of school - 'I don't want my graduation certificate anymore. I know I'm going to be a boss sooner or later.'"
Because of this joke that was almost like "It's impossible to work for someone else", Lai Guorong really stayed at a jewelry company in Yiwu to work. Half a year later, his salary rose from 600 yuan to 3,500 yuan and he was promoted to production manager.
He worked in the jewelry factory for six years and eventually rose to the position of factory director.
In his sixth year of work, through an introduction, Lai Guorong met a girl. They hit it off immediately and got married in a flash four months later.
Newlyweds, his wife asked him, "Do you want to leave the factory and start a small business together as a couple to start a new life?"
Lai Guorong's entrepreneurial dream began with a tricycle.
I get up at around 4 o 'clock every day and ride a tricycle with my wife all over Yiwu. We sell breakfast in the morning and pickled dishes in the evening.
Before working in a factory, Lai Guorong would fall ill once a month. After becoming a boss, he has never fallen ill once. "Because you tell yourself you can't get sick. Once you do, no one will do the work."
Image source: Xiaohongshu
Later, Lai Guorong and his wife set up a stall to sell thermal underwear together. After setting up for a while, there were still many that couldn't be sold.
By chance, Lai Guorong met a fellow worker he used to work with in a factory. Hearing that the other party was engaged in e-commerce, he visited them in person. After returning, he opened a 1688 store and put up the unsold thermal underwear there.
Forty sets were sold on the first night.
The night-blooming flower is fleeting, the sweetness is short-lived, and the good times don't last long. Lai Guorong still hasn't made much money.
As the year was coming to an end, the couple went back to their hometown to hold a full moon party for their child. They couldn't even afford the money for the party and still borrowed 4,000 yuan from relatives.
When I returned to Yiwu again, I couldn't pay the rent and there were no orders either.
With no other choice, he ran back to the factory to work, earning a salary of over 10,000 yuan, and became even more unwilling to accept it.
My friend's car irritated me.
A few months after returning to work at the factory, a friend drove a Great Wall motor to visit Lai Guorong.
Lai Guorong was extremely astonished: "Aren't you as poor as I am? How come you start driving a car?"
It turned out that a friend of mine had started an e-commerce business - it was in 2013, when e-commerce was booming.
It is said that "I'm afraid my friend will suffer, but I'm also afraid my friend will drive a Land Rover." Lai Guorong was completely provoked by his friend's car and resolutely quit his job to start a business again.
After leaving the factory, Lai Guorong paid the rent and only had over 10,000 yuan left in his pocket. The daughter spends over 1,000 yuan on milk powder every month, and the family is still heavily in debt.
"This can't go on like this," the couple gathered together, feeling uneasy for a long time, and set an annual target of "200,000 yuan". Lai Guorong bought a stack of A4 white paper and wrote "200,000 yuan" on it with a marker pen, covering the entire house.
To achieve this goal, as soon as he opens his eyes every day, he heads to Futian Market in Yiwu to look for supplies.
Image source: Xiaohongshu
By chance, he got to know the assistant general manager of a sportswear brand and learned that the company had a batch of sportswear stock worth 50 million yuan and needed to find a channel to clear the inventory.
Lai Guorong and his wife transferred three buses from the city center and picked up two boxes of goods from the other company.
But the awkward thing is that they don't have a car and have no idea how to send the goods back. They can only ask the factory to help transport the goods.
On the way home, the couple locked their goods in the carriage together. They didn't feel tired at all. They chatted and laughed all the way, imagining the future: In the future, they will also have their own car and their own company...
All efforts paid off. Seven months later, the goal of 200,000 yuan was achieved, and Lai Guorong was finally able to own the same model of car driven by his friend.
They moved from the first floor to the spacious and bright second floor, and their new home was also plastered with talismans. But this time the couple were no longer nervous. With a stroke of the pen, they added a zero - 2 million.
From zero to 200,000, it all relied on the couple working alone. It's impossible for just two people to reach the 2 million mark.
In 2014, Lai Guorong recruited the company's No. 1 employee - his father, who was responsible for helping with packaging. From then on, I gradually formed my own team.
But after working for two years, my father was "fired" by Lai Guorong due to the "age limit" - such a hard job as packing is really not suitable for elderly people.
After clearing out the remaining stock of sportswear, Lai Guorong started a new business.
He found that the profit margin of bras was relatively high, so he found a factory to have bras processed on his behalf.
He designed a "zipper front-button bra", which sold well as soon as it was put on the shelves. At that time, there weren't many bra merchants on the platform, and it was even harder to find those offering innovative products. This is an almost blank market. Once I come in, there will be a chance.
Since then, he has continuously designed more than ten types of bras, and almost every one of them has become a bestseller, with sales constantly rising.
The following year, the "2 million yuan" target on the wall was also exceeded.
From 2 million to a debt of 12 million
The entrepreneurial journey went smoothly. Without any unexpected events, the entrepreneur got carried away.
In 2016, despite his wife's dissuasion, Lai Guorong kept increasing his investment: "I don't know where I got the courage, but I found many factories, paid a deposit and asked them to produce a large quantity of goods."
Based on the previous sales volume, Lai Guorong judged that the funds for these new goods should be recovered soon to pay the balance to the suppliers.
But he underestimated his counterparts in Yiwu.
Image source: Xiaohongshu
During the two years when Lai Guorong's products became popular, he had long been targeted by his peers. As a result, whenever a new product was launched, within just a few days, a large number of similar products flooded the market, and they were all sold at a lower price than his.
The result was that all his 1.2 million pieces of inventory were lost in his hands.
At the end of 2016, Lai Guorong was forced to visit suppliers door to door to apologize, saying, "I can't repay this person 2 million yuan, and I can't repay that person 200,000 yuan either."
When he went home for the Spring Festival, he only had 40,000 yuan in hand, but was left with a debt of 12 million yuan.
Throughout the Spring Festival, amid the joyous sounds of family firecrackers, Lai Guorong was in a daze, completely oblivious to other matters. When his family members were talking in his ears, he could only hear a vague voice and was completely stunned.
Later, when recalling this roller-coaster experience, Lai Guorong always felt that he was "lucky".
Perhaps it was due to the market conditions, or perhaps it was because those old customers had stocked up outside and found that the quality of Lai Guorong's goods was still the best. It wasn't long before these customers found him again and cleared his inventory.
After paying off his debts, Lai Guorong was not as relaxed as he had expected. Instead, he felt "empty" inside and at a loss, "as if he didn't know what to do anymore".
So he left the company to his wife to manage and went out to open a liquor specialty store for two years. "I met many people and had many new ideas."
In 2019, Lai Guorong returned to the company and devoted himself fully to the research and development of fabric for yoga wear.
Judging from the subsequent market conditions, Lai Guorong made the right move in this regard.
Image source: Chao News
Catch the trend of The Times
In fact, as early as 2017, Lai Guorong began to develop fabric for yoga wear. However, due to the higher unit price compared to sportswear of the same function and the fact that Lai Guorong's yoga wear is positioned in the mid-to-high-end market, many distributors could not accept it.
For a while, Lai Guorong was most afraid of hearing salespeople come back to bargain: "In everyone's eyes, domestic yoga wear should be very cheap."
However, Lai Guorong believes that in order to boost sales and sell at lower prices, merchants will inevitably keep cutting costs, and the quality of their products will become worse and worse, thus creating a vicious circle and eventually leaving them with no profit.
So, he is very uninterested in the strategy of lowering prices, which is also the reason why Lai Guorong is unwilling to compromise on the quality of yoga wear.
He simply pasted the advertising slogan "The preferred manufacturer of high-end yoga wear" all over the company's warehouse and entrance.
The core of doing business is to sell good things. This subtle high-end target also changed the salesperson's mindset, and since then, he has never negotiated the price with him again.
The commitment to quality soon paid off.
Image source: Chao News
During the mask era in 2020, a healthy lifestyle swept the world, and indoor fitness and yoga became popular sports.
Suddenly, all the dealers came running over, demanding additional goods.
At that time, the schedules of over 30 employees in Lai Guorong's company were all fully booked. The production manager stayed at the factory day and night to monitor the goods, and the order volume almost broke records every month.
Taking advantage of this global health trend, Lai Guorong has once again sold his products all over the world, and the company's annual sales growth has been over 50%.
Nowadays, in his company, the 200,000 yuan worth of tokens back then has turned into 10 million USD. This is the "small goal" he set for the foreign trade department.
Image source: Chao News
Compared with the rapid expansion in previous years, Lai Guorong's thinking is now clearer. He knows exactly what he wants. "We invest several million yuan in research and development every year."
In his company, there are several laboratories dedicated to researching yoga wear fabrics. The constant temperature and humidity fabric laboratory, which cost over a million yuan, is brightly lit and the testing machines are running at high speed. The fabric on the machine has been polished tens of thousands of times. Only when it is not worn through can it be a qualified product.
A full-process chain from fabric research and development, inquiry and order receiving, sample production to warehousing and logistics has been established.
Image source: 1688 Zhejiang Aidu Super Factory Store
Nowadays, Lai Guorong's company has become the largest yoga wear manufacturer on the 1688 platform and is also one of the "three Giants of domestic yoga wear" frequently mentioned by netizens on social media platforms.
That impetuous teenager who dropped out of school back then turned his wild words into reality.
Lai Guorong is a sports student by background and has always persisted in long-distance running during his school years.
He said that business is like running: "You have to keep your cool. Your breath should be even. Once you set your goal, just keep running forward. Along the way, those irrelevant people and things won't be in your eyes."
