Examination has always been the most ideal employment direction for many Shandong people, and Guo Hongkai is a special case.
Opened a rice noodle shop, worked as a photographer, sold fresh products, ......Guo Hongkai has tried all walks of life, and when it was the hardest, he had a debt of more than one million, and never gave up the idea of starting a business, in his words, "It is impossible to work part-time." ”
In late January, Guo Hongkai held an annual company meeting, the first time he had been in business for more than a decade. Nearly 100 people arrived that day, and the stage was surrounded by red balloons, Guo Hongkai appeared calmly in a black tweed coat, and the smile that could not be hidden between his eyebrows completely exposed his mood at the moment.
In the past year, we have made exciting achievements in product integration, e-commerce operations, warehousing and logistics. The company's annual turnover was 11.7 billion yuan, with an annual turnover of 4.65 million orders. Guo Hongkai's year-end summary was unexpectedly interrupted by applause from the scene, and he also laughed aloud.
The clock hand was turned back to four years ago, when Guo Hongkai was sad all day long, and he was so anxious that he couldn't sleep in order to raise business funds. He sold his hometown's house, mortgaged his car, and borrowed money from banks and friends, but he didn't dare to go back to his hometown for the Chinese New Year, "for fear that others would ask me to pay back."
The gears of fate begin to turn with a children's cotton coat. Because the children's handmade cotton clothes hanging in Pinduoduo stores were automatically sold out without any promotion, Guo Hongkai strengthened his confidence in doing business in Pinduoduo.
In just four years, from cotton clothes to belly circumference, from a dozen orders to tens of thousands of orders per day, from a personal store to a black label store, Guo Hongkai built his own baby brand, paid off all foreign debts, and successfully "turned over".
When asked him the secret, the Shandong man in his early thirties smiled shyly and said two words: quality and differentiation.
Quality is the bottom line.
Entrepreneurship is about credibility, and children's clothing must pay attention to quality. This is Guo Hongkai's bottom line in business, and it is also the basis for him to choose partners.
Garment processing is an important production expense. Since operating the Xiongjiashe children's clothing brand, Guo Hongkai has not blindly chosen to cooperate with factories with lower labor costs, but would rather spend higher costs to ensure the quality of goods.
Xinlulan is a professional manufacturer of baby and child products in Anyang, Henan Province, and does OEM for well-known enterprises such as Cotton Times, Yingshi, and Babylove, and always has high requirements for product quality. For the same simple belly circumference, the processing fee of ordinary factories is only 22 yuan, but Xinlulan is seventy percent more expensive, reaching 38 yuan; A store's best-selling winter artifact costs about 6 yuan for processing in an ordinary factory, and nearly 10 yuan for Xinlulan.
This company does not allow unqualified products to go offline, which will increase a lot of repair work, so the management cost is very high, and the labor cost is relatively large. Guo Hongkai revealed that under the strict quality control of Xinlulan, the product qualification rate can reach 99More than 5%, almost exempt from inspection. The two sides have reached a cooperation since 2022, and the pass rate of sampling inspection of goods sent back from Xinlulan is very high every time.
Pinduoduo Xiongjiashe children's clothing official *** The production process of the goods on sale is strict (photo provided by the interviewee).
Considering that children are delicate and sensitive, in terms of manufacturing process, Guo Hongkai also tries his best to ensure the skin-friendly texture of the clothing. For example, ordinary factories use ultrasound to fix the fabric and the middle layer, but Guo Hongkai chooses to find workers to nail together with a quilting machine. "Although ultrasonic is more efficient and faster, it feels very the skin, and the quilting is not only reliable, but also does not change the texture of the fabric. Guo Hongkai pointed to the lines on the clothes and patiently explained the exquisiteness of each process of Xiongjiashe products.
In the selection of raw materials, Guo Hongkai is also very meticulous, not only the fabric will choose soft and comfortable fabrics, but even the buttons have also chosen with many well-known baby and child enterprises have cooperated with Dongguan Fuming Buttons *** brand "excellent buttons".
The children's clothing produced by Guo Hongkai's factory uses nibble standard buckles (photo provided by the interviewee).
With outstanding quality, the market share of the national infant market exceeds 90%. "The buttons they produce meet the standard of nibbling, children can bite, no *** Guo Hongkai revealed, the quality of the excellent buckle products is unified and guaranteed, and it will be slightly higher. Ordinary buttons are 4 cents a piece, and excellent buttons are 6 cents a piece, "a piece of clothing will use about 11 buttons, and the manufacturer will not reduce the price if the number of purchases increases, and the cost will come up as soon as the sales of our clothes are high." But he understands that only high-quality ingredients can consumers feel at ease when they use them.
In Pinduoduo Xiongjiashe Children's Clothing Official***, nearly eighty percent of the products are children's underwear, warm underwear and other children's inner circle clothing, Guo Hongkai has achieved the ultimate in quality.
In August 2023, he spent more than 100,000 yuan to buy a 5A photon antibacterial cabin. It is understood that this is a new type of pure physical antibacterial technology, as long as the textile items are placed in the cabin for about 3 hours, it can produce photogranulin, so that the textile has antibacterial and antibacterial, mite repellent, deodorant, and antiviral effects, and is stable and long-lasting.
At the end of last year, Guo Hongkai also upgraded the equipment to the highest level 7A antibacterial effect in China. After 100 washes, the values of antibacterial, mite repellent, deodorant, formaldehyde removal and far-infrared irradiation of the products irradiated by the 7A photon antibacterial chamber have also reached the national standards of the industry. "At present, almost all the products on the shelves of the store have been treated with antibacterial treatment. Guo Hongkai proudly said that in Qingdao, Shandong, Anyang and Shangqiu, Henan, there are very few children's clothing companies with their own antibacterial equipment, and the technology bought by Xiongjiashe is at the forefront.
Under Guo Hongkai's continuous learning and quality control, the brand of Xiongjiashe is getting bigger and bigger. Up to now, the brand has 7 stores on Pinduoduo, three of which have exceeded 10 million yuan in sales in the past 180 days.
Suffer a loss to pay "tuition".
Before the splashing of wealth and wealth, Guo Hongkai had the idea of opportunism, suffered losses in the field of e-commerce, and paid a lot of "tuition".
In 2019, the online sales trend was very good, and Guo Hongkai, who was running a fresh food store at that time, also ushered in a wave of order growth. The opportunity was in front of him, and the bold Guo Hongkai did not hesitate at all, rented a cellar full of sweet potatoes, and smashed it into hundreds of thousands of costs in one go. "Anyway, don't worry about selling, stock up on more goods, you should be able to make a lot of money. Guo Hongkai thought at the time.
As he expected, this year's Double 11 stores directly "exploded", and the demand on the Internet continued, but Guo Hongkai went wrong at a critical moment. Because of the lack of fresh management experience, the sweet potatoes I bought back had infectious diseases, and one or two of them were bad and not found, and soon infected all the sweet potatoes, and sent a lot to consumers. Guo Hongkai's store was subjected to a large number of customer complaints and after-sales return requests, the traffic declined rapidly, and the link was also taken off the shelves.
The planned funds did not come in, but instead took in logistics, after-sales, labor and other expenses, and Guo Hongkai's debt soon rose to seven figures. In this small town of Lubei in Texas, where the average monthly salary of residents is around 5,000, this money needs a family of two to pay back without eating or drinking for ten years, not to mention that Guo Hongkai has two children and dozens of employees to support.
In order to raise money, Guo Hongkai sold the house in his hometown county, mortgaged the car, and borrowed all the money from relatives and friends around him, and finally had no choice but to find a bank loan. "At that time, there were very few e-commerce companies in the entire Dezhou City, and no one dared to borrow money from the bank. Guo Hongkai said with a smile that he couldn't remember how he spent that time, but he clearly understood that he had borrowed hundreds or thousands of them.
His wife, Zhao Min, is the one who can find the changes in Guo Hongkai the most. The once cheerful and humorous husband suddenly talked a lot less, and from time to time he took a wine bottle to the river to hang around, "I know that he is borrowing wine to kill his sorrows." Zhao Min always felt uncomfortable every time he saw Guo Hongkai, who was almost 1.8 meters tall, drooping his head, "There is no way, we can't make up a few hundred yuan when we sit with our partners, and we have borrowed everything we can borrow."
During the Spring Festival of 2020, Guo Hongkai's family did not return to the county seat for the New Year. "I don't dare to go back, I can't pay the money back. Zhao Min was very impressed, on Chinese New Year's Eve, she brushed the New Year's wishes sent by everyone in her circle of friends, while thinking in her heart who she could borrow some money from.
Change is universal, and if you don't change, you die. This is a sentence that Guo Hongkai often hangs on his lips, and he successfully helped the company come back to life at a critical moment.
When he was desperate, Guo Hongkai casually opened a personal store in Pinduoduo to sell children's handmade cotton clothes. The business by mistake quickly improved, "I didn't do any pushing, and I kept issuing orders based on organic traffic." Guo Hongkai was very excited to see the signs of the store's improvement, and constantly encouraged the partner to turn to the Pinduoduo platform with all his might, "He was very unhappy, and asked my wife to persuade me not to toss."
The "pull" between conservatives and adventurists ended because of the popularity of a single item.
At the turn of the spring and summer of 2020, orders for belly circumference soared, and daily sales exceeded 1,000 orders. All the operations in the company put down the work at hand, went into the warehouse to help pack and ship, and it was common to get off work in the early morning, but Guo Hongkai did not feel tired at all, "I will not be tired at all." Although I was still in debt at that time, I felt that I saw hope, and I was alive, and I was motivated to do everything."
In the second year, the belly circumference continued to sell well, and the daily sales volume reached a new level, stabilizing at more than 8,000 orders, and the daily sales exceeded 200,000 yuan. Pressure followed. On the one hand, Guo Hongkai has to raise capital turnover, and on the other hand, he has to keep an eye on the factory to catch up with the goods. At eleven or twelve o'clock in the middle of the night, he and his partner were still driving around looking for factories, "I thought at that time, even if I couldn't stand still, I had to do this thing."
Make differentiated money.
In Guo Hongkai, in addition to his hard work, he also has the cleverness of a businessman, "I have always been misplaced and competed, and I only make the first wave of money."
In 2022, the Xiongjiashe brand will rise rapidly because of the hot sales of a belly circumference, attracting many stores to follow up and sell the same model, and the lower the pressure, the lower the pressure. After thinking about it for a long time, Guo Hongkai finally decided to endure the pain and cut his love, give up continuing to do belly circumference, and turn to the development of other children's clothing.
In the shopping mall, Guo Hongkai is not always the first to withdraw from the "battlefield", and he will also actively establish protective barriers after some popular models are made, such as allowing ** merchants to make exclusive contributions and so on.
After several years of clothing business, Guo Hongkai has explored a development path that belongs to Xiongjiashe: not to compete viciously with peers in terms of quality, but to make breakthroughs in fabrics, colors, styles, functions, etc., to find the biggest difference in their own products, and continue to make efforts.
We are an enterprise that understands operation and has the best advantages over operation than the factory. Referring to the core competitiveness of the Xiongjiashe brand, Guo Hongkai thought for a long time before giving such an answer with a smile. At first glance, it sounds like a scene, but it is the most real situation of the brand at the moment.
Dezhou is far away from Huzhou, Zhejiang, Anyang, Henan, Qingdao, Shandong, Foshan, Guangdong and other children's clothing industry belts, lack of raw material procurement advantages, other places can be completed in half a day from the design layout to the production of finished samples, Dezhou often takes a week to find the right fabric, "to wait for the fabric company to confirm, find the goods and then send them by express." However, because of the underdeveloped manufacturing industry, the oversupply of personnel, and the labor cost is lower than that of other industrial belts, which saves Guo Hongkai a lot of expenses.
The company's location characteristics and development genes have determined that Xiongjiashe's clothing does not need to look for increments in niche market segments like industrial belt businesses, and does not need to update and iterate too frequently, but to serve the target users of the store, give full play to the quality and practicality, earn the first wave of money, and establish user stickiness.
Even if he is recruiting a designer, he needs to understand the operational thinking first, understand what the product is really needed by the user, and then develop the product that matches the demand. Guo Hongkai said that the recruitment conditions he offered may be different from the requirements for traditional design, but they are in line with the actual development of the company at this stage.
Guo Hongkai is participating in e-commerce training (photo provided by the interviewee).
Because he has seen the light of the peak for a short time, no matter how hard it is, Guo Hongkai has never given up doing e-commerce. He firmly believes: "This is one of the few opportunities for financial freedom for ordinary people." ”
Non-standard commodities are very different, Pinduoduo excavates the strength of the factory from the source, provides consumers with good quality and price ratio, and realizes the two-way rush between consumers and excellent manufacturing.
Guo Hongkai's company's annual meeting lasted until late at night and did not stop for a long time. It is not only a carnival release after the bitter end, but also a portrayal of the rising image of thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises in Pinduoduo.