It is hard to imagine that a century-old brand that is quite famous in Haining, Zhejiang Province, will be so difficult to find.
Searching for any lifestyle and dining app on the mobile phone cannot obtain the detailed address of "Zhu Wanchang", and even a commonly used map navigation has "failed". On the only link about Zhu Wanchang, there are only 5 reviews. The reporter had to follow the guidance of the locals, and found Zhu Wanchang's sign in the shops on the ground floor of a residential area, which was really inconspicuous, and even mistook people for an ordinary small supermarket in the town. No matter how you look at it, it shows the appearance of neglecting network marketing. But the reporter paid attention to Zhu Wanchang, a long-established brand in Zhejiang Province, which is not the loudest in the Yangtze River Delta, because this store has a set of sales data on Pinduoduo: since the second half of last year, it has increased nearly 1,000 fans and sold nearly 7,000 pieces. Compared with some "net red products", the data is lackluster, but in many traditional food brands, it is already a successful breakthrough. I thought that behind this performance, it should be the result of chen Guoliang, the head of the group, staring at the mobile phone and computer screen day and night, but in fact, he still focused on offline business most of the time. He bought the store in his early years, and the family lived upstairs in the store, which was the only store he ran. After chatting with Chen Guoliang once, the reporter decided to change his mouth and no longer call Chen Guoliang "General Manager Chen" but "Boss Chen" instead. Because this seems to be more in line with the state of business he presents. The 50-year-old head of a traditional pastry brand deserves it too. In the small ancient town of Haining Yanguan Town, acquaintances and factory employees even call him "Boss Chen" only when joking. Most of the time, people simply call him "Guoliang". Boss Chen told me that in fact, there are staff members who make map Apps who have been looking for him for several years, asking him if he is willing to pay 180 yuan a year of information registration fees, you can enter the address of Zhu Wanchang's main store into the map system, Chen Guoliang refused: "Like to eat will always be found, do not want to come to tell him where the address is useless." "He feels it's not a matter of money, it's just that he doesn't like it. At the gate, next to Zhu Wanchang's signboard, there is a nameplate of "Jiaxing Time-honored Brand". In fact, in 2016, Zhu Wanchang had been rated as "Zhejiang Provincial Time-honored Brand" by the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Commerce, but Chen Guoliang did not hang up the nameplate. He said, just hang a piece of meaning. Anyway, there were just these people coming and going in town. Can a traditional long-established business owner who adheres to the traditional business philosophy really make the online business prosperous? Chen Guoliang waved his hand -- until now, he did not know what Kind of fire Zhu Wanchang's online business relied on, nor did he know how long it would be better.
Chen Guoliang showed reporters the "Zhejiang time-honored brand". Photo by Yang Shuyuan
Not thinking ahead?
Chen Guoliang talked most about the old shop next to the town's vegetable market a few years ago: bustling and business was so good. The old vegetable market shop is no longer visible. Nearly 100 square meters of new shop, displayed full, but not neat, all kinds of traditional pastries occupy only one wall on the left side of the entrance, and about two-thirds of the space on the right is placed with various wedding candies and gift boxes. Chen Guoliang was quite proud of this decoration. In this way, the candies and pastries at the wedding banquet are bundled. He explained: "After the wholesale of wedding candy, Zhu Wanchang's traditional pastry business has also improved a lot. Originally, the store could only sell about 10,000 signature cannabis cakes a year, but now it can sell 300,000 candies by tying up wedding candies. In fact, Chen Guoliang has not tried the "tall" store opening model. In 2012, the most popular tourist ancient neighborhood in Yanguan Town invited Chen Guoliang to open a shop. In order to meet the scene, the store was naturally built into an antique style. But that tourist street, with the flow of people watching the tide in the town, has a clear off-peak season, and the business is unstable. In the first year of opening the store, Chen Guoliang earned, the second year of small losses, the third year of large losses. "The situation is not good, quickly withdraw." Since then, Chen Guoliang has been even more indifferent to the decoration of the store. Today, the Zhu Wanchang direct-operated stores recognized by Chen Guoliang are only two of Wei Mingkai, an old friend of more than ten years. Wei Ming opened Zhu Wanchang for 6 years on a characteristic ancient street in Haining City, and usually went to Chen Guoliang's factory to get goods. Chen Guoliang has no requirements for the decoration style, the type of products sold, and the display of the store, except for one: whenever the customer raises the food quality problem, no matter who is reasonable, he can return it and change it. The popularity of the ancient street in Haining City is much stronger than that in Yanguan Town, so the business of this Zhu Wanchang "branch" is also much better than that of Chen Guoliang's main store. Young people are rare to see in the main store, and there are not only young customers in the downtown branch, but they also put forward various "improved taste" suggestions. For the taste of this matter, Wei Ming and Chen Guoliang's answer is almost the same: the improvement is not the original taste, such as the pastry made of white sugar, or it will be sweeter than xylitol; in addition, the new recipe often requires more expensive raw material costs, involving the whole body. Nor is it to stick to the tradition of "not thinking of making progress". Over the years, Chen Guoliang has tried many new products, such as mung bean sorbet eaten in summer, as well as egg yolk crisp, matcha crisp, and xylitol cloud cake that can also be eaten by patients with high blood sugar, but the sales are too small to return to the original. In the end, two innovative varieties were left, only sesame pot and peanut shortening, which were still "fine-tuned" products close to the old recipe. Zhu Wanchang's factory, like the main store, is a bit overstated. The factory is on the second floor of a factory building in the town's industrial park, covering an area of 1500 square meters, and the first floor is a blade factory. The staff in charge of the industrial park once asked Chen Guoliang whether he wanted to add a house number to the factory, but Chen Guoliang refused. In the factory, all kinds of bills and documents are hung in the classification, a group of furniture with a sense of the last century, and more than half a hundred workers who have been running in the factory for many years, all of which show that this is a traditional enterprise. "In fact, they are quite new, and the partitions in the office and workshop are made of aluminum alloy material." Chen Guoliang has different views on the old and the new. Chen Guoliang also has his own set of theories: keeping the decoration of stores and factories as "wild and simple" as possible, in order to take care of the psychology of more local middle-aged and elderly consumers. "Believe it or not, as long as I decorate the storefront on the front foot, there will be local elderly people on the back foot to ask if you want to increase the price."
Workers pack and ship web orders. Photo by Yang Shuyuan
How to make a force?
According to the rhythm of many years, Zhu Wanchang's low-key life is quite comfortable, but Chen Guoliang understands in his heart that a huge consumer group that he has not yet fully recognized is pouring in through the Internet. Speaking of which, Zhu Wanchang's online store is an old qualification. 13 years ago, someone took the initiative to find Chen Guoliang, saying that he wanted to sell Zhu Wanchang's products online. Soon after, the collaborator approached a photographer and photographed all the products in the factory. Later, there were also several Taobao stores to talk about cooperation with Chen Guoliang, most of them named their own online stores with "local specialties", and Zhu Wanchang was only one of the brands. Chen Guoliang and they have always maintained a simple relationship with suppliers and merchants. In those years, the number of online orders was not large. In 2011, there was a new Taobao merchant who wanted to specialize in Zhu Wanchang's single brand online store, the young man in his early 30s had a lot of ideas, and he didn't know what method was used, the daily sales went up, a promotion, a day sold 600,000 yuan of goods. But a few months later, the online store fell silent. Because there is too much backlog of orders during the promotion, the factory is simply too late to produce, and many buyers who have not shipped after the deadline have demanded compensation. Later, the lover of the online dealer opened Zhu Wanchang's Tmall flagship store and hired 12 customer servicemen. Chen Guoliang was a little unsure about this kind of process operation: "Small food is originally a small business, and it is not good to do so formally." This is just his intuition, Chen Guoliang is always a little afraid of the network. For example, the big promotion of the network platform generally requires the merchant to give the buyer a profit, counting the cost of freight, although the sales data looks beautiful, but the actual profit is very small. "We have a limited production of handmade pastries, which is not as good as those industrial assembly line products with a large daily output." Chen Guoliang said. Indeed, Zhu Wanchang's online store has been tepid since then. In 2018, the brand's online sales fell off a cliff, falling by nearly 90% of sales. But at the same time, Chen Guoliang's offline business is getting bigger and bigger, and his products continue to enter the supermarket chain, and sales are rising at an annual rate of 20%. Chen Guoliang is also relatively calm - searching for "Zhu Wanchang" on Taobao will show 2 stores, showing that they are 6-year-old and 10-year-old stores, and the number of store followers is more than 30,000 and more than 1,000 respectively... Ever wanted to regulate these online stores? "What does it do?" Chen Guoliang asked the reporter that he had his own set of theories, "Only what is popular will there be chaos, and when no one sells things under the banner of Zhu Wanchang on the Internet, there will be no flowers for this brand." "Calm down, but should we open an online store on a new platform, and how to make efforts on the network?" Chen Guoliang thought about it and couldn't understand it. Chen Guoliang's 23-year-old nephew Sun Sijian "pushed" him. Sun Sijian took a fancy to Pinduoduo. Previously, several of his friends who sold leather clothes in Haining were settled, the cost of opening a store was relatively low, and he pondered the positioning: there are many elderly consumer groups on the platform who pursue affordable and low prices, and the positioning of traditional pastries also happens to be these elderly people. He came up with the idea in the off-season of pastry sales last summer, with traditional pastry sales only one-fifth of the peak season and workers mostly idle. Sun Sijian has made some changes to the new online store. He found that walnut soft cake is a product that many long-established food brands will make, but the pretzel peach slice is his own specialty, so he put this product to the top when designing the sales page. He also re-customized the packaging for the loose pastries in the online order, and this new packaging cost a lot of money, 6 corners. The operating cost of the platform seems to be not high, and there is only one customer service, that is, Sun Sijian himself. Usually are small orders, the price is not high, and few people will ask what to ask before taking the order, and at the end of the day, there are only a few people who consult customer service. The business of the new online store has great ups and downs, when it first started, the daily sales were only a few tens of yuan to a few hundred yuan, and occasionally caught up with the platform promotion, which could reach tens of thousands of yuan - whether the sales volume was good or bad, Chen Guoliang could not figure out the law. Now, the Pinduoduo online store's profits are only about one-twentieth of the total profits, or even less. Every day at 10:00 a.m., Zhu Wanchang Food Factory prepares for delivery, including a fixed chain of supermarkets in Haining. The delivery address on the network platform is mostly in the Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai areas. Sun Sijian was processing the network orders that the printer "spit out", and the documents hung from the table to the ground, and he said that at least 30 orders were issued every morning. Separated from Sun Sijian by a glass door, an old worker reprinted the production date on the "cannabis cake" red background gold hot gold ingredient sheet sticker, according to the usual amount of cannabis cake reservation, the day as usual to knock more than 30 times, "cannabis cake" are issued to the physical store. Both numbers are more than 30. Some time ago, Chen Guoliang installed shopping software on his mobile phone for the first time, and he did not shop online, just to "shop". He seemed to be ready to fight a protracted war, "set up this stage and say, no one can say for sure what will happen in the future."
Across a glass door, Sun Sijian is processing online orders, and old workers in the factory are manually knocking on dates for ingredient lists. Photo by Yang Shuyuan
An old worker reprints the production date on the "cannabis cake" gold hot stamping table sticker on a red background. Photo by Yang Shuyuan
Go?
A while ago, Chen Guoliang went to a friend who made traditional pastries in the next city and witnessed the closure of a long-established pastry factory. Looking at the quiet machine in the pastry factory, Chen Guohao's heart was not a taste for a few days. Several of my friends in the past two years have also stopped production, they use the rental of factory buildings as a source of income, and they have found that the rental income in these two years is even more than the original old business. Some time ago, a young man from Taiwan visited him, and the young man's father also ran a long-established pastry shop in Taipei, selling only handmade mochi. Chen Guoliang listened to it with great emotion: "I also want to sell only a certain kind of pastry, but the conditions are not allowed, my three main pastries, as long as one does not do it, the factory can not continue to operate." "My greatest wish is that this old brand will not disappear in my hands." Recently, Chen Guoliang has always told his nephew who intends to take over his shift. Once, Haining had a powerful supermarket chain that came to talk to him about acquiring a brand. He said "don't care" and "casually", but Chen Guoliang set the purchase conditions very strictly, and in the end he was still reluctant to work on this "field" that he had cultivated for decades. Chen Guoliang took over the long-established business in 1996, having previously been an accountant at Zhu Wanchang's factory. Seeing that the efficiency of the factory was not good, and could not bear to watch the closure, Chen Guoliang took over the plate. Founded in 1875, this old shop has always been famous for its four-hour tea. When Chen Guoliang first took over, there were several long-established pastries in Haining. Haining people can always report two or three brands that are doing well when they talk about each pastry, but gradually, these old shops have lost their voices, and Zhu Wanchang has become the only one. Zhu Wanchang's business also fluctuated for a time. Since 2012, Zhu Wanchang's pastries have not increased in price, but the price of raw materials has been rising. Chen Guoliang's explanation is: if others do not rise, we cannot increase prices. From about 2007 to 2015, in addition to its own production, the factory has been helping some well-known pastry factories in Shanghai and Hangzhou to maintain operation. Chen Guoliang's private car is a cargo van, which was bought for 50,000 or 60,000 yuan more than a decade ago. The original purpose of buying a car was to deliver, at that time there was only one delivery driver in the factory, Chen Guoliang also had to help deliver when he was idle, to Hangzhou, Shanghai, Jiaxing and other townships to "run to beg for life". Later, one of the Shanghai enterprises with a large supply volume went out of business, and Chen Guoliang had no way, which slowly shifted the focus of production to Haining. More pastries printed with "Yanguan Wanchang" were produced, and Chen Guoliang ran to the local supermarket to talk about cooperation and settlement. He had the courage to say: "We don't do OEM processing, we do our own brand." Although it is an old brand, Chen Guoliang has never deliberately highlighted the concept of "pure handmade", because in his view, it is superfluous - some products, such as hemp crisp sugar, have no mechanical processing equipment at all, and can only be made by hand; and cloud cake has a special machine to replace labor, but the flavor and taste are not reduced, "as long as it is to find a way to be original, it can be." Now, most of Zhu Wanchang's pastries still need to be made according to the old method. There are also seven or eight pastry chefs in the factory, most of whom are over the age of 50. Most of them are apprentices of the older generation of pastry chefs in the factory, but now they have encountered the dilemma of "not receiving apprentices". In the factory, the highest paid ones are the masters who make crisp candy. The whole set of crispy candy production technology learned, as little as 3 months, more than half a year, there are young people to learn, within 1 month to leave. When these workers are old, who will make the crisp candy in the factory? "When the chefs who make these pastries can't move, will there still be people who eat these pastries?" Most of the time, Chen Guoliang did not dare to think about this problem, but only comforted himself: "Every generation must take care of their current affairs." At this time, a voice prompt for online orders came, which was undoubtedly a moment in the heart of this "traditional old shop owner Chen".
Workers at Zhu Wanchang's food factory make crisp candy. Photo by Yang Shuyuan
Column Editor-in-Chief: Kong Lingjun Text Editor: Kong Lingjun Title Image Source: Yang Shuyuan Photo
Source: Author: Yang Shuyuan