You may have a Tan carpenter's comb at home, or you may often see his store in the streets, but you may not know that nearly half of the employees of this Hong Kong-listed company that earns 300 million yuan a year by selling combs are disabled.
A few days ago, Liu Kejia, a member of the Nanjing Branch of the Horseshoe Society and vice president of Tan Carpenter, shared the story of Tan Carpenter with the students on the theme of "How honest, good and upright Tan Carpenter Makes Friends with a Comb" through the Online Brotherhood of horseshoe Society.
The following is a transcript of Liu Kejia's sharing
Hello fellow horseshoe club friends. Today I want to share with you how Tan Carpenter uses a comb to make friends all over the world. This proposition seems to be quite big, but in fact this is the six words that Tan Carpenter has been practicing: honesty, goodness, and integrity.
There are many friends on Tan carpenter, have a little understanding or have used our products, may also be in the city's stores, shopping malls or scenic spots have seen, everyone just began to see Tan carpenter will have a special impression: sell combs can also open a store.
Or first briefly introduce to you, Tan Carpenter is a chain of enterprises, there are nearly 1,000 chain stores, while the business has also developed overseas, especially in Southeast Asia and North America.
Tan Carpenter is actually a person and a group of people. This person refers to the founder, Mr. Tan Chuanhua, and a group of people refers to our factory, management center, and nearly 1,000 stores across the country who adhere to the concept of honesty, kindness and integrity.
We are such a group of people, because out of the preference for wood products, out of respect for nature, in the meticulous doing what they like, in the process of labor to find the joy of life.
When it comes to labor and happiness, the philosophy of our company is honesty, labor and happiness. You may think that these words sound very simple, but this is indeed the founder Mr. Tan Chuanhua's highest expectations for the whole enterprise, and he hopes that we can do it.
From the beginning of Tan Carpenter's business in the ninth year to the present, we have always been adhering to the concept of wanting to make a most common and ordinary thing in life into a work of art. It is not a commodity, but a work. Mr. Tan once said a very classic sentence: "If our products cannot become a scenery in people's lives, then we are 'committing crimes'." When customers give us the opportunity to serve them, and we do not satisfy them, then the value of our existence ceases to exist. ”
The story of Tan Carpenter begins with three stories of two dollars.
In fact, we Tan is always disabled, Tan Carpenter last year had a circle-breaking publicity, that propaganda is not our own to do, but some financial media and some self-media bloggers saw our company's annual report, very surprised to find that such a company seems to be unknown, but if you look closely, half of its employees are actually disabled. So, this aroused everyone's curiosity and also triggered a wave of enthusiasm.
When Tan Zong was young, he lost his right hand because of an accident and became disabled, he never stopped his struggle and became a private teacher. This matter has been mentioned in many interviews, but few people will talk about a detail, which is also a journey that Mr. Tan shared with us. At that time, at a private teacher commendation meeting in Kai County, Chongqing, Tan Zong was commended as an excellent private teacher, but when he participated in the commendation meeting, he was ridiculed by other colleagues. Everyone taunted him: "If I am disabled, if I am short of hands and feet, it is better to die." "So he was hurt a lot at the time, and he decided to go out and run around."
He traveled most of China and finally to Kunming. At that time, his coils had all been used up, hungry, the situation at that time was "people on the road", had reached the stage of wandering, and repeatedly received cold eyes and ridicule from the outside world, saying "You are a disabled person, still running out, this is not to add trouble to various places." These words may have been some unintentional words, but at that time, Tan Zong heard it very painfully in his heart.
At one point, he felt treated very unfairly, lost confidence in life, and even wanted to jump into Dianchi Lake to end his life. But then, his life hit a turning point. He painted for others in the square in front of the Kunming Railway Station, and although Tan Zong only had one hand, his calligraphy and painting were very good, very spirited, and had a talent of his own. He carried his own picture clip on his back in the square in front of the station and painted a portrait of a passing passenger, when he said, "If the painting is good, you will give money, and if the painting is not good, you will not give money." At that time, this passenger saw that he was disabled, and out of pity let him paint, he did not expect that after the painting came out, Wei Miao Wei Xiao. As a result, Mr. Tan received the first two yuan created by his own labor.
And this two dollars actually changed his future life, the first is to give him the courage to live, and the second is to let him find his own strengths. He felt that he just needed a time, including an opportunity, to be discovered by others, so he resolutely returned to his hometown and started a business.
Before this, Mr. Tan had made a lot of entrepreneurial attempts, including the production of prefabricated boards, flowering shops, and some other retail sales. By chance, a second two-dollar story occurred.
Shenzhen at that time there was a landmark building called Splendid China, he found that local handicrafts, especially wooden handicrafts, sold particularly well, he asked the counter teller what sold best, the teller told him that it was a wooden comb. This answer suddenly hit the depths of his soul, because Tan Zong's ancestors were carpenters, so in fact, this small wooden thing was very familiar to him, and he never thought that a small wooden comb could become the best-selling product on the counter. Since then, in 1993, Mr. Tan returned to Wanxian and started a tan carpenter business in an abandoned breeding farm.
Tan Carpenter only began to start a business in the breeding farm in 1993, making wooden combs, and in 1995, a very important event in the development of our company occurred, that is, the burning of wooden combs.
We burned 150,000 substandard wooden combs. What is the concept of 150,000? It is 1/2 of the output of that year, which is a very large number, and such a fire is actually the profit of the year, even including some of the funds accumulated by Tan Zong's early entrepreneurship, but he does not regret it at all, because he said that quality is more important than everything, if he is reluctant to burn the 150,000 wooden combs, reluctant to this 300,000 yuan, he does not really want to create a brand. "Only by putting quality first, Tan Carpenter will have hope."
After the incident of burning the wooden comb, in fact, the company also encountered a relatively large twist and turn in the development process. At that time, we had an insistence, that is, we would never owe any supplier money, the payment was cash, never delayed, never on credit. At one point, there was a tight liquidity situation, and the bank that promised to lend us regretted it because it did not receive the benefit fee we gave, which made Mr. Tan very angry and triggered a reflection on him: Why are banks restricting the development of enterprises? Why can't banks help businesses grow together?
So there was such a news in 1997, the Chongqing Commercial Daily published the "Tan Carpenter Recruitment Bank".
This news, at that time, Chongqing Business Daily accounted for 1/4 of the page, and aroused the attention of the national financial industry, enterprises and institutions, and thousands of newspapers and magazines reprinted this matter. In today's parlance, this was a very successful event marketing for Tan Carpenter at the time. And this event marketing is what we had to do, it was forced, but we now look back at this thing that was done at that time, it is really very good, because it is directly and powerfully called the social environment at that time, and at the same time we have found a better solution for the enterprise, so that we can reverse and carry out more in-depth cooperation with the bank.
After this online exchange activity, we can also organize the horseshoe club students to come to Tan Carpenter to study, and we also hope to invite everyone to tan carpenter's garden factory to take a walk, take a look, and have a new and three-dimensional understanding of Tan Carpenter.
On March 7, 1998, Tan Carpenter opened his first store in Nanchong, Sichuan.
At that time, if you saw such a store on the street, you would definitely be surprised: how to sell combs can also open a store. This is also a beginning of Tan Carpenter joining the chain system, and then we continue to develop, the chairman with the initial start of more than thirty employees, in the start of the breeding farm insisted for nearly ten years, the company bigger and stronger, into a chain of business system. In 2002, the company moved from a 10-year-old breeding farm to a new factory in Shuanghekou.
We are still in the Shuanghekou factory production office, you can see, it is actually very different from the factory, last year we did a phase of CCTV factory visit live broadcast, when doing live broadcast planning, CCTV host, planner and choreographer will be very surprised, think that Tan Carpenter's factory is not like a factory, but like a big park, the entire office environment is a lush small garden, small forest, so I also especially want to invite our small partners of the Horseshoe Club, to our new factory to take a look.
With the continuous growth of the Tan Carpenter franchise system, we successfully listed on the Main Board of Hong Kong on the last trading day of 2009.
Wei Wei, one of our employee representatives with disabilities, presented us with a carved comb called Fruitful to the Chairman of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. This carving comb is designed and produced by one of our own skilled craftsmen - Chongqing Municipal Arts and Crafts Master , and many of the products he designed have won various honors and medals of the state, which are very skill-intensive and the crystallization of painstaking efforts.
Five years after going public, we made a very important decision, that is, Tan Carpenter Group moved from Chongqing Guanyin Bridge to Jurong, Jiangsu Province.
Many investors will ask, why did Tan Carpenter move? What was the reason for moving over? What kind of development plan is there? In fact, one of the things Tan has always said is that we have to be grounded. Because in the years after the listing, the bigger the company's development, the greater the bureaucratic atmosphere, Tan always wants our employees to forget why we started. Now everyone often talks about a word called not forgetting the original heart and keeping the mission in mind. So what was Tan Carpenter's original intention? Our original intention is to make a small piece of wood into the most beautiful scenery in life.
At that time, in the process of continuous growth of the enterprise, in fact, there were many small problems, small contradictions, after self-examination, we decided to step out of our comfort zone, first of all, to break the original management model, management structure, so we moved directly from Chongqing to Jurong, Jiangsu.
We have just talked about some major events and some important nodes in the development process of Tan Carpenter Enterprise, and we will share with you some of our inheritance and innovation in the production of wooden combs.
Tan Carpenter is the drafter and participant in the formulation of china's national combing standards, which represents our leading and unique position in the process and technique of wooden comb making.
Tan Carpenter produced the world's first intercalated wooden comb, produced the first curved angled wooden comb, produced the world's first grass and wood dyeing comb, produced the world's first crimped wooden mirror, produced the world's first hollow wooden mirror, and also produced the world's first toothed comb. These are the products of our patented technology, which are representative and cross-era products developed and produced by Tan Carpenters at different time stages.
We produce wooden combs, so many partners will ask, "Where did Tan Carpenter's materials come from?" Is Tan Carpenter's material all good wood? "The answer is yes, our materials are all hardwood, including many different types of mahogany, as well as some of the more expensive wood on the market, our wood is all imported from Indonesia, South America, Africa, have the origin of the certification, is the Chinese Academy of Forestry appraisal certification."
Just mentioned that we have a lot of breakthroughs in the technique, process and innovation of wooden combs, in addition, one of the biggest cognitions of Tan carpenter products is that the design is beautiful. Why do we always attach so much importance to design? In fact, it stems from the founder's painstaking efforts for Tan Carpenter, hoping that we can make a wooden comb into a landscape in people's lives, and the scenery must be very beautiful, very desirable, and can have imagination space. Therefore, we attach great importance to the design of this piece, have a full range of design and development resources, in addition to their own team, but also with many well-known design teams at home and abroad, including with some universities to cooperate.
Since 2015, we have held five wooden comb design competitions, and each competition we will go to universities such as Jiangnan University, Nanjing Academy of the Arts, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and other universities to carry out cross-border school-enterprise cooperation.
In the process of the wooden comb design competition, we will produce those exquisite and excellent works, in the later stages, we have turned them into real products, in the market for limited sale.
We have a set of winning works in the design competition - the bird airbag comb, which is now also a popular product of Tan Carpenter, a total of four colors, very suitable for putting in the hand, is a very special one, the design is very dexterous.
In addition to cooperation with art schools, with all walks of life, including some advertising agencies, to bring breakthroughs in design, we have also done a lot of cross-border cooperation attempts. We do a starting point for cross-border, but also hope that the traditional, historically heavy Tan carpenter can have some eye-catching designs, especially to attract young people, so we took the initiative to choose to cooperate with Disney and launched a series of cooperation models. Including design cooperation with NetEase Cloud, the music and comb have been integrated.
Tan Carpenter is a very interesting enterprise, I myself have been in the company for such a long time, the biggest feeling is that we have been at our own pace, doing what we love, and then constantly spreading, passing on, to tell their own stories. Maybe this thing, or the way we're doing it now, isn't that fashionable, but because we've been doing it, we've been doing it a lot, and then after the dots are connected, it becomes our unique corporate culture.
We have been starting magazines and periodicals, such as "Chinese Handicraft", which were originally initiated by Tan Carpenter, including our "Principal" magazine and our own internal journal.
In addition to constantly revealing and merging in our own core culture, we are also committed to promoting the art field of wood art. Since 2017, four wood art exhibitions have been held, bringing together a lot of famous masterpieces from home and abroad.
At the beginning, I mentioned that half of Tan Carpenter's employees are disabled, and in April 2018, we were invited by the dean of Nanjing University of the Arts, and more than 350 disabled employees of Tan Carpenter crossed more than 1,200 kilometers from Wanzhou in Chongqing to Nanjing Academy of Arts to conduct a public welfare art and culture exchange activity. More than 300 of our employees went to the university to work as a college student for a few days. Tan Carpenter and Nanyi have always had a very in-depth cooperation with the hospital, when the dean of Nanyi heard the story of Tan Carpenter's disabled employees, he was very moved and felt that Tan Carpenter was very remarkable.
Before that, we would never publicize how Tan Carpenter's products were made, how many disabled employees were behind Tan Carpenter, how hard Tan Carpenter was to start a business, we rarely told these things to the outside, because Tan Zong himself was a reluctance to express these things to the outside, because he felt that expressing too much was actually a kind of moral kidnapping of others, he did not want us to use this way to get the attention and sympathy of the outside world, he hoped more in the product itself, the enterprise itself, the brand itself, The culture itself is to be exposed, so that others can see the products of Tan Carpenter, see the quality of Tan Carpenter, see our after-sales service, our stores, and thus like Tan Carpenter.
At that time, such a southern art activity, the first is very large, the second is very difficult, we need to take the high-speed rail, even if it is very simple to transfer to the high-speed rail, inbound on the train, such links, for most of our disabled employees are also very, very difficult, they have never been out, do not know how to buy tickets, they do not know how to pass the security check, many employees with hearing impairments, language barriers have no way to get a positive response in the outside world, There aren't as many staff members who can communicate with them in sign language, and it's even harder to have more physically handicapped employees.
Many of our physically handicapped employees may need help, they can't walk so fast on their own, and they even sit in wheelchairs, and many times they need to be carried and carried by others. Even in this case, we overcame all the difficulties in the process, and they successfully arrived at the Nanjing University of the Arts, where they simultaneously underwent a three-day university study.
For our more than 300 employees with disabilities, they lack access to education, most of them do not graduate from primary school, and they do not receive a good allocation of educational resources. This is also why the dean of Nanyi at that time put forward such an activity idea, which was in line with Tan Zong, because Tan Zong hoped to let our disabled employees go out and see the world, let them go to be college students for a day, even if it was a day, to realize their dream of being educated, to realize their dream of being a college student.
This is a very unimaginable task in the minds of many of our employees with disabilities, and together with Nanjing University of the Arts, we have turned this impossible thing, a dream, and an ideal into reality.
Starting in 2019, Tan Carpenter has done some fashion pop-up shop activities nationwide with wooden combs as elements.
In 2019, the comb garden was done, which was mediated by combs and used combs to convey affection, and built four major themes: warm tree holes, comb tooth forest, three thousand hair strands and comb love. Each exhibition area corresponds to a different function, which can be made on the spot and can be experienced, so it attracts a large number of young people to stop and watch.
Last year, we changed some ideas and methods, and made a pop-up shop with a national style theme, called the Combing Room Yan Research Institute, which is actually a trend that follows the national style beauty.
Last year's event, we held three, Chengdu, Beijing and Qingdao, the first half of this year will continue to promote this activity well, promote open, because it actually reflects our Oriental culture, is a perfect combination of combing culture and fashion trends, consumers in this process, can feel the constant ingenuity of Tan Carpenter and constantly changing, updating the beauty of the national tide of literature and art, the beauty of culture, the beauty of craftsmanship, the beauty of combing and the beauty of emotion, it is actually a different angle, Let everyone know that Tan Carpenter is actually changing a lot, we are getting younger and more fashionable.
Finally, regarding social welfare activities, it is actually difficult to say why we want to do this thing, and these public welfare are printed in the bones of Tan Carpenters. We rarely tell others what Tan Carpenter did this year, what he did last year, we will do it every year, but we feel that what we do is very small things, such as drought resistance, earthquake relief, donating a lot of love schools, and at the same time we pair up with many children from special schools.
There is also a relatively large theme, in fact, we are a resource-consuming enterprise, to be honest, we ourselves have deep concerns, based on our resource consumption of this matter of a cognition and self-motivation, we are constantly doing one thing, that is, afforestation. Since 2007, we have issued a green action initiative to franchisees across the country, including our stores and sales staff, and will organize colleagues and franchisees from various places to plant trees in the local area every year, and we have also carried out some public welfare cooperation with Ant Forest and the local government of Inner Mongolia for windproof afforestation, which we have been doing continuously.
On the other hand, when it comes to Tan Carpenter, one of the topics that must be mentioned is the emotional culture of Tan Carpenter, because in addition to the good quality of our products, novel design, constantly innovating, and constantly improving in the construction techniques, we are also continuing to spread a point to the outside world, that is, love. This love includes family affection, friendship, and love, and we hope that just like the theme I shared today, we hope that with a comb, we can make friends all over the world. We also hope that this small wooden comb can bring you the emotional connection between people, and can be used as a bond to maintain and alleviate some contradictions in the family, to close the relationship between the family and people. It can be a keepsake, it can be a sign, it can also be an object of daily companionship.
There is a very classic saying inside the Tan carpenter, the comb is a promise from green silk to white hair, why say so? It is because Tan Carpenter provides free lifelong maintenance services, and the little partner who has a Tan Carpenter comb must not throw it away because your comb has cracks, damages, scratches, or other problems during use, do not lose it, we hope that you can cherish it, and we hope that you will always remember this comb, the state of mind when you bought it, the state of mind when you received it as a gift, what kind of person was it at that time, what kind of time let you have Tan Carpenter. You can take your comb to any of our stores and we offer free lifetime repairs. Except for a very large project such as replacing the rubber mat, all the projects are basically free, and our craftsmen will definitely return you a brand new comb.