SHEIN is undoubtedly the hottest super unicorn this year, and few people know that the founder behind it is a native of Shandong - Xu Yangtian, 37 years old.
Coincidentally, in May this year, Waterdrop successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange, becoming the first insurtech company in China to land on the New York Stock Exchange. Behind this unicorn is also a Shandong guy - Shen Peng, from the intern of the Meituan all the way to the youngest executive of the Meituan, who was once Wang Xing's right-hand man.
Not long ago, Fujing Agriculture, the largest producer of potted vegetable agricultural products in Shandong, submitted a Hong Kong stock prospectus, and the founder behind it, Zhang Yonggang, is also a full-fledged Shandong native. The unknown Shandong vegetable farmer couple is expected to sit on their first listed company.
When it comes to Shandong, what will be everyone's first reaction? I believe that everyone has their own answer. At present, more and more Shandong founders are rising, rushing to the IPO bell ringing stage one by one.
This is a scene that was rarely seen in the past.
SHEIN, the hottest 100 billion unicorn this year
Behind it is a Shandong native
SheIN's helmsman Xu Yangtian is mysterious.
Scattered information on the Internet shows that Xu Yangtian was born in 1984, graduated from Qingdao University of Science and Technology in 2007, and went south to Nanjing the following year to work in SEO (search engine optimization) at a foreign trade online marketing company. During this period, Xu Yangtian and two partners founded Nanjing Dianwei Information Technology Co., Ltd.
From the description of one of the partners, Li Peng, it is probably possible to outline Xu Yangtian's early career: he lived a poor life at a young age, and often fed his stomach with steamed buns and soy sauce. Despite this, Xu Yangtian, who is physically lean, is very diligent, and he went out to work in his third year of high school, and the university was also half-working and half-studying.
Such an experience seems to have created Xu Yangtian, who later started a business in a muffled voice. Around 2009, China's cross-border e-commerce industry was in the start-up period, and a number of multinational B2C websites began to show their strength. Seeing the huge profits of the wedding dress category, Xu Yangtian turned to the business of selling wedding dresses across borders. With the money earned from the sale of wedding dresses, he ushered in the first rapid development, and also took the domain name of SheInside.com to establish his own independent station, which is the predecessor of SHEIN.
At the beginning of 2012, Xu Yangtian's eyes extended to a wider and more frequent category of women's clothing, so he gave up the wedding dress business and started again to officially sell women's clothing overseas. Firmly eyeing fast fashion, SHEIN is on more than 600 new models every day, mainly selling fashion women's clothing with a price of less than $20, and some goods are even less than $5.
At the same time, the red economy is in the trend, in order to quickly open the market, Xu Yangtian as early as 2011 from kol to establish a marketing model recommended by Internet celebrities, in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other international social platforms for publicity and promotion, while reaching in-depth cooperation with these social platforms, and working with well-known designers to create joint cooperation for global users.
It can be said that SHEIN is one of the first companies in the world to try to promote influencers. In the early days, almost all of the traffic to the SHEIN website came from KOLs' recommendations, and the young Chinese company quickly succeeded in winning the favor of a group of ordinary American women with a return on investment of up to 300% with a cheap and multi-style advantage.
Only at this time, SHEIN did not have its own supply chain. Xu Yangtian's approach is to first take pictures of the clothing of the merchants in the Guangzhou Thirteen Elements Clothing Wholesale Market and hang them on the website, and after the overseas users place an order on the website, the team will go to the wholesaler to get the goods and ship the goods, completing the entire transaction closed loop. A year later, Xu Yangtian, who had just completed his wedding, lamented on Facebook: "My company is growing rapidly, and I now have more than 50 employees!" ”
Since 2014, since the peak period of website orders has reached nearly 50 million yuan, Xu Yangtian personally went from Nanjing to Guangzhou to build a board house, form a design team, and even take the initiative to subsidize the factory, and is also determined to do the garment supply chain center. In 2015, Xu Yangtian officially renamed SheInside to SHEIN, and the story of his rise began.
With a number of decisive factors such as supply chain, internet celebrity marketing and mobile e-commerce, SHEIN's achievements over the years have also made peers red-eyed in 2018 GMV exceeded 10 billion, and in 2019, it exceeded 20 billion. The real outbreak is in 2020, when major fast fashion brands close their stores to survive because of the epidemic, SHEIN without offline stores is riding the dust.
All kinds of paths have contributed to today's hot SHEIN. According to App Annie, SHEIN has become the most installed shopping app on Android in the United States, and then topped the iOS charts. This means that SHEIN's downloads have surpassed Amazon's $490 billion GMV in 2020.
At the same time, the software is becoming popular worldwide at an incredible rate by ranking first among iOS shopping apps in 54 countries and number one among Android devices in 13 countries. Despite this, xu Yangtian, the head of the team, still reminded the team: "We must think of danger in peace."
Now, behind this giant has gathered well-known VC/PE institutions including JAFCO Asia, IDG Capital, Jinglin Investment, Sequoia China, Tiger Global, Shunwei Capital and so on. The e-commerce circle also circulates such a legend: a well-known VC investor, with the early capture of SHEIN, a world war to seal the gods.
You may not know,
How big are the founders of Shandong
Shandong, for a long time, was regarded as a desert of the new economy. As everyone knows, a number of unicorn founders are emerging in this land.
Shen Peng, who successfully IPO this year, is also a Shandong guy. He is from Pingyi County, Linyi, Shandong Province, born in 1987, and graduated from the Central University of Finance and Economics. At the beginning of 2010, Wang Xing founded Meituan, and Shen Peng, who was still in his senior year, joined Meituan and was the No. 10 employee and No. 2 salesman of Meituan.
In the 6 and a half years of Meituan, Shen Peng went from a BD newcomer to Tianjin city manager and then promoted to regional manager. At the end of 2012, Shen Peng, who was less than 30 years old, became the co-founder and head of the national business of Meituan Takeaway, commanding the 6,000-person Meituan BD team and the youngest executive of Meituan.
At the beginning of 2016, Shen Peng decided to start a business, first do droplet mutual aid, and launched a free personal serious illness help Internet service platform "Water Drop Love Chip", which is the predecessor of Water Drop Chip. After that, in May 2017, Waterdrop announced that it had obtained a national insurance brokerage license and launched the Waterdrop Insurance business, forming a closed loop of business. In May this year, Waterdrop successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange, becoming the first insurtech company in China to land on the New York Stock Exchange.
Liu Chuanjun, one of Shen Peng's Linyi compatriots, is also a well-known entrepreneur. Many years ago, the WowoTuan, founded by Liu Chuanjun, was also listed on the NASDAQ. There is an episode in this: the Wowo Tuan was founded by Liu Chuanjun and others, and later sold to Xu Maodong, another Shandong man who worked hard in Beijing. In 2014, before Wo Wo Tuan was listed, Liu Chuanjun left and soon founded Meicai.com. He was a master's degree in space physics from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and has participated in the research of Shenzhou 6 and 7 spacecraft, Chang'e 3 satellites, and the Firefly 1 satellite for mars exploration, and has also studied Mars.
The founder of Douyu, Chen Shaojie, is also from Shandong, he is a native of Jinan and founded Douyu in Wuhan. Last year, Douyu announced a merger with Huya, which will be delisted after the merger. He also made it to the 2020 Hurun Rich List with a wealth of 5.5 billion yuan.
The above are all cases of Shandong people starting a business in other places. In fact, so far, the most well-known Shandong Internet listed enterprises, I am afraid that this is only this - Chizicheng Technology, which is a global artificial intelligence information distribution platform, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at the end of 2019. The founder behind it is Liu Chunhe, a native of Binzhou, Shandong. The meaning of Akako Castle comes from a sentence of Mencius - the so-called adult, do not lose his pure heart.
Born in 1985, Liu Chunhe studied pattern recognition at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in his early years, but began to start a business before graduating from graduate school. At first, he started his business in Jinan and later moved to Sanyuanqiao, Beijing. In 2018, Liu Chunhe led the company back to Shandong and is now a Shandong company. Regarding the reason for returning to his hometown, Liu Chunhe once said to the outside world that he was a native of Shandong and had a special feeling for Shandong.
Speaking of shandong's richest man, we can't get around Jiang Bin's name. In 1965, Jiang Bin was born in Shidao, Weihai, Shandong, and his younger brother was Jiang Long. Jiang Bin has loved to read since childhood, and after being admitted to Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, he also entered Tsinghua University for further study.
In 1987, after graduating from university, Jiang Bin was assigned to Weifang Radio Factory No. 8, which specializes in miniature microphones, as a technician. At the time, he traveled a lot. According to Jiang Bin's recollection, once, a wenzhou company bought their company's products at a price of 45 yuan, and then sold them at a price of more than 100 yuan, which brought a huge shock to Jiang Bin.
In 1996, Jiang Bin, who had just passed the age of establishment, decided to go to the sea to start a business and produce microphone products that were not optimistic about outsiders. However, due to the team's disagreement about the future development of the company, his first venture ended in failure. In 2001, Jiang Bin and his wife Hu Shuangmei co-founded Weifang Yilida Electroacoustic Co., Ltd., the predecessor of Goertek Co., Ltd., and the latest market value of Goertek is nearly 160 billion yuan.
Lu Shang, a historically brilliant merchant gang
You don't know About Shandong
Turning over the history of Chinese business, the "Lu Shang" - Shandong Shang Gang, is an inseparable group. The former hot drama "The Great Dye Factory" tells the story of Lu Shang.
In this land of Qilu, a large number of strange people in the business community who have been born in the past and the present have been born, such as Guan Zhong, the first phase of the Spring and Autumn Period, Jiang Taigong, the founder of the State of Qi, and Meng Luochuan, a giant merchant at the end of the Qing Dynasty.
Over the past few decades, Shandong has been known as the "elephant economy." In the first half of 2021, shandong's GDP reached 3,890.635 billion yuan, with a GDP growth rate of 12.8% in the first half of the year, while the national GDP increased by 12.7% year-on-year. Although there is still some gap between Shandong's big data and high-tech industries and Provinces such as Jiangsu and Zhejiang, specific to the secondary industry or manufacturing industry, Shandong not only has more enterprises, but also has a larger scale, such as aluminum, steel, petrochemical and other industrial products. Here is a set of data: among the 41 industrial categories in the world, China is the only country with all kinds of categories, and Shandong is the only province in China with all kinds.
Although it is known as the first economic province in the north, Shandong is not impressed by many people. In fact, this magical land has bred many unknown "national firsts".
First look at the gold production, Shandong Province is the country's first gold-producing province, Zhaoyuan Gold Mine is well-known throughout the country; vegetable and fruit aquatic production is the first in the country, of which Shouguang, the hometown of Chinese vegetables, is well-known throughout the country, not only for the domestic but also for Japan and South Korea to supply fresh fruits and vegetables; beer production is the first in the country, Shandong is a major province in beer production and marketing, Qingdao Beer Laoshan Beer is well-known in the country and even the world..... Abound.
There are many more industries in Shandong that have invisible hegemony. For example, a sugar substitute called erythritol is adopted by food companies because of its good taste. At present, there are 5 companies that supply 95% of the world's erythritol, and Shandong accounts for 3, namely Binzhou Sanyuan Biologics, Dezhou Baolingbao and Weifang Dongxiao. Everyone knows Yuanqi Forest, Nongfu Spring, wahaha, but we don't know that the companies that supply sugar substitutes to them are all from Shandong.
For another example, although there is no well-known automobile manufacturer in Shandong, there is a Haomai Technology, which is the tire mold enterprise with the largest global market share; although Shandong does not have a battery giant such as the Ningde era, and Dongying has a Shi Dashenghua, whose lithium battery solvent ranks first in the country. There is also hyaluronic acid. "The world hyaluronic acid looks at China, and China looks at Shandong." It is not an exaggeration to say that 75% of the global hyaluronic acid sales are from Shandong, and the top five companies in the global hyaluronic acid sales are Shandong enterprises.
Some time ago, the "cosmic center" Of Cao County, Shandong Province, suddenly became popular all over the Internet, which also let us see how magical a small Shandong County town is. Not many people knew that CaoXian had seized 1/3 of China's Hanfu market and contracted 70% of the country's performance costumes; it also occupied 90% of Japan's coffin market by exports.
The conversion of new and old kinetic energy is the most profound impression left by Shandong on the venture capital circle in recent years. Since 2018, Shandong has carried out a top-down reflection and strongly opened a major project for the conversion of new and old kinetic energy. After two years of kinetic energy conversion, Shandong's industry, which used to be weak, began to erupt into new vitality. The data shows that shandong's "four new" economy such as new technologies, new products, new formats and new models has accounted for more than 30%.
One side nurtures the other. Looking at the whole country, the personality of Shandong people is very distinct, thick, bold, moral, and good friends. This land is beginning to emerge a group of founders who have gone to the whole country.