(Chinese Version)

　　Editor’s Note:

　　After graduation, Stone and his college roommate Big Feng invested RMB 500 each and opened their own online store on Taobao. Three days after their stores opened, they received the first order. At that time, they would purchase goods from Beijing Zoo Clothes Retailing Market and sell products to customers across China. From 2012 to 2015, their peak time daily turnover once reached 7,000. However, after the retailing market was moved away, the shortcomings of their family-style came to light. Coupled with the constant change of requirements on Taobao, their online store went through all kinds of ups and downs amidst the Chinese e-commerce wave. In TMTpost Photo Gallery 050, we turned our lens on this five-year-old Taobao store and shared with our readers the stories behind it.

　　It was March 9th, 2017, STHOME’s storage in Stone’s house, Beijing. He started the men’s clothing business when he graduated from college five years ago.

　　“I love freedom and don’t want any kind of restriction, so I decided to start my own business after graduation. At that time, I didn’t have much money, so I thought it might be a good idea to just run an online shop on Taobao,since the threshold is low and the not much cost is needed. All I need to do is buy and sell and pocket the difference. So I just got started,” he told TMTpost.

　　Five years later, he and his three partners have opened two men’s clothing stores on Taobao, selling mainly American street style clothes. There was a time when a store’s monthly turnover at peak time reached RMB 800,000.

　　His partner Big Feng was his college roommate. After graduation, Big Feng went to an IT company. Big Stone approached him and asked if he’d like to join and start their own business. Their cooperation model was quite simple: everybody invested RMB 500 to the business and accounted for half the share. After their negotiation, Big Feng was responsible for marketing, operation, design and photography sector of the online Taobao store.

　　Little Song was also Stone and Big Feng’s college roommate. After graduation, he became a white-collar worker for a while. Later, he quitted the job, joined a tiny startup and became head of the customer service division.

　　Yang, the fourth member of Stone’s startup, was in charge of storage management and package delivering business. He used to do clothes retailing business at Beijing Zoo Clothes Retailing Market for a while together with his parents, so he was quite familiar with the storage management and package delivering. Before the retailing market was moved away, Yang’s family store was the major supplier of Stone’s online store; however, the retailing market was later moved away, so Yang’s parents had no choice but to move outside Beijing and continue to do clothes retailing business.

　　It was March 8th, 2017. Yang and Little Song were preparing the parcels to be delivered. Before 2015, they had to use the apartment Stone rented as their workplace. Their business boomed in 2015, and they even considered the possibility to enlarge their team for a while. So they rented three rooms as office and storage in a business building near Guangming Bridge, Beijing.

　　Their store’s business peaked in 2015. For a while, their monthly turnover reached 6,000 to 7,000 per store. “2015 is a threshold year. We could have turned from a family store into a large-scale retailing company and built our own brand. However, as we began to enlarge out business, our sales slumped,” Stone recalled, attributing the dropping sales to his failure, “although out sales roared in 2015, our operation model was actually very weak.”

　　Little Song and Yang were sorting out a new consignment of goods sent from the Guangdong factory. Since 2015, lots of clothes store business owners at Beijing Zoo Clothes Retailing Market gradually moved out of Beijing. Therefore, many online clothes stores lost their suppliers and had to compete with their rivals for local factories in Hangzhou and Guangzhou. There was a time when they could easily sell clothes without putting too much effort on design and promotion pictures. However, after they lost the major supplier, their turnover dropped accordingly.

　　“Factories in South China will certainly meet the needs of local customers first, so we can hardly compete with them,” Stone complained.