Just a few days ago, Li Jiale in 02 had just graduated from school, and he was already interviewing people to recruit new people for his team.
Starting his business in his sophomore year, Li Jiale of @河南铂圣进出口公司 started with the first order of $96, and worked 4.8 million in the first year and 7 million in the second year.
On the eve of graduation, he moved the company from school to an office building in Zhengzhou. When he was in school, Li Jiale was like a cool male protagonist on campus, and he took his classmates to do tens of millions of business in his spare time. After graduation, everyone went their separate ways, leaving only Li Jiale and the remaining 2 classmates to rely on AI to urgently fill their positions and survive the turbulent period.
From the campus to the office building, Li Jiale's "cross-border love transaction" has not changed its logic of making money - making the least effort and getting the most buyers is just a way that has been upgrading.
Part 1
02 male classmates
It is necessary to sell wedding goods to the country
I started my business in my sophomore year.
During the summer vacation of university, I studied in Malaysia, and the locals especially like to play badminton, and I also play it every day. The rackets at that school were of good quality and cost-effective, and I asked them where they bought them. The person in charge said, I bought it from your China.
Later, I met a Switzerland competitor at the empty bamboo competition and learned that they also source empty bamboo from China in Switzerland. I know that China's export strength is strong. However, the fact that I met foreigners who purchased in bulk from China in my life still had a big impact on me.
Li Jiale (first from right) meets overseas buyers at the empty bamboo competition
Since there is such a huge Chinese market overseas, why don't I go and get a piece of the pie? I quickly started my business and started my business nearby, our local industrial belt in Zhengzhou - the wedding category.
I do it by myself, and I usually have to go to class. So I have to make the least effort to get the most buyers.
This strength is to sell goods differentiated. Let's look at the appearance first, among the same products, if the buyer can see the use of the product, who will be more attractive to them. But the reality is that I want to buy all the samples of the wedding scene, but the money is not enough, and a background frame costs thousands of yuan.
In the beginning, I could only use the product pictures given by the factory for the products in my store. Everyone uses the factory diagram, and as a trader, I don't have a price advantage. At first, I only sold some small items with a relatively low unit price, especially for more expensive items such as flower walls.
I tried to use AI to generate a scene map for the flower wall, and there was a green leaf background behind the flower wall, and this product opened 5 orders on the same day, which is my first hot product with a high customer unit price.
It also started by selling flower walls, and my business was a bit of a look, so I pulled my squad leader and deputy squad leader over and worked with me. We began to think about the further differentiated operation of products, not only the different product pictures so superficial.
Electroplating racks, there will be in every wedding scene, and there is a large demand for conventional products, so I wondered if I could make it my best-selling product. I will analyze the electroplating rack, just like doing a full body physical examination of the product, find out the potential points, stratify according to different markets and buyers' preferences, design A+ version and A-version products, and use hierarchical operation to highlight product differentiation, staggering and head-to-head competition with big sellers.
I mainly do the European and American markets, A+ version of the electroplating frame, for those who pursue high-end atmosphere and grade of large buyers, highlighting the "speed change", thickness, ductility and other material performance and long service life, but also can be split into three sections, easy to transport, local tyrant customers also like to save money.
The A-version electroplating rack is for those wedding companies, they purchase frequently, but the product is generally only used once, so the price has to be close to the people, the material can be simplified, split into seven sections of delivery, and the freight is so low that there are no friends. After running through the layered operation on the electroplating rack, we copied this model to other products, and in the first year, we did 4.8 million.
Part 2
The customer just wants to buy a shelf
I asked him to pack the whole yard
A big reason why I do B-end foreign trade business is that I have met overseas buyers of badminton and empty bamboo before, and they are all professionals who understand this category. Chatting with buyers, I don't just sell things, I can also get first-hand professional opinions and overseas market insights from buyers, and update and upgrade myself. In this way, I and my peers have an information gap, and we can provide better services to customers, and the business will naturally become more and more stable.
Most of the wedding supplies are sold as a package, even if the customer's initial demand is a single product, it can cultivate him into a big buyer of one-stop purchasing.
Li Jiale and the foreign students in the team shared how to negotiate orders with buyers
I have a client in United States who is the head of design for the company. For the first order, he just wanted to buy an electroplating rack and sent me a video of the venue.
As a trader, I have seen a lot of products, and I watch the video and give him advice from the perspective of the product. I not only gave him the recommendation of the electroplating frame, but also the decorations on the shelf, what are the popular products with the tablecloth and carpet, and what new products can be used on the background wall. From a single product recommendation to a complete set of product matching programs.
I also took screenshots of the AI business assistant's market analysis of these commodities to show him, and used the data to prove my recommendation. The client said that seeing the preference data of other buyers also deepened his grasp of the market trend, which was very helpful for his design and purchase.
This customer only bought a shelf for the first time, but he was impressed by my professionalism and has become my regular customer. He not only came to repurchase more of the supporting products I recommended, but also sent me his on-site design draft, which gave me a new understanding of overseas wedding aesthetics and a more professional understanding of products. In the second year, we had more regular repeat customers and made more than 7 million transactions.
Part 3
Rely on digital people to fill the position urgently
AI can pick up all the wool
Before graduation, our team had more than 10 students, and even foreign students. There are many people with great strength, and if you stay up all night together, you will do business, which is really like a hot-blooded comic.
After graduation, some students want to take the public entrance examination, and some students want to change tracks, and there are only 3 people left in our team.
I moved my company to Zhengzhou, the provincial capital. The business plate is expanding, there are fewer people, and the pressure is greater. tired, but also to allocate manpower and time reasonably.
In the past, staying up late to talk about customers was a common thing for Li Jiale and his classmates
Staying up for a long time won't work. I communicated with some foreign trade merchants and found that the active time of overseas buyers in different industries is different. I use digital humans to look at the reception data of the store by time, and match the active time of buyers with our own efficient time, so as to get twice the result with half the effort.
Like we used to be in school, we attended classes in the morning, received customers online in the afternoon, and stayed up late in the evening, thinking that we had perfectly pasted the foreign trade time. But now I look at the reception data and find that from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. domestic time, customers are very active, but we haven't gone to work yet - the response rate is low; From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. domestic time, there were more customers, and our response rate was low, because we went to rest and prepared to stay up late to receive customers after eight o'clock.
This was really unexpected, and we adjusted our working hours to focus on these two periods of time during the day. It was too late in the evening, so I used an AI business assistant to receive it first. We'll reply together in the morning. This not only improves the transformation, but also makes it more healthy, and the post-00s should also take care of their health, which is too important for our long-term business.
Relying on numbers to choose the right time to work, I also try to find shortcuts in operations. I use the AI business assistant to send products, enter the product words, and the AI will send the products with one click, very quickly. Moreover, I will also use AI hair products as selected products, and AI wool can be exhausted.
I once wanted to send a flower wall product, enter the product word "flower wall", and the AI will recommend which product category the product should be placed in, and a scene map of a specific style is displayed. The product in this picture happens to be a style that I have studied for a long time and is very optimistic about, and this model sold very well after I sent it.
This AI understands foreign trade, and the flower wall style and scene map it shows are actually a very popular model among buyers under the category of flower wall, and the scene map is also in line with buyers' purchase preferences.
It's so practical for me that I don't have the time to study each item as much as I would study this wall. After that, when I want to get product selection suggestions and product scene inspiration, I go to the AI hair column, enter the name of the product, and then I can see the high-quality style and suitable picture inspiration of this product.
I am a novice entrepreneur with a small cost, and I can't have a price advantage compared to those big manufacturers, so I can only spend more effort on customers and study how AI tools can be better used for me, which makes us more confident and motivated to meet the challenges. I am now interviewing newcomers to join the team, and I hope that we can break through the goal of 10 million this year and let China's wedding products go global.