Pingdu has just completed the false eyelash industrial park
Five years ago, not long after Anfa Yi started e-commerce, he created a miracle in the false eyelash industry.
At that time, An Fayi had just quit his job, sold his car and house, and came to his girlfriend's hometown Pingdu, a county-level city located in the western part of the Jiaodong Peninsula in Shandong, and started an e-commerce business from scratch.
In Pingdu, the false eyelash industry has been developed for more than 40 years, and it has been dominated by foreign trade OEM for a long time, with an annual output of more than 70% of the world. When Anfa Translation entered the industry, it was just in time for the rise of local false eyelash e-commerce, so he tried to open an online store on Pinduoduo.
After opening the store, Anfa Translation launched a new single product called "Little Devil", but I didn't expect it to explode quickly, selling tens of thousands of orders in a single day, and rushing to the first place in the Pinduoduo category on the 4th day, and continued to explode for nearly half a year, making Anfa Translation enter the ranks of head merchants in one fell swoop.
In the past five years, the eyelash industry has grown rapidly, the number of merchants has increased from a few hundred to nearly 4,000, and the number of express orders has exploded to an average of 300,000 pieces per day, and more than 60,000 practitioners have poured into it, most of whom are mothers who stay in the countryside. As a foreign son-in-law, Anfa Yi inadvertently broke into the industry and witnessed the earth-shaking changes in the false eyelash industry along the way.
Everywhere is gold, and the profit of a single product is more than fifty percent
This year's 35-year-old An Fayi is an authentic Shandong guy who grew up in the countryside and met his girlfriend in college. After graduating, Anfa Yi started sales, and his career started quickly, with a monthly salary of 20,000 yuan or 30,000 yuan. After working for a while, my girlfriend was admitted to the career editor in her hometown.
At that time, in order to prepare for marriage, An Fayi borrowed money to make a down payment, and had just bought a house in the city, and his girlfriend's successful landing disrupted the original plan. In order to be with him, his girlfriend also had a lot of trouble with the family for a while, and An Fayi decided to fulfill "the responsibility that a Shandong man should have", sold everything he could, and resolutely went to his girlfriend's hometown.
When he first arrived, Anfayi didn't think about what to do at all, "fortunately, he had some savings in his hand and was ready not to make money for 5 years", but the turnaround came sooner than he expected.
The production process of false eyelashes is complex and involves 20 steps
Under the introduction of local relatives, Anfa Yi came into contact with the false eyelash industry, false eyelashes look simple, but the production process is quite complicated, a pair of false eyelashes of about two centimeters involves nearly 20 production processes, including pressing, merging, on-line, cutting, coiling, shaping, stripping, supporting, etc., for a straight man, it is not easy to figure out the doorway.
In order to get started as soon as possible, Anfayi specially spent 8,000 yuan to go to the eyelash shop as an apprentice to touch the material and process of false eyelashes.
"At the beginning, I didn't have the funds to stock up, so I took the goods from the factory, and tried live broadcast and traditional e-commerce successively, but the order volume couldn't get up." An Fa Yi said that later a peer said that Pinduoduo had a large order, so he decided to give it a try.
After opening the store, the sales volume in a single day soon reached thousands of orders, which made An Fayi feel that his previous judgment was wrong, and he should have done Pinduoduo earlier.
An Fayi recalled that in the second half of 2019, false eyelashes began to become popular on short videos and social platforms, but because Pinduoduo is cheaper, young people will go to Pinduoduo to place orders after watching it, and the natural traffic on the platform is also abundant, so many merchants have enjoyed dividends.
Compared with other platforms, although the price of the same inventory in Pinduoduo is cheap, the profit is also considerable, "a box of three rows of false eyelashes costs 8 yuan 5, and the profit at that time can reach 50%, and all aspects of the upstream and downstream are very profitable, selling semi-finished products can earn 50%, selling packaging boxes can also earn 50%, everywhere is gold."
Millions of single orders have been sold, and the factory's production capacity has increased by 50 times
After opening up the situation, Anfayi also focused on Pinduoduo, opened a number of stores, set up its own small factory, and constantly tried new styles and styles, and ushered in an outbreak in the new year.
"One night, when the customer service was off work, the store was suddenly crowded, and a single product called Little Devil sold tens of thousands of orders within a few minutes, and my partner and I went to do customer service in person." Anfa Yi said that selling 10,000 orders a day was an absolute miracle in the false eyelash industry at that time.
On the fourth day of the explosion, "Little Devil" became the first single product in the false eyelash category on the platform, with an average daily sales volume of 20,000 or 30,000 orders, and has sold more than 900,000 orders so far.
Subsequently, Anfa Translation took advantage of the situation to launch a series of products such as "Little Devil Dense Style" and "Little Devil PLUS Edition", and the new products were still sold out after half a year, and millions of orders were sold in total, "suddenly becoming the head merchant of the platform".
At that time, Anfayi's factories were almost at full capacity, and they were shipping goods at the limit of production capacity and logistics every day, and it was urgent to expand the factory's production capacity.
At Alpha's factory, the automatic dispenser for false eyelashes has greatly improved production efficiency
Until this year, Anfa Translation has gone to a higher level every year, successively opened 4 factories around Pingdu, and launched semi-automatic production lines, automatic dispensing machines, etc., and the number of workers has increased from a dozen to four or five hundred, most of whom are local village mothers.
"At the beginning, our factory could only produce a maximum of 1,000 orders per day, but now we can produce 50,000 orders, which is equivalent to a 50-fold increase in five years." An Fa Yi said that compared with the OEM model, the advantage of e-commerce is that there is work all year round, so as to support the factory and retain workers, most of the factory workers are women and mothers in the village, with a monthly income of three or four thousand in the off-season and six or seven thousand in the peak season, and do not delay taking care of the family.
When Anfayi was running wildly, the eyelash industry also ushered in a big explosion, and many local practitioners heard about Anfayi's deeds and wanted to "live an addiction of 10,000 orders per day", and they poured into the Pinduoduo platform.
Cheng Ting is one of them, in fact, Cheng Ting entered the industry much earlier than Anfa Translation, but she has been doing offline distribution and traditional e-commerce, limited by production capacity, and has no energy to open up new channels.
In 2021, Cheng Ting felt that she couldn't wait any longer, and finally opened a store in Pinduoduo.
"Our store has only been open for a month, and it has begun to explode, from more than 1,000 orders to tens of thousands of orders, and it has never stopped." Cheng Ting said that compared with traditional e-commerce, Pinduoduo has brought new customers, and the store mainly places orders for young women under the age of 25.
At present, the "Menglu brand" false eyelashes created by Cheng Ting have been a frequent customer of the top 10 of Pinduoduo's single product sales list, and the monthly sales of the store have reached millions, and there is a great momentum of catching up.
In 5 years, the false eyelash brand has grown into a false eyelash brand with tens of billions of industrial belts
In Pingdu, the false eyelash industry can be traced back to 40 years ago, because of the geographical location close to Korea, Korea people first ran to the Jiaodong Peninsula to do business, invested in the construction of eyelash factories, and the local villagers gradually introduced false eyelash technology into Pingdu, started a family-style workshop, starting from foreign trade OEM or production and wholesale, and gradually formed an industrial prototype.
Cheng Ting recalled that when she first entered the industry six or seven years ago, most of Pingdu's false eyelash merchants were engaged in foreign trade, and the volume of e-commerce was very small, and they were mainly OEM for e-commerce merchants in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong, and the high-premium sales links did not stay in Pingdu.
Since 2019, under the driving effect of Pinduoduo head merchants such as Anfa Translation and Cheng Ting, false eyelash e-commerce has blossomed everywhere in Pingdu, and the local industry has also ushered in the most rapid development in the past 5 years.
In the past five years, the number of employees in the false eyelash industry has reached 60,000, most of whom are village mothers
In the past 5 years, the number of flat eyelash companies has grown rapidly, with more than 800 new ones added in 2022 alone, and has now reached 3,895, with an average daily volume of 300,000 express orders in the peak season, more than 60,000 employees, 120 million pairs of false eyelashes produced every year, and an industry output value of more than 10 billion, which has grown into one of the pillar industries in the local area.
"From the perspective of merchants, the most obvious perception is that the price of express delivery continues to decline, at the beginning of the express unit price to three or four yuan, every single feel painful, now as long as a little more, sometimes cheaper than Yiwu." Anfa said.
At that time, in order to subsidize the family, Lu Jiaojiao opened an express station in Pingdu, and the business has been sluggish, but she found that the number of false eyelashes is increasing, so she changed careers to start an e-commerce of false eyelashes, and with a "fishtail" false eyelashes, it has gradually become the head merchant of Pinduoduo, with monthly sales of millions.
Anfayi believes that the new e-commerce represented by Pinduoduo has detonated the domestic market of false eyelashes, accelerated the development process of flat eyelashes, and completed the 40-year road of foreign trade OEM in just four or five years.
Since the beginning of this year, the flat holiday eyelash e-commerce has gradually entered the stage of full competition, but local brands such as Anfa Translation's "Eyelash Angel", Cheng Ting's "Dream Deer", and Lu Jiaojiao's "Eyelash Shangpin" have begun to emerge. Cheng Ting introduced that in the past two years, Hanfu travel photography has been particularly popular, and many young people have named Hanfu makeup artists to use Menglu, and even makeup schools have purchased our brands in bulk for teaching.
"The competition is really fierce now, branding is the future trend, and the brand can go further." An Fa Yi said that Shandong people are obsessed with the establishment, and the old man urged him to take the civil service examination for ten years, and he has stopped urging him in the last two years, and he has also recognized the career of false eyelashes.