"There are three main types of customers in the Textile City. One is cloth dealers from all over the country. They send truckloads of cloth back from the Textile City and wholesale and retail them locally. This type of customers,
What they want is ready goods. These people will stay in Keqiao for a day or two, and some will stay for a week or two. When all the goods they want are produced and collected, they will escort the truck away.
"There is also a large domestic clothing company. When they come, they usually go shopping. They only look at samples and place orders when they see good ones. After they are produced, the products are sent directly from the factory to their company.
The goods won’t even enter the Textile City.
"Both of these customers are big customers. What they are looking for are powerful sellers in the textile city and large factories with guaranteed production and supply capabilities. For small factories like ours, people won't even pay attention.
At a glance, I know that even if I give you the order, you won't be able to produce it. Doesn't this delay business?"
As soon as Mr. Lan talked about the past and recalled the time when he had just started his own business, he talked endlessly. His whole body became energetic as if he had been on hormones, and even his eyes lit up. Sheng Chuncheng also liked hearing this.
After listening quietly, Mr. Lan continued:
"Those who can patronize us are the third type of customers, that is, small customers, small clothing processing factories and clothing workshops, who come from Yiwu, Luqiao and Hangzhou, especially from Hangzhou.
"At that time in Hangzhou, in the urban-rural fringe around the Sijiqing Clothing Wholesale Market, there were such small clothing processing factories and villages in the three forts, seven forts and nine forts, in Wufu Village, Sancha Village, Shuixiang Village, and farmers' rental houses.
A workshop has four, five or seven or eight sewing machines. If there are more than ten sewing machines, it is considered large.
"They will patronize our place. First, the fabrics in the market are more expensive than ours. We don't have stall rentals here. Even the same fabrics will be one to two cents and one meter cheaper than elsewhere. There is another reason.
, are the bosses in the market who are good at business, their eyes are raised to the sky, and they basically don’t pay attention to small customers like them who get one or two pieces of cloth.
"The cost of fabrics, especially bulk goods such as linings, pocket fabrics and cotton, is sky-high. With so many companies competing in the market, the prices have already been beaten down. You can earn 5 cents and 10 cents per meter of fabric.
Okay, you can go to that area and ask, ask one company or several stores. Everyone’s prices are the same. Have they been reduced to the bottom?
"I started selling cloth. I am different from others. I can get the same lining cloth ten cents cheaper than others, so I can buy my cloth quickly. I am the first to sell out every day. Other people are not jealous either.
They looked at me from the side as if they were watching a joke. They all knew it and had accounts, and felt that I was not making any money at all and no one would follow up.
"When I encounter a stall and a customer wants to bargain, the owner of that stall will point to my place and tell the customer, if you want cheaper prices, go to her place. The cloth in her place is the cheapest here, haha, that's right
In this way, they treat me like an Amulin.
"I ignore them. If you want to laugh, just laugh. You have your accounts and I have mine. My algorithm is different from yours. You just don't know.
"After working for a month, have we made any money? Indeed, not. After deducting the cost of 7,788, our factory only made a total of more than 200 a month, not counting our own labor. If we had
If the labor is taken into account, it will be a loss.
"After the accounts were settled, Lao Ni quit. He said that if you sell cloth like this, we are serving the people instead of RMB. This factory is still making a profit, so we should just close it. He is going crazy.
Already.
"He was anxious but I was not. I told him, who said we didn't make any money? We made too much and made a lot of money. He asked, where is the money? Where is the money? Take out the money you make.
Show me, do you have any hidden ones?
"I said no, I didn't hide any money. When it comes to making money, we didn't make it, but I did gain customers. He couldn't think of it, and still scolded him, what's the use of gaining customers? They're all losing money, like you do.
, the more customers you have, the more money you lose.
"I told him, you want to make money, and I also want to make money, but have you ever thought about where the money comes from? Will money fall from the sky? Of course not. In the entire Textile City, money is in the pockets of customers
If you don't have customers, you can't sell the goods no matter how much you have, and you can't make money by piling them up, so what's the use?
"When I get a customer, I just grab his pocket. He kept his pocket tight today and didn't let me make any money, but he will definitely make me money in the future. Just follow my approach and we'll do it for another month.
Try it.
"Lao Ni was unwilling in his heart, but he knew that even if he quarreled, he couldn't quarrel with me. Besides, it was me who was selling cloth, not him. How could I sell the cloth? What could he do? He finally had to agree and try for another month.
.
"At that time, no matter whether they were coming from Hangzhou or Yiwu, few of the guests from Luqiao had their own cars. They all came by bus. Buses were crowded and slow, and they came from the nearest Hangzhou.
The time spent waiting for the bus at the station, the time on the road, and the time spent buying fabrics also take a day.
"After buying the cloth, I had to carry it myself and stand by the national highway waiting for the bus. When the bus came, I had to load the cloth into the bus one by one and in bundles. It was very inconvenient. They came to Keqiao, and the rest of the day
There is almost no need to do anything.
"Although everyone was a small boss at that time, they were very hard-working, but they had a lot of things to do every day. It was not that there was nothing they could do, and no one was willing to come to the Textile City to purchase goods. People around me laughed at me, Amulin, for another reason.
I run a street stall and I print business cards. I give one to every customer when he comes, just like the big bosses of the stalls in the market.
"They don't know that I actually do this on purpose. Every customer I give a business card to, I write the words 'available for delivery' with a pen on the back of the business card. After a while,
The call I was waiting for finally came. It was from a boss in Hangzhou. He didn't have time to go to Keqiao and asked me if I could deliver the goods to him. I said of course.
"I prepared his goods according to his request. Since it is shipping, I won't give him a dime cheaper. They don't care about it. They think it's normal. This is the price in the market anyway. The shipping fee is included.
At that time, the boss thought about it, he didn't have to make a trip, saved time and saved travel expenses, so he saved ten yuan more.
"That's it for this order. I delivered it to a passing bus and told him the bus number and approximate arrival time. He went to the Sijiqing Fabric Market where the bus stopped to pick up the goods, and the order was completed.
Already.
"There are more and more customers like this. The cloth we produce every day almost does not need to go to the market. It can be packed directly from the factory and delivered to the bus. The daily management fee of the market is saved.
.
"I also found a few cars that specifically run from Shaoxing to Hangcheng. I made an agreement with the driver that their cars would carry all my goods and they would give me a discount on the freight. They agreed. For customers, I will charge the normal freight.
Come on, you can make some money here.
"There are also some customers who trust me after I have shipped goods to them several times. If they want to buy any cloth, even if I don't have it here, others will not come. They just ask the driver to bring me the cloth swatch and tell me his original
Purchase price.
"I took the fabric samples to the market and found them. I talked with them. Everyone was local and doing business here. They would give me a lower price, so I received some agency fees, haha.
.
"Anyway, that's it. As long as I have money, I will make it and run away. Isn't it just that people have to work harder? What's the point of being afraid of hard work? There is no way to make money without hard work.
"It was also a good time. At that time, there was some kind of 'Hangzhou style women's clothing' here in Hangzhou, and it became famous across the country. I had a few clients, but they were all very small, with a few dozen people.
The scale of the processing factories is expanding rapidly, and they want more and more fabrics. Our factory, of course, is also adding machines and recruiting people, and the scale is also expanding accordingly."