chapter 16

Back then in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, there were many garment factories like this, and everyone produced more or less the same products.

Without any advantage, it was easy to be eliminated.

She brought us a pile of T-shirts that supposedly cost just over one yuan each to make.

These clothes were simple, with no embellishments, but I sensed a business opportunity.

It was 2006.

Taobao had already emerged, but it wasn’t booming yet.

Only a handful of forward-thinking people were willing to try shopping online.

There was no free shipping, no seven-day unconditional returns.

Whether you could buy something suitable was purely a matter of luck.

During the National Day holiday, I went home with Jiajia and explained to her father the beautiful prospects of opening a shop on Taobao.

In the early days, almost all Taobao shops were middlemen making a profit from the price difference.

We could run a factory-direct store.

That way, we could cut down costs and be the first to capture the market.

The required expenses weren’t much.

Models and photographers could be found among college students.

They had time, were willing to cooperate and revise repeatedly, and were relatively inexpensive.

As for a designer, I already had someone in mind.

In my previous life, I was a team leader in a garment workshop and had received the company’s design manager.

Since we were from the same province, we chatted a bit.

She said she graduated from the China Academy of Art.

Judging by her age, she should be a junior now.

I persuaded earnestly, and Jiajia kept acting cute and pleading.

In the end, her father agreed.

He asked me, “How much salary do you want?”

“I’ll be in charge of operations. I hope to have relative freedom in decision-making, and I want 15% of the net profit as my income.”

Jiajia’s father laughed, “If there’s a loss, you won’t get a penny.”

“There won’t be a loss.”

If we lost money, then I really would have wasted decades of my life.

At that time, Taobao didn’t have Tmall stores yet.

We first registered a personal shop, and since there was no seven-day unconditional return, we didn’t even need to pay a deposit.

In 2007, the shop officially went online, named New Life.

It was the new life of Jiajia’s father’s factory, and also my own new life.

I was busy every day, barely touching the ground.

Riding my electric bike, I shuttled everywhere.

To make communication easier, I bought a second-hand laptop.

Zhang Jie was far away in Beijing, and he was busy with his studies too.

Sometimes we chatted on QQ, but after a few words, I had to rush off to other things.

The night before the shop went online, he said to me, “Zhaozhao, the wind has picked up in Beijing. Looks like it’s going to snow again.”

“I feel like you’re also a wisp of wind I can’t hold onto.”

It was already past one in the morning.

I looked up and saw the stars outside the window.

Smiling, I replied, “The weather in Hangzhou is great. I can see lots of stars.”

“Zhang Jie, to me, you were once a star in the sky I couldn’t reach.”

“Why insist on holding onto me?”

“I am the wind, you are the star. We can always walk side by side under the same sky.”

After a long while, he replied, “So you still remember what I said back then.”

One day, chatting with Zhang Jie, he told me that after getting into Tsinghua University, he received quite a few scholarships. After deducting his mother’s medical expenses, he still had over a hundred thousand yuan and wanted to invest.

I opened the stock trading software and said to him, “Buy stocks. Right now, anything you buy will go up.”

“But when the Shanghai Composite Index reaches 6000 points, you must sell everything. Don’t stay a moment longer.”