Nearly 10,000 people have fun at this lonely shop

A Taobao store selling poems attracts many customers with its novel product forms. This article starts from Cai Xiaogui's store and introduces the novelty of the store in detail. It is recommended for students who want to learn about e-commerce.

The most eye-catching note in Cai Xiaogui's shop is "Best not to buy!" After quitting his job at the age of 30, he relied on the savings he had saved from working since dropping out of high school to do what he wanted to do most, "writing poetry." He wrote thousands of poems one after another, "but no one read them." So he hid the poems in "weird little gadgets" and put them on Taobao store to "stuff" readers.

As for writing poems, he thinks that "being interesting is very important", while the evaluation of others is not that important. When he was setting up a stall offline, he designed "Scratch Poems" with the product idea of ​​"Scratch Lottery". Customers who stopped in front of the stall could scratch off a poem he wrote by paying a few dollars. "When I encounter a poem I like, it's as happy as winning a prize."

He is a hard-working shop owner and a lazy customer service. When making products, he will make them as long as someone buys them; when encountering questions from backstage buyers, he does not want to answer them as long as he can avoid answering them. The works have been completed, and the readers' feelings are open. He never expects specific feedback or comments. The products in his store are polarized, so he repeatedly warns buyers to "be cautious when buying", but some people still buy all the products. "But because everyone has a sense of boundaries, there is not much communication", as if it is a tacit understanding of high-fiving in the air.

For Cai Xiaogui, the Taobao store is a platform for displaying his creations. If it can make money, that is of course a good thing. If it cannot, then just let it go. “Anyway, I don’t want to lose the things I like just to make money.”

1. The man who lives on the central axis of Beijing

Cai Xiaogui and his wife, along with their two dogs, live in a hutong in Zhushikou, Beijing. The house covers an area of ​​12 square meters, with no bathroom or balcony in the room. In the morning, Cai Xiaogui needs to empty the urinal, while his wife goes to work and he is unemployed at home. "When both of us are in the room, it's too crowded to even turn around." After a renovation in 2016, Cai Xiaogui added an outhouse and made a small loft out of a construction site shed. He also installed a custom cabinet at the entrance, which took up the space for the door, so he could only turn the door to open outwards. "The hutong is narrow, and before opening the door every day, you have to judge whether there is anyone passing by the door." However, the house is not very soundproof, and the couple can judge the exact time to open the door. The coming and going of people in the hutong is also the background sound of Cai Xiaogui's daily stay at home.

This house was allocated by Cai Xiaogui's father-in-law's company, and he only had to pay a symbolic rent of more than ten yuan a month. Although the space was small, the location was good. Zhushikou, where the alley was located, was located outside Qianmen, Beijing, and it was exactly the intersection of the north-south central axis and the east-west Zhushikou Street. Such a central location made it convenient to go anywhere.

But Cai Xiaogui prefers to stay at home, and walking the dog every morning and evening is his only exercise. After he resigned at the age of 30, he has been staying in this small room, writing poems, turning poems into products, and then putting them on Taobao store. "The store is my portfolio." For him, endless creation is an instinct. "The product has a sense of value when it is completed." I don't know if it can be sold, but I will do it anyway. The material basis for his willful "naked resignation" is the savings accumulated from working in the past 13 years. But more importantly, it is the mentality. He has never felt anxious. "I don't have too much pursuit. I just think it is a real pity that I haven't done what I like in my life."

Cai Xiaogui dropped out of high school in 2004. He worked on an assembly line in a factory, guarded a warehouse, set up a street stall, and was also a grassroots programmer... Among the many jobs he had, two were related to writing: one was in a book company, where he was in new media operations. His main job was writing copy, and an extra benefit was meeting his current wife; the other was in an entertainment marketing company, which was the "peak of Cai Xiaogui's career as a social animal". He earned 20,000 yuan a month and managed a small team.

But it was also this well-paid job that prompted him to resign. There was no special incident that triggered him, "I just didn't want to go to work anymore." This feeling of "not wanting to do it anymore" was exactly the same as when he decided to drop out of high school. During the final exams of his second year of high school, he hid in his dormitory and didn't go out. Later, he climbed over the wall and escaped without taking his luggage. When he came back to get his luggage after the summer vacation, the dormitory had become a girls' dormitory, and his campus life ended from then on.

If you don't have expectations, don't do it. Because he had no expectations for college life, Cai Xiaogui didn't go to school anymore. Because he had no expectations for working life, he quit his job completely. But if you want to do something, you have to do it. For Cai Xiaogui, writing poetry is such a must-do thing.

2. “Improper” Poets

"It's OK as long as people can take responsibility for themselves", so Cai Xiaogui opened a Taobao store to prevent himself from falling into poverty. However, since he really couldn't think of what to sell, he started making some "weird little gadgets". In 2014, he launched his first product, a mini "coffin". At that time, Cai Xiaogui liked wooden crafts, and after thinking for a long time, he still couldn't figure out what to make, so he decided to "make a coffin!"

He didn’t want to make the first product too crude, especially when he had no confidence in sales. “If the workmanship is not good, no one will buy it.” So he went to find a carpenter and made the first batch of goods with old boxwood. He only made 5 pieces, and the cost was so high that the palm-sized coffin was finally priced at 140 yuan. Of course, after the store became popular, Cai Xiaogui handed over the carpentry work to his father and “lowered” the price to 76 yuan.

On the product details page, Cai Xiaogui wrote honestly, "What's the point of buying it? Nothing." But he also wrote a sentence for this product, "To commemorate every small-scale death of inner ripples." His suggestion is, "Whenever you feel like dying, you can write a note and throw it in. Maybe it will help you vent your emotions and get a buffer, but maybe it won't."

This is the product details page of Cai Xiaogui. He describes the product in a poetic way, but the artistic mood he depicts is more approachable than expected. Cai Xiaogui writes poetry, and he likes people to read his poems, and he also avoids people thinking that he is serious, "I am not a serious person." For him, fun seems to be more important than literary quality, so he puts poems into Rubik's cubes, playing cards, nail art, cigarette pipes, scratch cards, Scrabble boards, and second-hand Nokia phones...

Cai Xiaogui first came into contact with modern poetry in high school. As a representative of the Chinese class, when he was collecting homework for the modern poetry class, he suddenly had an idea to reply a few sentences on his classmates' homework books, "because he felt that everyone's writing was not interesting enough." Everyone thought his writing was interesting and spread it around to read. The teacher also praised him for his good writing. Later, Cai Xiaogui dropped out of school. He went to the Internet cafe to stay up all night, just to write. The email page was open all night, and he typed a few hundred words, "sending an email to myself, even if it was saved."

Sometimes he also writes his observations and thoughts, similar to "spicy comments", and posts them on QQ space. He enjoys it when people like and comment on them. He has no confidence in his poetry, but he still writes, "I don't care about external evaluation, I just want people to see what I write."

He posted the poem online. Some people left funny comments, while others complained, "Is this also called poetry?" Cai Xiaogui didn't take it seriously. In 2009, he decided to make poetry writing his lifelong career because "after reading other people's poems, I found that I could write too."

"So if you want to write, just write." In fact, many things do not have such a high threshold. Cai Xiaogui regards his fame through writing poetry as a delusion like "getting rich by winning the lottery". "The reality is that I live in a slum, but this just suits my temperament."

The highest source of income he earned from writing poetry was from the electronic poetry collection he published on Douban, which was sold at a price of 0.99 yuan per copy. After the platform took its cut, he pocketed 0.33 yuan for each copy sold. "I earned more than 1,000 yuan in total. Later, this electronic poetry collection became free to read."

3. The Buddhist shop owner who advises people not to buy

In an era of scarce attention, it is not easy for an unknown poet to find readers who are willing to listen. Cai Xiaogui took a different approach and designed products around poetry and put them on the store. "I want everyone to read my poems, and whether they sell well is secondary." He made the poems into playing cards, named "A Deck of Poems". Under each of the 54 cards is a short poem, which is equivalent to a loose collection of poems. The price is 54 yuan, equivalent to one yuan per poem. There is a QR code printed on the back of the card. Scanning it will give you an audio reading of the poem, implying "you have to read poetry anyway."

One of the most representative products in the store is the "Afterwards Cigarette", but this is not a real cigarette, because there is no tobacco in the cigarette tube, but 18 "slightly embarrassing poems", which is equivalent to a small poetry collection. Cai Xiaogui warns consumers as always, "To avoid disappointment, please don't buy it." But perhaps out of curiosity, this product still ranks among the top three best-selling products in the store.

As the store sales increased, Cai Xiaogui sometimes felt overwhelmed. For example, to sell a box of "after-the-fact cigarettes", he needed to roll the "cigarettes" manually. When he sold "a pair of poems", he wanted to round the four corners of the cards to prevent cutting his hands, but because he couldn't afford a machine, he used a nail file to round the corners at home. Once, when the company was doing centralized procurement for event prizes, he had to round the cards overnight. What made Cai Xiaogui crazy the most was that someone placed an order "in the cloud and water". This drip glue product is the third series of his "continuous sentence series". "I made 100 boring words into the shape of a bamboo book, which seems to give it a classic appearance and the growth of "Warning to the World", but in fact it is still those broken sentences, so just read it." Despite the "dissuading" posture, it still couldn't stop people from placing orders. Cai Xiaogui, who received the order, had to make the 100 boring words he wrote by hand into the drip glue. "In winter, just waiting for the bottom glue to dry, you have to wait a whole day."

Although he says that making products is tiring, Cai Xiaogui still enjoys doing some useless little things.

He sent 100 boring sentences in the form of text messages to a second-hand Nokia phone, and also gave away two old batteries and a universal charger to ensure that the phone can be turned on and checked at any time. He knew that this kind of product was not necessary. This product, priced at 104 yuan, occasionally sold one order a month. Even more occasionally, Cai Xiaogui could receive a picture in the background, which was a text message scolding him. This was the "little easter egg" he buried in the Nokia phone.

He also gave a book of poems called "White in the Snow" and packed it with snow in an inflatable bag. Customers who received it were often reluctant to open it, but out of curiosity about the contents of the book, they had to open the package to see the only snow. Of course, opening the book also meant cleaning up the scattered artificial snow.

Some products have nothing to do with poetry, but are more derived from Cai Xiaogui’s funny mood, but they also seem to have some poetic connection. For example, the "Internet green self-entertainment water" that was made popular by bloggers is actually a heating pack, a bag of drinking water and a wolfberry.

When can I use it? Cai Xiaogui's answer is, "Drink a cup of water and celebrate the happy moment alone." This product has the most lively comment area in the store. Although the most asked question is "Will there really be a 'big shot' who buys it?!" It has become the most popular product in the store with more than 2,000 sales and more than 100 reviews. The store has been open for 9 years. Cai Xiaogui, who has accumulated four diamonds, realized in the past two years that people will come to his store when they don't know what gifts to prepare. "Buying is lonely, but giving is happy."

Author: Yi Wanyu; Editor: Zheng Yawen

Source WeChat public account: Seller