Young entrepreneurs busy packing products in Zhanjiang on June 3. (Photo by Li Zhong/gdzjdaily.com.cn)
A group of young entrepreneurs in Zhanjiang has built an e-commerce platform to promote the "taste of hometown".
11 young entrepreneurs, most of them are post-90s generation, have launched an online platform to sell local specialties on May 27. On the first day of its trial operation, they received more than 400 orders for lychees with the turnover exceeding 30,000 yuan ($4833).
It is a young and vigorous team. Wearing identical white t-shirts, they are busy packing lychees with great enthusiasm in Lianjiang county, Zhanjiang city, South China's Guangdong province.
The team chose lychees as their flagship product to start with due to the fact that lychees are in season now. To find the best fruits for customers, they almost visited every lychee orchard in Lianjiang and finally cooperated with four of them, which have high-quality lychees.
In terms of logistics, they use city distribution networks for local orders and cold chain distribution networks for orders in and out of Guangdong province.
Huang Xiaolong, a native of Lianjiang, is the team leader. Huang worked in Beijing and Xinjiang following his graduation from the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing in 2010.
In early 2015, he returned to Zhanjiang to spend the Spring Festival with his family. It was then he saw a fast-developing Zhanjiang and decided to start his business in the hometown with his business partners.
"Zhanjiang is developing fast and I think that if you have a dream, you don't need to go far away from home. My business partners and I have a dream and we all want to realize it in our hometown. I want to let Zhanjiang people who work in large cities know that they can achieve more here," Wang said.
Wang went out at 6 am and returned home around 2 or 3 am for many days. His parents were worried about him and didn't know what he was doing until he told them several days ago.
Other team members include Qi Guanlong, who does graphic design, and Jie Yingpeng and Huang Renjian, who are responsible for background operation system. They are all Zhanjiang natives.
"Since our business is in the early stage, we often work day and night together. It is very common for us to work until 2 or 3 am in the morning," said Jie Yingpeng.
Besides team members, they also collaborated with about 80 local young entrepreneurs and helped each other to flourish the business.
"For example, if I do e-commerce and he produces farm products, we can cooperate with each other. We are building a business eco-system with more and more participants," said Huang Xiaolong.
Besides lychees, the team also sell other kinds of local goods online including oranges, taros, sweet potatoes, pickles and even chicken. Not long ago, they reached a cooperation agreement with a local tea brand.
"I want more people to have a taste of my hometown specialties through e-commerce platform," said Huang.
The team have a bigger dream. That is to collect and sell specialties of each pivot cities in the Belt and Road Initiative.
Zhanjiang Chamber of Commerce in Beijing has raised 10 million yuan startup capital for the team.
"Once we get the finance, we will build a platform to sell agricultural and byproduct specialties of cities along the Belt and Road trading routes to other cities and regions in China and even overseas," Huang pointed out.
He also said that after the first round of financing, the team will optimize the online platform, attract more team members and expand the scope of the city distribution network.
Their ambition is to develop the e-commerce platform into the most influential one in Zhanjiang, establishing a logistics team for city distribution and building a logistics distribution center.
