One day in 2019, Zhang Da noticed an interesting order on the Pinduoduo backend. "Looking at the name and contact information, it seemed like an order placed by my cousin, but my wearable nail shop had only been open for two days, so she shouldn't have known about it," Zhang Da recalled.
Born in 1993, Zhang Da is from Donghai County, Jiangsu, a place famous for its crystal. After graduating from high school, Zhang Da had ventured to Beijing to run a crystal business, but without much success, he eventually returned to Donghai. By chance, he heard that someone was selling wearable nails on Pinduoduo and was doing quite well.
With a try-it-out mentality, Zhang Da quickly opened his first Pinduoduo store, which led to the story at the beginning. Later, Zhang Da confirmed that the order was indeed from his cousin. "She said on the phone that as soon as she searched for 'wearable nails' on Pinduoduo, my product link popped up."
At that time, Zhang Da might not have realized that Donghai's wearable nails were on the verge of a boom on Pinduoduo.
After five years of rapid development, wearable nails have become a new business card for Donghai.
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Located in the northeastern part of Jiangsu, Donghai has natural crystal resources that account for half of the country's total. Over the past thirty years, Donghai has gradually become a "Crystal Capital" that integrates production, processing, and trade.
Since 2019, the local wearable nail industry has been booming on Pinduoduo. Beyond the crystal industry, Donghai quickly gained a new industrial identity.
In 2019, Zhang Da and his wife, Gu Hanling, who had been in the wearable nail business for only half a year, caught up with the explosive growth on Pinduoduo.
Their Pinduoduo store was established in March of that year, but by October, the daily orders for wearable nails on Pinduoduo had skyrocketed to three to four thousand. During that period, the couple had to lead more than thirty employees to work from dawn to dusk, but they still couldn't keep up with the pace of the rising orders.
In Zhang Da's memory, the winter of 2019 saw the couple without a single day of complete rest. "There were too many orders, and the employees simply couldn't keep up. It wasn't until we switched to a pre-sale model that the situation slightly improved."At the beginning of their venture, Zhang Da and his wife, along with ten employees, could only squeeze into their own guest bedroom of over twenty square meters; as orders increased, the team moved into an attic in the urban village; when their Pinduoduo store experienced a significant surge in orders in October, Zhang Da rented a factory space of several thousand square meters in one go. Summarizing this journey, Zhang Da encapsulated it as "moving every three months."
In contrast, Ma Zhuang, who entered the market a year earlier, reaped the benefits of Pinduoduo more quickly. As early as the beginning of 2019, a wearable nail product under Ma Zhuang's brand began to sell explosively, eventually achieving an impressive total sales figure of nearly 5 million yuan, becoming a super item on Pinduoduo.
Every time he thinks of this single product, Ma Zhuang, also born in 1993, cannot hide his excitement: "We should be among the first on Pinduoduo to make wearable nails popular, and many people followed suit."
Having tasted the benefits, Ma Zhuang expanded his store count to five, attempting a store cluster management model, which led to his Pinduoduo store's annual sales doubling, reaching nearly 20 million yuan.
Summarizing the rise of wearable nails, Ma Zhuang believes it was Pinduoduo that brought in a new consumer group, especially young women. Before wearable nails, this group was keen on enjoying time-consuming and expensive nail services in stores. After the introduction of wearable nails, they were attracted to the new, detachable, and time-saving method.
"More importantly, getting a manicure in a store used to cost two to three hundred yuan and take five to six hours, whereas a set of wearable nails now only costs twenty to thirty yuan," said Ma Zhuang.
A significant proportion of Zhang Da's Pinduoduo store's nearly 10 million yuan in annual sales comes from students. "Apart from the delivery addresses all being schools, we also noticed that whenever the school year begins, Christmas, and National Day, the sales of wearable nails increase significantly, which is clearly student consumption."
After the entrepreneurial stories of Zhang Da and others spread, people from Donghai flocked to Pinduoduo, sparking a new wave of gold rush in wearable nails. Interestingly, many of these new merchants were once employees of Zhang Da and others.
Ma Zhuang recalls that around 2021, Pinduoduo's traffic was surging, and many employees who left to start their own businesses were running their stores successfully. "At least four or five employees, after learning the craft of wearable nails, partnered up and opened stores on Pinduoduo. Many of them have done half a million to six hundred thousand orders in one or two years, with sales reaching tens of millions of yuan."Also in 2021, Pan Qianfang, sensing the explosion in the business of wearable nails, discovered the nail business upstream in the industry.
"Nail pieces are the core raw materials for wearable nails. In the past, merchants from the East China Sea purchased from Tianjin, Yiwu, and other places, but local production has a more advantageous price." After calculating this account, Pan Qianfang quickly purchased three nail production equipment and expanded all the way. After receiving orders from Zhang Da, Ma Zhuang, and others, he increased the factory's output value to 20-30 million yuan.
After at least two rounds of explosions on Pinduoduo in 2019 and 2021, the number of people employed in the East China Sea wearable nail industry and the scale of the industry have all reached a new level. Now, the number of people employed in the East China Sea wearable nail industry has reached more than 50,000, and the annual sales of manual wearable nails are close to 3 billion yuan, with an output of more than 100 million pairs. Some wearable nails have also crossed the ocean and been sold to Europe and America.
Baoma becomes the main force in the workplace, with a monthly income of 8,000 to 9,000 yuan
More than 50,000 people in the East China Sea wearable nail industry are mostly local village and town Baoma groups, and they have now become the backbone of the industry.
From the edge of the workplace to the center, local Baoma did not dare to expect a few years ago; "One is to take care of the family, and the other is that we have not been the main force in the workplace."
Baoma is the self-awareness of "edge people in the workplace," which has also made many wearable nail merchants feel headache.
For example, Liu Haojie, who is only thirty years old this year, entered the e-commerce army of wearable nails at the same time as Ma Zhuang. In May 2019, he saw the daily orders of Pinduoduo stores increase to 3,000 to 4,000 orders, but Liu Haojie was distressed by the recruitment of Baoma.
"I told them at the time that it is very easy to make 40 pairs a day and earn 300 yuan, but they don't believe it at all, thinking that the salary is so high that it must be difficult to do." Liu Haojie is quite emotional about this.
Compared with Liu Haojie, Zhang Da's situation is slightly more moderate. The ten Baoma recruited by Zhang Da at the beginning of his entrepreneurship took on the main production tasks when the Pinduoduo store exploded, and their monthly income also increased to five figures. Later, these people also successively attracted more than 200 Baoma.This also made Zhang Da realize that the unique work characteristics of wearing armor are more conducive to the success of mothers. "Wearing armor is a purely manual job suitable for meticulous people, and the piece-rate payment work has a high degree of flexibility, making the mother group naturally suitable for this job." According to Zhang Da, it usually takes a week, or at most two or three days, for mothers to get started.
At the beginning of the teaching, Zhang Da's wife, Gu Hanling, noticed that high income and flexible time are important reasons to attract mothers to the industry.
"In small counties like Donghai, which are fourth or fifth tier, it used to be that men went out to earn money and women took care of the family. But in recent years, many families have had a second child, and the pressure of supporting a family suddenly increased." Gu Hanling said that jobs suitable for mothers, such as cashiers, used to have an income that was only enough to supplement the family's expenses, which is obviously no longer sufficient for them.
Take Dong Erjing, for example, who felt a sudden increase in pressure after giving birth to her third child. Before getting involved in wearing armor, Dong Erjing had considered becoming a "screw" on a factory assembly line.
"In the past, if you wanted to earn more, you could only go to an electronics factory or a garment factory, but you had to work for more than ten hours a day and couldn't take care of your children at all, and you could only get four or five thousand yuan a month." Dong Erjing said that after three years of cooperation with Ma Zhuang, her monthly income has reached eight or nine thousand yuan. "Mr. Ma's business on Pinduoduo is very big, and I have also brought many little sisters to do it together."
In Donghai, the commission for making a pair of wearing armor varies from five to eight yuan. With the accumulation of experience and the speed of work, the income of mothers is still increasing.
Li Jingqin, a mother of two children, has a monthly income of more than ten thousand yuan, which is twice as much as when she just started the business. "Although there are new styles of wearing armor every week, the actual production process is almost the same, and once you are proficient, you will only get faster and faster." She said.
While her income has doubled, Li Jingqin also takes care of her children's three meals a day. The place where she works is not far from home, and it only takes five minutes to walk to and from work every day. After the rise of wearing armor, businesses have become popular in setting up small workshops around the community, allowing mothers to work while also taking care of their families.
For example, after Ma Zhuang's sales on Pinduoduo reached 20 million yuan, the number of mothers he cooperated with soared to more than 600, for which he set up more than 20 workshops; Zhang Da maintains a stable cooperation with more than 200 mothers through six workshops."In the past, we would only rent residential buildings after we had recruited enough stay-at-home moms," according to Ma Zhuang, who introduced that the wearable nail business on Pinduoduo has been booming, leading to a high demand for stay-at-home mom labor, and now merchants will first seize the nearest residential buildings before they can attract stay-at-home moms. This also implies that stay-at-home moms have become the core talent for wearable nails.
Starting last year, facing the Donghai market with no stay-at-home moms to recruit, Ma Zhuang went to Kaifeng, Henan, to set up a workshop. "Because we can't recruit stay-at-home moms locally anymore, even those in rural towns have been taken, we have to recruit from other places."
The peak season only lasts for 20 days, and maintaining a continuous hit product is the way to break through.
Clothing has a typical sales characteristic of off-season and peak season, and as a clothing accessory, wearable nails also show similar characteristics: wearable nails tend to sell better in winter.
Gu Hanling found that compared to clothing, the peak season for wearable nails is even shorter. "Although Christmas, New Year's Day, and other festive days are also peak sales seasons, the more than twenty days around the Spring Festival can contribute to 70% of the annual sales."
How to seize these more than twenty days and earn more profits in the extremely short explosive period of wearable nails? What people in Donghai do is to retain as many stay-at-home moms as possible during the off-season sales.
"This is the same as in factories, stay-at-home moms feel that during the off-season, you don't have many orders here, and the income is unstable, so even if there are more orders during the peak season, she won't come," Gu Hanling emphasized that, after all, stay-at-home moms are the targets of competition everywhere in Donghai.
There are many people who failed to retain stay-at-home moms during the off-season and lost wearable nail orders during the peak season.Among them is Liu Haojie. After his first major sales surge in 2019, he experienced a continuous boom on Pinduoduo for the following three years, with peak daily sales reaching over 600,000 yuan, yet he still missed out on numerous orders. "There's no way around it; the number of mothers you can retain during the off-season is destined to determine how much money you can make during the peak season," he said.
For a period, some merchants in Donghai would hoard large quantities of goods during the off-season, quickly attracting a significant number of mothers, but due to unsold inventory and cash flow pressure, they soon faced financial difficulties. "One can only say that these people were too ambitious," Zhang Da described.
Compared to the aggressive hoarding strategy, Zhang Da has been steadily testing the strategy of bestsellers on Pinduoduo, taking a more cautious and methodical approach.
"By comparing the click-through rate and conversion rate of the wearable nails, Pinduoduo can identify a bestseller within the latest seven days," Zhang Da said. Through this method, he managed to test a "Starlight Chocolate" that reached a total sales volume of 100,000 orders in just three days; another style of wearable nail, "Beveled French," became a perennial bestseller for half a year.
This summer, Zhang Da's strategy was validated by the market. In June, he just rented a new factory covering 2,000 square meters. The continuous identification of bestsellers on Pinduoduo gave him the confidence to double his team's size during the off-season.
Ma Zhuang has a more explicit set of numbers when testing bestsellers: "If the conversion rate of a wearable nail test reaches 3%, it is very likely to explode." Zhang Da explained, "Because the product will experience explosive growth, if a wearable nail sells 100 units on Pinduoduo today, it might become 500 units tomorrow, and 1,000 units the day after, with the overall sales eventually becoming very impressive."
Under this strategy, Ma Zhuang once tested a super single product with sales reaching ten million yuan.
The strategy of testing bestsellers on Pinduoduo is being adopted by more people in Donghai and gradually extending the industry to fields beyond nail pieces, such as color gel and five-piece wearable nail sets.
"The production threshold for wearable nails is not high; we only have an advantage if we do the entire industry," said one merchant.