Lou Zhongping dropped out of school at the age of 14, followed his father's "chicken feathers for sugar" trade, traveled all over the country, and started his entrepreneurial career as a peddler. In the early days of starting a business, it was also the hustle and bustle of youth that made him look up mountains. He successively collected pesticide bottles, chicken feathers, sold toothbrushes, and engaged in breeding... During this period, he worked in more than 20 businesses, but achieved nothing. After he turned thirty, he meditated quietly, not making the same mistake again and again, and began to cherish what he had! Resist all temptations, shoulder all the pressure, and focus on an inconspicuous little commodity - a straw. Although the product is small, with his persistence and concentration in the past two decades, he has built a straw into the world's number one straw brand in the straw kingdom. According to statistics in 2012, his Shuangtong Straws produced nearly 20 tons of straws per day. Adhering to the path of innovation, he forced him to sell straws priced at 8 cents each and produce an output value of hundreds of millions of yuan, becoming a veritable world leader. Hidden champion. In the words of Lou Zhongping: "The choice to start a business is like being reincarnated into your mother's womb. Since you have chosen, you must make it perfect, sophisticated, and a century-old business." There are no sunset industries in the world, only sunset companies. It is with the entrepreneurial spirit of "taking small to make big" that he has made great achievements on only 18 acres of land, designing and building Yiwu Ecological Factory, the first enterprise in green environmental protection, energy conservation and emission reduction, and created "gathering sand to form a tower" legend of wealth and became the leader in the straw industry. Lou Zhongping builds his own straw kingdom by "taking small to make a big difference"

Lou Zhongping has six brothers and sisters in his family. He has been traveling with his fellow villagers since he was 15 years old, using rattles and peddlers' drums as a means of making a living. At that time, Lou Zhongping didn't make a lot of money by doing business as a salesman. But it made him understand a business concept that has influenced his life, that is, not to do small things for the sake of profit. This concept later accompanied Lou Zhongping to complete the legend of wealth accumulation like gathering sand into a tower. It can be said that the Yiwu peddler business in the late 1970s and 1980s was a side job for many farmers during their spare time. At that time, in addition to earning a living as a peddler, Lou Zhongping also tried many industries, but none of them could change his fate. In 1991, Lou Zhongping decided to end his long-term wandering life as a peddler, set up street stalls around the Yiwu market, and slowly rented stalls to enter the market business. Because he entered the market business, he was assigned a department store stall in Huangyuan Market. Through stall management, Lou Zhongping became a leader among the 5 or 6 business households in two or three years. "Because I suffered hardships as a child, I am very down-to-earth and very stubborn. More than 10 years ago, when I had the opportunity to start a business, I chose to make straws. Because there were not many people making straws at that time, and the small profits were small but quick to sell. , you can still make money if you do it well. The most important thing to avoid when doing business is to go too far.”

At that time, the fourth-generation market, Huangyuan Market, was put into use. Lou Zhongping saw a business opportunity at that time and thought that selling plastic products would be a good idea. The more samples, the more comprehensive the categories, and the more varieties, the more customers can be attracted and bigger orders can be signed. So at that time, before the fourth-generation market opened, he spent 46,000 yuan on it. I opened a stall at the junction of daily necessities and hardware, the first stall in the main aisle. When Lou Zhongping's business in the market was booming, many stall operators followed his lead. Whatever goods he sold, others followed suit. Lou Zhongping believes that there is a big crisis hidden behind this kind of homogeneous competition. You must find your own unique path to remain invincible in the fierce market competition. By chance, he focused on an inconspicuous straw. At that time, it was very simple. The couple asked their family members to help, and then called on a few employees, and just like that, the two machines were opened.

Only when Lou Zhongping started to set up a factory did he realize that setting up a factory was far from being as simple as he imagined. The first thing he encountered was the problem of product sales. When I decided to set up a factory, I told a customer in Jiaxing that he had an order from the United States and the product he needed every day was a 6-ton truck. As a result, it takes a week to order a truckload of goods. Since then, we had to find new sales channels by ourselves. At that time, the company's development concept was very primitive and there was no brand awareness. In terms of funds, the company also used its own accumulation to expand and grow.

So at that stage, Lou Zhongping added two or three pieces of equipment for producing straws almost every year. The company's steady growth developed. As the scale of the company became larger and larger, his straw factory took over the entire industry. Half of the private houses in the village are rented as factories. Seeing that his straw business was doing well, many Yiwu businessmen followed him and started straw factories. The number of straw factories in the city suddenly expanded from the original three or four to thirty or forty. Competition has also become increasingly fierce. Coupled with the Asian financial crisis in 1997, raw materials have risen sharply.

At this time, straw manufacturers in Yiwu and across the country were in an unsustainable situation. At this time, Lou Zhongping began to think about whether to quit this industry, and his wife also began to persuade him to quit as soon as possible and find a new industry. However, Lou Zhongping finally believed that straws are a typical consumable disposable product, and the market demand will be increasing with the development of the global economy. As long as we get through the current difficulties, we will definitely have a good prospect. After this understanding was established, instead of shrinking the front line, he took the opportunity to acquire some straw companies that were facing bankruptcy. As a result, it has further rapidly grown in scale. After the company grew, Lou Zhongping believed that it could no longer simply expand reproduction as before, but must improve the company's brand value and its own innovation capabilities.

In 1995, he was careful and discovered that all the straws sold on the market had the faces of two children printed on the packaging. Straws without this logo could not be sold. He immediately went to the Industrial and Commercial Bureau to check, and found that no one had registered this trademark. He immediately rushed to the Industrial and Commercial Bureau with 2,000 yuan to go through the trademark registration procedures. The registration of the trademark greatly promoted Lou Zhongping and his Shuangtong Straws to embark on the road of branding. It also gave him an epiphany: the advantages of brands in the fierce market competition. Although Lou Zhongping is not highly educated, he is a studious entrepreneur. From hardware to software, from learning the latest development of the Internet to studying Japanese companies many times, building ecological factories, rainwater collection systems, reclaimed water reuse systems, geothermal air conditioning, and a series of plans including every plant and tree in the factory area, He drew and designed all by himself. During his studies, he learned about business management, how to employ people, and how to unite people and turn a company into a big family united as one.

The three years of 1997, 1998, and 1999 were the three years Lou Zhongping studied at the Zhejiang University branch. This further study is different from the pure study in the past, because by 1997, in the business operation, his company had already reached a certain scale, and he had encountered many problems and setbacks, and he was at a crossroads. , at that time, I was very confused about what to do with my business. During these three years of study, he learned many things that he had not learned in his life. What is an enterprise? What is management? What is a brand? What is a concept? What is thinking? Therefore, it is about learning and applying. While learning, you can apply it to business operations, effectively combining theory and practice.

"I started surfing the Internet very early. When the Internet was still a new thing in China, I put straws on the Internet and sold them. I used straws to 'suck' the world in." Lou Zhongping said This matter benefited from the development of the Internet. Relying on the Internet, his straws were sold all over the world. Currently, the company's business through e-commerce accounts for more than half of the company's total business.

2000 - Enjoy the free meal of the Internet

As early as 2000, I put small straws on the Internet for sale. In addition to various search engines, I also Use your membership on an e-commerce website to sell small straws to the world.

At that time, free lunches on the Internet were still popular in China. Through free online promotion, we also received some orders and tasted some benefits, which laid a good foundation for the company to enter full network operations. .

2002——E-commerce is our company’s top priority

Since 2002, we have operated e-commerce as our top priority.

From a small business in a traditional industry to a large enterprise with an output value of over 100 million yuan, e-commerce has given us a huge boost, mainly due to the huge turnaround in the following aspects:

First, business ideas change. In the past, the so-called business was face-to-face, person-to-person, material and currency transactions, and there was no concept of "virtual".

Second, operational behavior, that is, changes in operating mode. It used to be the era of telephones and faxes, but now it's the era of computers and the Internet. The convenience, breadth, and influence of the network model are incomparable to the traditional model. From the traditional model to a virtual business operation, as long as you keep your computer and network, you no longer need to see people, things, and money. You can still do business if you don't see everything.

Third, in terms of production, finance and enterprise management. The use of e-commerce by enterprises reduces operating costs and improves work efficiency. Our company's local area network covers every workshop and team. Documents can be uploaded and issued in a paperless manner; orders can be placed directly to the terminal workshop.

2003 and 2004 - Using the Internet to focus on overseas markets

Now it can be said that we can be searched on any Internet. Our salesmen never go out to do business. Customers take the initiative to contact us, and currently 80% of the company's business comes from the Internet. All these results are achieved thanks to two words - opportunity. Guarding a shop is worse than guarding a computer. No matter how good shopping malls or stores are, they are not as good as large online markets.