Folklore is a story passed down orally by ordinary people
I will bring you an article about how the global straw king is made:
"Achieve another level of success" is the motto of "Shuangtong" business management. It means that although the straw is small, it needs to use a broad mind to perfect the small straw, and do not blindly compare, do not aim too high, and continue to Focus on turning "Shuangtong" into a century-old enterprise to achieve another unique height. Lou Zhongping, chairman of Yiwu Shuangtong Daily Necessities Co., Ltd. explained.
The self-made "straw king"
"I dropped out of school at the age of fourteen and followed my father to "exchange chicken feathers for sugar" in Jiangxi. In the next fifteen years, I struggled I have worked in more than 20 industries and failed countless times. Starting in 1992, I started to come into contact with straws when I was running a stall in Yiwu Small Commodity Market. At that time, I only purchased goods from Guangdong, Fujian and other places and sold them in the Yiwu market. "Two years later. Based on the large number of straw customers he had accumulated, Lou Zhongping decided to produce his own straws. He founded the Shuangtong Straw Factory in 1994. In the blink of an eye, he has been doing it for 20 years, and has turned a straw that only earns a few cents per straw into an output value of hundreds of millions, becoming the largest straw manufacturer in the world.
It is conceivable that Lou Zhongping, who started from scratch, must have experienced many hardships in his early years of entrepreneurship. However, these hardships are like grains of sand, turning into a dazzling pearl in the years. Today, he is known as the "Straw King". His Weibo has more than 400,000 followers. "Shuangtong" has also presided over the drafting and formulation of international standards for straws on behalf of Chinese straw companies in 2012.
He also subverted people's views on straws and turned straws into works of art. Various shapes of artistic straws, toy straws with windmills, haha ??straws to help children take medicine, and love straws for a couple to drink together can all be found here.
The current "Shuangtong" has gained a lot in innovation, with 5 invention patents and more than 100 utility model patents. This year, 2-3 invention patents have been approved, and the number of valid straw patents it owns has reached more than two-thirds of the world's straw patents. Lou Zhongping said, "The secret to making small straws bigger is constant innovation. The idea of ??innovation is to graft ordinary straws with fun, functionality and entertainment, thereby giving new life to the inconspicuous little straws. ".
In 1995, he registered the "Shuangtong" trademark as his own brand. At that time, Yiwu small commodity market owners rarely had brand awareness. Lou Zhongping discovered that the outer packaging of straws produced across the country had two children's logos (the current trademark pattern of the double-child straws). One day, on a whim, he took the packaging of a pack of straws to the Yiwu Industrial and Commercial Bureau to inquire. Although the staff did not know this The origin of the logo, but he was told that no one had registered the trademark yet. Lou Zhongping immediately went home and took out 2,000 yuan to register the trademark. Two years later, at the end of 1997, Lou Zhongping obtained the "Shuangtong" trademark certificate approved by the National Trademark Office, and changed the "Shuangtong" trademark used by straw factories across the country. The trademark was "owned" and a solemn statement of trademark rights was published in the local newspaper.
Later, he took the lead in foreign trade exports, and in 2003 he already occupied 20% of the global market. By 2005, Shuangtong's daily production capacity reached 100 million straws.
The period was not without twists and turns. In 2005, Lou Zhongping realized that although European and American customers had placed large orders, they had kept prices too low, causing "Shuangtong" to stay at the low-end and simple production in large quantities and neglected its business. for innovation. So he began to consciously shift sales from foreign markets to the domestic market. Free up more than half of the production space to develop domestic high-quality small customers, focus on cultivating the domestic consumer market for high-end straws, and increase the marginal effect of the "Shuangtong" brand. A large number of high-quality "Shuangtong" straws have begun to enter supermarkets and high-end restaurants across China. Consumption, the core competitiveness of enterprises can be effectively improved. The control pattern of the enterprise market has completely changed, from the original dominance of large customers to the current dominance of small businesses, which have firmly grasped the voice and initiative in industry development.
The first intimate contact with computers
Lou Zhongping started to come into contact with computers in 1995. At that time, some companies only used computers to show their appearance, but he learned it meticulously. This amazing machine may "change the world". He started by learning typing and started to contact the Internet in the second half of 1997. This is another journey for him.
"Before this, the Internet was still unfamiliar to our generation, especially those of us in third- and fourth-tier cities like Yiwu." Lou Zhongping said that foreign customers at that time brought us Let’s get some information about the Internet. At that time, there were already some early applications of the Internet in China. So they jumped on the trend and tentatively spent 10,000 yuan to hire someone to build a simple website, using the Internet to find foreign customers. "When Jack Ma was working on the China Yellow Pages, we started working on corporate websites." Lou Zhongping joked.
It was also through e-commerce that he came into contact with a person who had a profound influence on him. The 70-year-old Japanese businessman Michaki Kuwahara saw the "Two Boys" website on the web and connected with this cross-border friendship. He taught him many business concepts and management experience, which was of great help to Lou Zhongping in his subsequent business ventures. When Michio Kuwahara passed away in 2012, Lou Zhongping posted 8 consecutive Weibo posts to commemorate this business senior who influenced his life.
He makes the large-scale decisions of the company, and he is also dedicated to the implementation of small details. Once when he saw that the company's pictures in the Shuangtong Tmall flagship store were not "high-end" enough, Lou Zhongping stayed in the studio for more than a month, and the photos he took highlighted the color and shape, focused on texture, and combined the straws with The colors are vividly presented. Lou Zhongping has repeatedly emphasized, "I am the person who knows the best about straws in the world, and the world's top straw experts must be among Shuangtong."
It must be mentioned that Lou Zhongping taught himself professional engineering drawing software, personally participated in the design of drawings, and personally designed the construction of the company's factory buildings. If he hadn't seen the pictures on the computer with his own eyes, Design drawings, his extraordinary learning ability is simply incredible. Lou Zhongping patiently introduced: "The bottom of the building is a water reservoir, the roof is a vegetable garden, and the walls of the factory building are covered with various pipes."
In addition, he also posts on Weibo and WeChat He is an expert with more than 400,000 Weibo followers and has posted more than 14,000 Weibo posts. Now, a "Weibo matrix" effect has been formed in which the Weibo posts of @Lou Zhongping, @Shuangtong Straw and dozens of employees are linked to each other and often forwarded to each other. He frequently posts corporate activities and management experiences on his personal WeChat, and also has the straw man of Shuangtong Weibo and the straw girl of "Shuangtong Straw" on the public WeChat jointly publishing information. With years of familiarity with the Internet, he has a deeper understanding of new media than the average person.
Some people may ask, if your assets are so big, why don’t you invest in several other industries like other e-commerce companies? He still maintains his humble attitude: "I will not be fooled by the empty heat in front of me. In this life, I just hope to make this straw perfect."
Perseverance can carve gold and stone. It was this spirit that allowed him to take the small straw to another level.
Be a happy boss
He is a boss who is both "stingy" and "extravagant", but his happiness index is very high because he has created a "happy kingdom" .
He spent several years designing and turning the factory area of ??less than 20 acres into a green and environmentally friendly recycling factory, making it the enterprise with the highest land utilization rate in the country. He designed gray water treatment and rainwater collection systems that are rare in private enterprises in China. The factory has been built into a veritable low-carbon and environmentally friendly "garden factory". He applied the energy-saving and consumption-reducing concepts he learned from Japan to the daily operations of the company, saving 2 million yuan in water and electricity costs every year.
The internal facilities of the Shuangtong Administration Building are built to the hardware standards of a three-star hotel. The first and second floors are office areas, and the third to eighth floors are staff dormitories. More than 70 million yuan was spent to build an environmentally friendly and ecological factory building, and nearly 30 million yuan was spent on the construction and decoration of the employee dormitory building alone. Faucets, doors, and beds are all made of first-line brands.
The indoor environment is very clean, and the faucet has never been replaced in nine years. It is difficult to keep it in such good condition even in your own home. "We use stainless steel to weld these beds in the room. Once installed, they cannot be moved out, so we consider their lifetime use. When I designed them, I thought very long-term. The company needs to retain talents. We must make them live a comfortable and stable life, and this money cannot be saved," Lou Zhongping said firmly.
There is a two-story sky garden on the roof of the company, where more than 20 kinds of vegetables and fruits such as peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, sugar cane, and grapes are planted in an orderly manner. "In foreign countries, such rooftop gardens have long existed. The efficient use of space allows employees to relax, utilizes resources and improves the environment. Moreover, the vegetables grown on the roof are pesticide-free, safe and secure, and you can't finish them all. You can also add food to the canteen," Lou Zhongping said with a smile.
There is also a multi-functional hall called "Nine Pavilions" on the ninth floor of Shuangtong, which is specially used for employees' learning and entertainment activities. There is also a small library next to it to store various books for employees to borrow. . Lou Zhongping is a person who loves learning. He likes to constantly learn and accept new things. The company also conducts weekly study meetings, allowing all management to share and communicate with each other on a weekly basis. Study meetings also have their own rules for row seats. Each study meeting requires staff from various departments to sit cross-legged and apart. He said this was to strengthen communication between departments and stimulate new ideas and creativity.
At the entrance of the administrative building downstairs is a large company garden of several thousand square meters and an employee fitness area, both of which were built by Lou Zhongping at a "huge sum" of money. There is a clear lotus pond at the entrance of the company, with the scene of "little lotus just showing its sharp corners". If you don’t know, you must not know that this is the famous gray water reservoir in the wastewater collection system. Next to it is a two-hundred-year-old camphor tree, a row of persimmon trees, loquat trees and grapefruit trees, all full of various fruits. Lou Zhongping told us, "This place was originally made of rocks. In order to plant trees, the rocks were dug out more than five meters deep, and then soil was brought from outside to backfill, so the trees grew much more vigorously than outside the factory area."
Details determine success or failure. Lou Zhongping's attention to every small link is destined to push this company into a better and further future. "Companies that do well abroad will always be passed down for hundreds of years, and we will continue to make this straw." He is as confident about Shuangtong's future as he was twenty years ago.
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