Small eyelashes, big business
Do business all over the world without leaving home.
Wang Pengjuan, the entrepreneur of "Hometown of False Eyelashes", has been focusing on "beautiful industry" for 15 years and constantly introducing new products.
An industry drives one party’s economy, and Dazeshan Town is a model. Walking in the streets of the "Hometown of False Eyelashes", you can see large billboards of so-and-so eyelashes everywhere. In this small town, every household’s life can’t be separated from the industry of false eyelashes.
Some people say that the annual transaction volume of 7.7 billion yuan makes a small town rich, while others say that the global false eyelashes are almost monopolized here. Behind this industry, a batch of self-employed individuals who have made a fortune because of false eyelashes have been born, and Wang Pengjuan, the founder of Artistic False Eyelash, is one of them.
Wang Pengjuan, founder of Artistic False Eyelashes.
Fifteen years ago, Wang Pengjuan, who had always been interested in the "beautiful industry", quit her factory job and set up a false eyelash company. Today, fifteen years later, the company has nearly 100 employees and four factories with an annual output of ten million boxes of false eyelashes.
Become attached to false eyelashes and start a business for 15 years and sell it to the world.
Hair pulling, curly hair, sticky hair … In a factory called Boxiu False Eyelash Factory in Dazeshan Town, the tweezers in the hand of worker Cui Jie flew quickly, and pairs of neat eyelashes appeared on the template.
This is the 15th year of Wang Pengjuan’s pioneering work. As a native of Dazeshan, she witnessed the rise and transformation of the false eyelash industry in the local area, and also witnessed the blossoming from the earliest one or two small workshops to today.
Talking to her about the beginning of the false eyelash industry, she quickly opened the chatterbox: "False eyelashes are popular in Pingdu, mainly influenced by Koreans. As early as more than 30 years ago, many Koreans came to Shandong to invest and build factories. "
"In recent years, the development of this industry in our town has reached its peak." She recalled.
Wang Pengjuan showed the products.
"Every afternoon is the busiest, because I have to ship, I ship 20,000 to 30,000 pairs of false eyelashes every day, and there can be no mistakes in tally, sub-packaging, packaging and delivery." According to Wang Pengjuan, her factory started from a small workshop with kang processing. In 2020, she invested and built a new factory in Chenjia Village, Dazeshan Town. The workshop and office conditions have been improved, the working environment has been improved, and the treatment of workers has been continuously improved. After receiving large orders from foreign customers, she distributed some orders to the surrounding processing factories, which promoted the development of more than 20 eyelash and related supporting enterprises.
"When the benefits were good in previous years, the orders could not be received, and most of the customers came from some countries in Europe and America." Talking about her achievements today, Wang Pengjuan said with a smile that she is still in the right line.
Wang Pengjuan became attached to false eyelashes, and she had to start from fifteen years ago. Fifteen years ago, as a native of Dazeshan, Wang Pengjuan had a stable job, but restless, she wanted to make greater achievements. By chance, Wang Pengjuan found that the business of false eyelashes in the town was getting better and better. Discovering new business opportunities, she happened to receive an invitation from an old customer, asking her to help sell false eyelashes online. "I didn’t expect to simply upload a few physical maps. After one week, I started to measure, and I could sell thousands of dollars a day." The early Taobao shop was not as competitive as it is now. Wang Pengjuan, who tasted the sweetness, sold fake eyelashes online.
"Instead of doing it, it is better to set up your own brand!" With the accumulation of business, Wang Pengjuan became familiar with the whole industrial process, so she opened her first false eyelash factory in Pingdu, and founded her own false eyelash brand-Yizhun False Eyelash, which opened a new path of self-production and self-sales.
Most processes rely on manual future development and technological innovation.
As the largest gathering area of false eyelashes supply chain in the world, the factory assembly line in Dazeshan Town is still mostly manual.
From the procurement of raw materials to the final product, false eyelashes need more than ten processes, such as hair cutting, hair curling, hair sticking and so on. Of the more than ten processes, only a few processes need to be completed manually with machines, and most processes are still done by hand.
Wang Pengjuan, the founder of Artistic False Eyelashes, is guiding the craft.
According to Wang Pengjuan, hair has a certain particularity, and it is difficult to achieve full assembly line. Therefore, after these years of "evolution", they have divided into multiple processing points, each of which is responsible for three or five processes in the whole process, and finally re-integrated.
"For example, the process of Kamao is to manually hold a small machine and manually operate it again and again." Wang Pengjuan said, for example, there is a machine called "stereotypes" in the process, which was only developed in recent years. Before that, this process was also manual and very cumbersome.
With an annual turnover of more than 7 billion yuan, why didn’t the factory become fully mechanized? Wang Pengjuan explained that most of the transaction amount was taken away by middlemen, and we were only at the supply chain end, and the profit was not high.
"However, some industrial parks in Dazeshan Town already have a number of machines under development, which may come to market in a while. If the effect is good, we will definitely be new at the first time." Wang Pengjuan said.
Plan live broadcast to speed up product update iteration.
Engaged in this industry for more than ten years, Wang Pengjuan has experienced many shuffles in the industry and great changes in the era of e-commerce and short video.
Wang Pengjuan said that in the past, the participants were mainly offline wholesale markets and foreign trade companies. Nowadays, MCN and KOL of many social platforms will also negotiate with us.
"But we are generally reluctant to cooperate with big bloggers. First, we have to stock up in large quantities, and second, the profits are too low." Wang Pengjuan said.
But it is undeniable that the e-commerce platform provides a broader market space for some young entrepreneurs. However, for more middle-aged founders, the entry of e-commerce giants such as Tik Tok, Taobao and Pinduoduo means more intense price killing and more complicated operation mode.
"I also want to do factory live broadcast, and directly find customers who ask for orders and retail customers, but I can’t find suitable talents." Wang Pengjuan said.
When talking about future plans, she still firmly stated that she wanted to be the one who ate crabs. "Although so many factories around us have not broadcast live, we all know that once we do it, there is a strong potential energy."
In addition to finding a way out at the sales end, Wang Pengjuan has been speeding up the iteration of styles for more than ten years. "From thick eyebrows and heavy makeup to thin eyebrows and nude makeup, the popular styles of false eyelashes in these years have changed a lot. Our factory will have new products every month. " As she spoke, she pointed to the rows of false eyelashes with different styles on the display cabinet behind her and introduced them respectively: "This is the trilogy of Sunflower, Little Flame, Lazy Man and Bai Yueguang …".
According to her introduction, in the past, people who wore false eyelashes were mostly young people aged 18-30. Nowadays, with the concept of "beauty regardless of age" becoming more and more popular, the consumers of false eyelashes have expanded to 16-55 years old.
Wang Pengjuan believes that in the future, the realization of large-scale production, live broadcast and other new marketing methods are in place, which is the beginning of the contest in the second half of the false eyelashes industry and the best path for the "hometown of false eyelashes" to jump.
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Why is the false eyelash industry profitable?
"Sometimes the profit of a box of false eyelashes in pairs is less than a dime." Regarding the profit of false eyelashes, Wang Pengjuan added that according to the different raw materials and styles, she set the unit price of a box of false eyelashes between 10 yuan and 15 yuan, but the profit is actually very meager: "The materials we purchase are mostly chemical fiber raw materials that are relatively close to the people, and the price of a box of raw materials is only a few cents. But labor costs are the bulk of the cost of false eyelashes. "
She said that the piece rate of each working procedure in the factory is about 1.2-1.5 yuan, which means that after six working procedures, the labor cost of false eyelashes will reach 7-9 yuan. Multi-process needs to invest more assets, and it also requires high labor quantity and proficiency.
Wang Pengjuan said that since the beginning of this year, the volume of the industry has become more obvious, and the order volume is declining.
"I feel that the whole industry has entered a new stage." Wang Pengjuan has been in the false eyelash industry for fifteen years and has gone through three business cycles of this industry.
Before entering the industry of false eyelashes, Wang Pengjuan always felt that "the threshold of this business is not high, the cost is low, and it is not difficult to make money". However, when she plunged into it, she found that there were more challenges than expected. "However, there have been three big shuffles, and I can stay every time." (Guanhai News/Qingdao Evening News/Pocket Qingdao reporter Xue Fei)
Editor in charge: Yue Wenyan