Wang Ning: During the National Day holiday in 2007, my good friend and I took a train for the first time to Shanghai. I remember chatting casually on the train when someone smiled with a glint in their eyes and said to us, "Shanghai is full of gold everywhere, it just depends on whether you can pick it up!" This filled us with anticipation for this city.

The two of us wandered curiously through the streets of Shanghai, seeing everything as new and exciting. In the evening, on a remote alley, I saw an elderly woman setting up a stall selling glowing horns that concert fans like to wear on their heads. I immediately became interested in this small item. My companion at the time didn’t understand why I was so interested in such a tiny thing, but I firmly told him this was a business opportunity because I had never seen this in Henan. It was fun and very attractive. Christmas was coming soon, and we could bring it back to Henan to sell, and it would definitely sell well.
Then we started looking for factories in China that could produce this kind of product, and contacted classmates in several cities in Henan, preparing to launch sales simultaneously during the Christmas season. That’s how we began our first close contact with the retail industry using the college student street stall approach.
Fortunately, the sales during Christmas were as explosive as we expected, with nearly 10,000 glowing horns sold. This sparked my strong interest in product retail. Previously, making documentaries required a long production cycle, but the small goods we purchased didn’t need R&D, and flipping them could earn the same profit as developing our own products.
In the following period, I led my team to visit places like Hangzhou and Yiwu, inspecting and selling some other interesting small products. Since then, we became obsessed with that feeling—discovering new products that people like and buy quickly, and the thrill of it.