Scott's China Trip - Part 4: Yiwu and the Grand Market

*Be sure to see Mitzi's regularly scheduled post below this one.*

We met in the executive lounge for breakfast and everyone was hitting up Matt and Mike with questions. They were happy to answer everything while also reminding everyone that this was going to be the first day of training and we were just getting started. We were also glad to meet Paul, our poor lost classmate who missed his connection in Toronto but had made it to Yiwu basically on his own to meet up with us. At breakfast we hit up the wait staff for lots of watermelon juice as it was a big hit with our group, and they learned to have it on hand for us during our stay.

 The Executive Lounge in our hotel, conveniently located on the same floor as my room, always had gorgeous table decorations. These are all live plants.

 Part of the breakfast spread. Looks pretty much like one you would see in the USA, which was comforting (though not a lot of US breakfast spreads have chow mein as an option).

We then moved to the business conference room to officially start our training. We reviewed some of the basic principles of their Amazon Secrets course, and then took some time to go around and have everyone introduce themselves to the group, including what brought us to China and what we hoped to achieve.

It was great to get to know the group and get jazzed up for our first visit to the Yiwu market which was just across the street from our hotel. But before we went to the market, we met Jing of JingSourcing.com, Mike and Matt’s sourcing agent of choice in China. He is 27 years old and has his own office on the opposite side of the market from our hotel. He and a few of his associates met us in front of the hotel and gave us a ride to lunch at an Egyptian restaurant near his office. True to form, the food took forever to get to us but when it arrived it was quite good and made me nostalgic for my trip to the Middle East back in 2000.

Our group with Jing and his staff. Mike is in the grey shirt with his arm around Jing (glasses, grey sport coat), and Matt is in the white shirt in the front.

                              

The menu at the Egyptian restaurant. "This for money." Straightforward. I like it.

We left the restaurant and took a 5 minute walk to Jing’s office on the third floor of this big, boxy, old office building. We got to meet his staff, see his operation, and were treated to some customary SCALDING hot Chinese herbal tea; it seems like they keep the stuff boiling in the pot and then pour it into your cup where it’s no longer boiling but only just. It also has very little flavor so it’s basically like sipping at boiling water on a humid, sweaty day. Good stuff.

Then it was time to take our first crack at the market. We walked across the street from Jing’s office with Jing in tow and entered the market. We entered on the first floor in a section that dealt in kids’ toys. There were tons of different shapes and sizes of quadcopter drones, including one about the size of a tangerine that was pretty amazing. There was also a lot of junk too, and Mike and Matt explained that often people from other countries will buy the cheapest, lowest quality stuff, but if you try to sell that in the US no one will buy it.  Because the market sells to all parties so you just have to keep your eye out for the stuff that’s going to work for where you plan to sell.

We then went upstairs and arrived in the vast jewelry section. I was excited because I had found a few jewelry items and had ordered samples from Amazon because they were selling like gang-busters and were dirt cheap to manufacture! Unfortunately, finding the exact right thing when there are 3000 different jewelry stalls selling pretty much the same stuff as far as the eye can see, it can be a bit overwhelming. Additionally, jewelry on Amazon is a “gated” product category, which means you can’t start selling jewelry right away without jumping through a few hoops first. Consequently, I shifted my focus a bit from jewelry to home & kitchen because that is an “un-gated” category where I could start selling right away. I had also purchased some samples from that category and it was easy to just shift my sights.

We spent a few hours with Mike and Matt wandering the market more-or-less as a group getting an idea of what to expect tomorrow when they were going to turn us loose with a personal interpreter to find our own products to launch. We then went back to the hotel at about 4:30pm before meeting back down in the lobby to go out to dinner with Jing. A few members of the group were wiped out so they just ate at the hotel and called it a night, but a few of us joined Jing to go to dinner at Yiwu’s newest  mall. The mall was about 30 minutes away, once again leaving the impression on me that cities in China are HUGE, and when we arrived it was a pretty impressive place. It was incredibly clean, bright, sparkly, new, and full of stores, restaurants, and balloon decorations. We Americans noted how malls are really on the decline in the US and wondered if this fine Chinese mall would be meeting a similar fate in a decade or two.

                                      

                                      

After looking around for a while Jing pulled us into an authentic Chinese restaurant. Mike and Matt had him order us a bunch of authentic Chinese dishes so we could get the real Chinese food experience. What we got (after another long wait) was a lot of soup-based dishes, a lot of seafood, and generally a lot of stuff that our American palettes weren’t especially accustomed to. They ended up bringing out probably 12 different dishes, each one of which could have been a dinner for two, and we devoured 2-3 of them, made a dent in 2-3 more, and hardly touched the remainder that made up the most foreign of the fare. When we got the bill, what would have been easily over $200 in the US was less than half that. Pretty sweet deal, especially given that we basically ate less than half of what we ordered, but we all left with a much better idea of what authentic Chinese food (at least in this part of China) is.

Everyone was exhausted by the time we got back to the hotel and called it a night. I took a little stroll before turning in because I had been so fascinated by the way Chinese skyscrapers are designed like giant neon candles in the night sky. Have just recently re-watched Blade Runner, as well as a few YouTube film essays analyzing its influences as well as its influence, I was struck by how Blade Runner-esque the nighttime skyline of Yiwu was and wanted to take some pictures. There was one building in particular that was close to the hotel I wanted to grab some pictures of, but as I was walking I realized that the scale of all of these buildings is so massive that things that seem like they are pretty close end up being quite a trek on foot. I wandered back to the hotel and turned in for the night so I could be ready for the next two days of canvassing the market looking for products.

                                      

                                      

The Yiwu Marriott and some of its many colors