Market Research Etc.

Market research with Bonnie (Chenchen) and Joy (Lulu, I think).

I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week with my assistant/translator Joy, the manager of domestic sales Chenchen, and the sales managers from Ningbo and Shanghai. We toured supermarkets and department stores in each of their areas scrutinizing competitors’ cleaning products along with ours etc. It was nice getting out of Xiwu and seeing more of the country. Shanghai’s traffic is terrible, but our driver didn’t seem too flustered. I learned ‘fan si le’ meaning ‘troublesome to death’ while in the Shanghai traffic.

I’ve found they use more dry floor sweepers here than wet mops. Each company has several models with very functional differences. I’ve come up with a few ideas on differentiating our products, we currently aren’t selling well in that category, but it’s so saturated now I think I’m going to wait and create some new products for the company first. There are also some significant quality and mechanical design issues I was able to identify, but my intent is to provide direction on these to my, yet to be hired, engineer, as opposed to modeling it myself. I’ve learned that there is some kind of patent protection here, a few features on some of the dominant products were pointed out as being patented. I couldn’t figure out how they new it, there’s no patent marking like we would have, and getting the details of the patent will probably be even tougher, but it was interesting to know that in a place so known for IP theft.

I’ve yet to identify a distinctive Chineses look to the products. ID seems to still be new to this market, and it isn’t fashion-driven, such as in mobile phones which are very Chinese and there are regional favorites, but I think there is opportunity to create beautiful, desirable products in this market, just like Casabella, Target, and Oxo have done in the U.S. So, for the time being I’m more interested in creating a strong brand for Shijia than figuring out what the Chinese flair is.

Transportation

We had Shijia’s driver take us in the company’s minivan to Ningbo and Shanghai. The driving in quite scary for someone used to U.S. driving habits. Cutting people off, forcing your way into traffic, weaving through traffic going 30 mph less are just the way it works. In the van was the driver, the domestic sales manager, a Shanghai sales manager, the company owner’s wife (she holds an active position in the company, I just can’t remember it) and her daughter. A little way out of Xiwu I became of a soft gurgling noise coming from behind me. I saw that the cute little daughter had become car sick and was being helped by her mom and one of the others with a bag, she must be less than two years old. What surprised me was that through the whole ordeal she didn’t make a sound, not a cry or a whine, I guessed that she could be mute, but she was fine. So now I’ve seen dogs that don’t chase cars and kids that don’t cry, at least when they’re sick – this is a strange place. Three times in the trip we hit the brakes hard enough to through the driver’s little dancing wooden Buda, and his other things on the dash against the windshield. I won’t forget my seatbelt.

At the end of the day after touring the second store in a chain that looked exactly alike, the girls turned to me and with a sly look said, “Now we can go shopping!” It wasn’t too bad, I don’t have Toni’s sizes yet, so I didn’t buy anything, but it was pretty weird being in a nice mall and seeing nothing over about $40. Some sectors are conspicuously missing, such as camping gear. I wanted to buy a new pocket knife, since I had to leave mine, but we couldn’t find one, or even a department that had anything close to it.

Cow tongue

It actually isn’t unhealthy, it’s a muscle, w/o fat, but I just don’t like the smell. Maybe a little mouth wash before they went would’ve helped. I finally fell asleep in the van on the way back, for I was suddenly in Fenghua parked on a wide sidewalk. I dragged my feet along to the others and through my hazy eyes saw over a dozen of these smooth, flesh colored, nautical looking objects on a small table in front of a restaurant. I realized they were cow tongues. I don’t mind the meat, but the outside is kind of furry and has the strongest flavor, also, it’s not dark red, it’s light colored. The soup we had, which I think they got for me, since I told them I liked noodles (you can’t go wrong with noodles, right?) was lightly flavored, and had baby bok choy, the skin off the cow tongue cut in strips, and a little bit of the meat. I couldn’t do it that night, I just wasn’t up to the challenge. All I could say, when Joy looked over at my bowl, still full of strips of tongue was, “not bad”. Still, I think I might have offended them.

I’m slowly catching on to what I like and how to get it. There are some people I just don’t like to eat with, and tofu has become a relative comfort food. Maybe I’ll sneak my camera to dinner and start snapping photos of my favorite dishes. Still, it is healthy and fresh. Twice during lunch today a fish jumped out of it’s tank onto the floor and had to be put back in. All the veggies are kept in baskets on a rack against the wall or are somehow displayed. You can point to what you want and they cook it up, only a few cooking options exist.

Injection molding

I gave myself a tour of the injection molding facilities tonight. They are quite advanced here probably having over 30 machines, all modern, and a quarter of which using robots (that’s not a cruel reference to the workers, they are custom robots used for loading and unloading parts), vertical and multi-shot machines. I was relieved to not see any children or obvious safety issues. I had dinner with a guy about my age who called himself a bum, basically he was jobless. We were both eating alone in the restaurant so I invited him to eat at my table. He had just come into town looking for work. I learned that factory workers usually make about 80 yuan/day for a 10 hour day. I know overtime exists, but I’m not sure when it starts. He was staying in a cheap hotel (barely cheaper than my own) on money he had saved while he looked. I actually tried really hard to pay, but he forced his way and paid for dinner. Quite a striking contrast to Atl where they will ask for your money, but snub a meal. These guys work hard.