At 9:40 Sunday night, the bus pulled into Hangzhou East Railway Station.
Lin Fan got off with his backpack half emptied, took two buses back to his apartment complex, and climbed to the second floor in the dark. The stairwell light was still broken.
The moment the door opened, Ma Le sprang up from the sofa, remote still in hand.
"Two thousand pairs? You've got to be kidding me!"
"Twenty-one thousand. Paid in full. They'll arrive in Hangzhou on Wednesday." Lin Fan tossed his bag onto the shoe cabinet. "Factory Director Ye is riding with the shipment tomorrow morning."
Ma Le stood there with his mouth open, counting on his fingers. Halfway through, even he started to panic.
"Man, we've got thirty-three thousand altogether. Last week you told me the money was tied up in stock. Now it's gone to sleep inside a pile of shoes."
"There's still seven thousand on the card."
"Seven thousand?" Ma Le dropped back onto the sofa. "What's that going to cover? Don't you still owe Old He the balance for the scarves? And didn't you promise my cousin a pair of boots? If my mom asks what I've been doing these past six months, I'll have to tell her I rented our garage to a lunatic."
Lin Fan went to the kitchen, poured himself some water, and drank half the glass in one go.
The cold wind at the station had blown through him the whole trip. He was tired, but his head was clear.
There were twenty days left until November 11. Starting tomorrow, he had three things to get done.
First, he needed somewhere to put roughly two hundred boxes. Half the garage wouldn't hold them, so renting a place was the most urgent task.
Second, he needed help. If thousands of orders came in on Double Eleven, he and Ma Le could pack until New Year and still not ship them all. He had to line people up in advance.
Third, the listing had to go live before Double Eleven. Whether the boots sold was another matter; he needed to build up sales and reviews first. Search rankings didn't favor new listings.
As for what that day would look like, he didn't have to guess. Taobao was running the event, and small marketplace shops couldn't get into the official promotion. But people from all over the internet would flood onto Taobao that day, and they wouldn't browse only the promoted shops. Only he knew what this batch of fur-trimmed ankle boots would become in twenty days.
"Come on, say something."
"Take Wednesday afternoon off. Come with me to the freight depot to pick them up."
"Like hell I will."
At nine the next morning, Lin Fan was back at his desk.
Zhou Bin dropped a stack of merchant qualification documents in front of him. He said he had to submit his conclusion by the end of the month and told Lin Fan to keep pulling the shop's weekly data reports, one every week without fail.
Lin Fan said okay.
That evening, he set two sample boots on the windowsill and borrowed Ma Le's digital camera. He took around forty shots: a white background, side views, the lining, the tread. He chose seven, edited them, and worked on the product page until half past one in the morning.
He created the listing but left it unpublished, waiting for the shipment.
At two on Wednesday afternoon, the two of them stood by the loading platform at the freight depot in Jianqiao.
"How many boxes?" Ma Le's throat had gone dry.
"One hundred and ninety-six."
The boxes were stacked beside an iron rack like a wall. Foreign lettering was printed on them, and they were coated in dust from the warehouse in Wenzhou.
Ma Le had rented a van with all the rear seats removed. They crammed about forty boxes into it per trip and made five trips back and forth. It was dark by the time they finished the last one.
On the third trip, they hit a problem.
The scarves still took up more than half of their section of the garage. They stacked the boot boxes in there until they were chest-high and reached the entrance. The roll-up door jammed halfway down; forcing it shut would crush the outermost stack.
"Look for yourself! The door won't even close!" Ma Le stood at the garage entrance, panting, a patch of dust on one knee of his work pants. "Look at this mess. Is this our garage or a shipping container?"
"Then leave it open for now. I'll stay here and watch it tonight."
"Watch it?" Ma Le's voice rose. "My mom's coming back next Wednesday for her two jars of pickles. She'll open the door and get hit in the face with two hundred boxes. What am I supposed to tell her? 'Mom, your son's changed careers and become a warehouse keeper'?"
Lin Fan didn't answer. He crouched and opened a box from the outermost stack.
He sliced through the tape. Ten pairs of boots lay side by side inside. He took out a pair, reached into the cuffs, squeezed the lining, then let go. The pile sprang back up. He pinched the soles and inspected the stitching, row by row. It was tight.
"Feel this."
Ma Le stopped mid-rant and, almost despite himself, reached inside. He squeezed once, then again.
"This lining really isn't bad," he muttered. "Way better than the pair my cousin showed me online for a hundred and twenty."
"Cost us ten-fifty a pair."
"How much?"
"Ten-fifty." Lin Fan put the boots back. "We list them at thirty-nine."
An expression started to spread across Ma Le's face, but he forced it away.
"Someone still has to buy them at thirty-nine." He counted on his fingers. "Two thousand pairs. Do you know what that means? Our shop's best day was a thousand orders, and that was scarves, pants, and socks put together. Who buys two thousand pairs of boots in a day? They're not cabbages."
"And if they don't sell?"
"Then you can sleep on the pile of boots. I'll let you have the garage all to yourself."
Lin Fan smiled and taped the box shut again.
Ma Le's complaints lined up perfectly with Lin Fan's own calculations. Once the listing went live tomorrow, he had a good idea how many pairs it would sell each day. The worse the numbers looked, the better. After all, the report due at the end of the month needed to look bad too. If both looked bad at once, that suited him perfectly.
"That empty house." He stood and brushed the dust from his hands. "The one your mom owns on the west side. Hasn't the tenant been gone almost six months?"
Ma Le froze.
"Don't even think about it."
"Ground floor, with a yard. Around sixty square meters. It's sitting empty anyway."
"That house is my mom's pride and joy. Even empty, she goes over every week to open the windows. If you pile two hundred boxes of shoes in there, she'll chase us both out with a mop."
"I'll pay rent. Places like that go for seven or eight hundred a month. I'll give her a thousand, one month's deposit and one month's rent up front, cash." Lin Fan looked at him. "Your fee for having the shop in your name stays the same. The house is separate. Talk to your mom. If she agrees, I'll give you two hundred out of that thousand every month."
Ma Le clenched his back teeth. His reluctance fought with something else on his face for a long while.
"Two hundred and fifty."
"Two hundred and fifty."
At eight that evening, they rode their bikes to the west side of town.
Ma Le's mother opened the door, looked first at her son and then at Lin Fan, and wiped her hands twice on her apron.
"Xiao Lin, have you eaten?"
"Yes, Auntie." Lin Fan put the fruit he had brought on the shoe cabinet.
Ma Le's mother fired off questions one after another. What did they need the house for? What were they storing? Was it all aboveboard? Would lots of people come and go? Would the boxes damage the floor? Would anyone live there?
"Mom, I told you I have a little online shop." Ma Le leaned forward. "We bought a batch of winter boots and don't have room at home. We'll store them there for the winter and clear everything out come spring."
"Didn't your shop sell pants?"
"We sold those. Now we're selling boots."
"So you're a big businessman now?" Ma Le's mother eyed him, then turned to size up Lin Fan. "You're mixed up in this too, Xiao Lin?"
"I'm helping Ma Le. I'll look after the stock, but I won't keep a key. Ma Le will open the door every time we go in or out." Lin Fan spoke carefully. "Auntie, we'll cover the floor with cardboard so the boxes don't touch it. No one will live there or cook there. You can come and check whenever you like."
The older woman said nothing. She went inside, came back with a plate of sunflower seeds, sat down, and cracked two open.
"Twelve hundred."
"Mom!" Ma Le protested.
"Twelve hundred, with a twelve-hundred deposit. I'll go open it up tomorrow morning." She tossed the seed shells into the trash. "That's a good house. It's the price I'd charge anyone."
"Fine. Twelve hundred." Lin Fan took out the money from his inside pocket and counted it on the spot.
After counting the money, she noticed the open sample box on the floor beside her. She lifted out a boot, turned it over to inspect the sole, then reached inside the cuff to feel the lining.
"Oh, this is nice and thick. Real wool?"
"Synthetic, but it's good quality."
"Save me a pair. I'm a size thirty-seven."
"Mom, give it a rest."
The next morning, Lin Fan took half a day of annual leave and hired a three-wheeler. He and Ma Le moved a hundred and twenty boxes from the garage to the house on the west side.
They covered the ground-floor living room with cardboard and stacked boxes along the walls up to windowsill height, leaving a walkway down the middle.
The seventy-odd boxes left in the garage were the first ones they planned to sell. Keeping them close made them easier to ship.
After the last trip, Ma Le sat on the front steps. He had two blisters on his palms, and his shoes were soaked with sweat.
"I worked it out. Between the rent, freight, and three-wheeler, you've spent twenty-three thousand on this."
"Twenty-three thousand four hundred."
"How much is left on the card?"
"A little over five thousand."
Ma Le tipped his head back to look at the sky and let out a long sigh.
"And we've got to give my mom a pair for free."
"We'll give her one."
At eight on Thursday night, the listing went live.
Lin Fan rewrote the title seven times. In the final version, he arranged "fur-trimmed," "ankle boots," "thick lining," and "genuine leather soles" in the order people most often searched for them. The main image showed the pair he had photographed on the windowsill. The price was thirty-nine, plus five for shipping. A small line on the page said returning customers could message for another two off.
He updated the shop announcement and sent a message to previous customers.
Nine orders came in the first night.
Friday brought twenty-six.
Saturday and Sunday brought forty-seven between them.
Every evening, Ma Le crouched by the garage entrance to help pack, calling out the numbers as he wound tape around boxes. By the third day, he was getting impatient.
"At forty pairs a day, you'll be selling these until next April." He shoved a sealed box to the side. "Be honest with me. Did that Ye guy talk you into a bad deal?"
Lin Fan kept his head down, sticking a shipping label onto a box.
Forty pairs a day was bringing back the cost. Reviews were coming in, the sales count was inching up, and the listing had already reached the second page of search results in the past two days.
Slow was fine. What the listing needed now was momentum, not a few days' worth of revenue.
When they finished work late Sunday night, he went upstairs, turned on his computer, and pulled up the shop's backend figures.
Daily sales in October had fallen from eleven hundred at the start of the month to just over two hundred now. The few new boot orders couldn't lift them. The line for the whole month sagged steadily downward, like a snapped rope.
Tomorrow was Monday the twenty-sixth.
Zhou Bin had to submit his conclusion about the shop by the end of the month. The promise he had made in front of the entire department was there in black and white in the meeting minutes: if volume dropped by half by the end of October, the shop would be impossible to find before the year was out.
Now it had dropped by more than half.
And Lin Fan had pulled that weekly report himself.
Before you continue