All of Wenzhou's Fur-Cuff Boots Are in My Hands! Crush That Thirty-Nine Shop!

At six on Wednesday evening, Ma Le unlocked the vacant house in the west of town. The whole place smelled of cardboard boxes.

Sales had resumed yesterday, bringing in thirteen orders. By this point today, there were already thirty-one. It was as if the returning customers had been holding it in during that day of suspension. The moment the link went live again, they flooded back.

The two of them squatted in the living room, sorting through boxes and rewriting the sizes on them with markers. Sizes thirty-six and thirty-seven were moved toward the door, while size forties were shoved to the very back.

"What's the point of this?" Ma Le dragged a box across the floor with a creak. "We can just open whichever box we need when we sell a pair."

"That works normally."

But that day would not be normal.

On an average day, they only had a few dozen orders. Checking sizes and searching for stock one order at a time, even digging through an entire box only took ten minutes or so. But on the eleventh, orders would come flooding in waves. When someone reached into a pile of boxes, they had to find the right size immediately. Spend time searching through one extra box, and a pile would build up behind them.

Thirty-six and thirty-seven were the two best-selling sizes. They had been last year, and they would be again this year. There was no need to check.

As for the competition—whether they could crush it or not, the other side was currently calculating a different set of numbers.

That same evening, in the north of town, every light was on inside a factory warehouse covering nearly three thousand square meters.

Two trucks had just returned from Wenzhou and were parked in the yard. Flatbed carts ran back and forth unloading cargo. Metal racks divided the warehouse into dozens of storage sections, each assigned a range of sizes, with boxes stacked to the ceiling.

Lei Xiangdong stood in the open space by the entrance, holding a sheet of paper rolled into a tube.

He was in his early forties, with a crew cut and a dark jacket. When he stood there without speaking, he looked like a truck driver checking the goods.

The warehouse manager reported the numbers for the week. The five or six factories in Wenzhou were producing around three thousand pairs a day. Staff stationed at the factories counted the output daily, and the shoes were loaded and hauled back the same day. There were now more than forty thousand pairs in storage, enough to fill the racks through January next year.

"Customer service?"

"Forty-six people. Three shifts on Double Eleven, working through the night." The bespectacled operations manager flipped through his notebook. "We've booked six trucks with the courier company. Starting on the morning of the eleventh, one will leave every two hours."

"Has the event price been set?"

"Dropped from fifty-eight to forty-nine. That's the lowest we can go." The operations manager paused. "Lei, if we go any lower than forty-nine, we won't make anything. Factory prices are just over twenty, and after warehousing, customer service, and delivery, we only clear around ten per pair at forty-nine."

Lei Xiangdong nodded.

When it came to prices, others looked at how much something sold for. He looked at the lowest price anyone on the entire internet could offer.

When he had gone from factory to factory in Wenzhou at the start of October, people had thought he was there to grab stock. Grabbing stock had only been incidental. What he really wanted was to book every machine that made fur cuffs from October through March next year. Only if the machines were in his hands would production be in his hands. And only then would prices be in his hands.

This winter, he was the one setting the price of women's short fur-cuff boots at fifty-eight.

"There's something I need to report." The operations manager turned another page in his notebook. "A shop popped up on the marketplace. Five-diamond rating, used to sell leggings. Last week, it listed short fur-cuff boots at thirty-nine with free shipping. Returning customers get another two yuan off."

A flatbed cart clattered loudly in the yard.

"How many sales?"

"Less than ten days since it was listed, and it's sold around a hundred and fifty or sixty pairs. It's been climbing over the last two days."

"Where did the stock come from?"

"Couldn't find out." The operations manager rubbed the edge of his notebook. "There's no brand listed on the page. Customer service says they have their own warehouse stock."

Lei Xiangdong twisted the paper tube in his hand twice.

Thirty-nine.

For a pair of short fur-cuff boots, direct-from-factory costs were just over twenty. He had ground that price down bit by bit. No one else in all of Wenzhou could get them any cheaper. Sell at thirty-nine, subtract five yuan for free shipping, and there would not even be ten yuan of profit per pair. Sell a thousand pairs for ten thousand yuan, while still needing somewhere to store a thousand pairs and people to pack them.

No one did business like that.

"Counterfeits," he said.

"Counterfeits?"

"Thirty-nine is counterfeit pricing, not quality-goods pricing." Lei Xiangdong lifted his chin toward the warehouse. "You handle these goods every day. The fur cuff is stitched to the lining, and the soles aren't padded with filler. You can't make boots like that for under thirty-nine. Every machine that makes fur cuffs is in my hands from October through March next year. Where's he going to get a decent batch of stock?"

The operations manager chuckled and tucked the notebook under his arm.

"Then he must be passing off inferior goods made with cheap glue. They'll come apart after one winter."

"Whether they come apart or not isn't my concern."

It was not his concern—but as long as that listing was up, it became his concern.

With a thirty-nine listing sitting on the marketplace, when his forty-nine event page opened on Double Eleven, customers searching for the same style would have their eyes drawn to that thirty-nine. One shop matched the price, then ten shops matched the price. Before winter was even over, the fifty-eight price point would be ruined. The six-figure deposit he had put down at the start of October, the people he had stationed at factories one by one—it would all have been for nothing.

That price had to disappear from the page before Double Eleven.

"Report him. Say he's selling fakes," Lei Xiangdong said. "Use several accounts to report him at once. Not on separate days—pick one afternoon."

"Understood."

"Use a few more accounts to reserve his inventory. Don't pay." He paused. "Follow up with reviews. Two a day. Say the soles came apart after wearing them, say the fur shed."

The operations manager wrote it down, then looked up when he was finished.

"Should we list a batch of cheaper ones too, just to pressure him?"

"Pressure him?" Lei Xiangdong gave him a look. "He sells thirty pairs a day. I move three thousand. If I list cheap ones, the first price to collapse will be my own."

"Then..."

"You don't understand plain language, do you?" Lei Xiangdong rapped the paper tube against his notebook. "A no-name five-diamond shop, and you're talking to me about pressure? Crush it. Make it disappear from search results within a week. It's that simple."

The operations manager shrank his neck and answered twice in quick succession.

It was nearly dark when a young staffer who handled orders rushed back from Wenzhou. He jogged into the yard and stopped only to catch his breath.

"Lei, that shop's listing started selling again this afternoon."

Lei Xiangdong turned around.

"Wasn't it suspended yesterday?"

"It was. They submitted proof, and it got approved."

The yard fell quiet for two seconds, though the unloading carts continued clattering.

"What proof?"

"I don't know. If the platform approved it, they approved it. We can't see it."

Lei Xiangdong said nothing.

If they could submit proof, then they were not selling counterfeits. Where would counterfeit goods get purchase documents? Goods hauled back from wholesale markets came with no paperwork at all. That was the most basic piece of business sense he had learned over all these years.

If there were documents, then the goods came from a legitimate factory.

And every legitimate pair of women's short fur-cuff boots this winter was stacked in his storage sections.

"Ask every one of the people stationed at the factories tonight," he said. "Ask whether there's been a single day this month when goods were produced but not loaded onto the trucks."

"We already asked." The young man handed over his notebook. "Everything matches every day. However many pairs they made, that's how many we hauled back. Not one pair slipped through."

Lei Xiangdong lowered his head and flipped through two pages. He held the printout of that shop's listing in his hand and stared at it for a long time.

The boots in the picture had fur cuffs, short shafts, round toes, and the most popular color.

Not one pair had slipped through.

Then where had these two thousand pairs come from?

"Keep an eye on it." He folded the printout and tucked it into his jacket pocket. "Report its order volume to me once a day. If it hasn't shut down before Double Eleven, tell me."

"Lei, you mean..."

"I'll go down to Wenzhou myself."

In the house in the west of town, the boxes were stacked until nine that night.

Ma Le sat on the steps by the door, smoking, with a pile of peeled-off old tape at his feet.

"Thirty-one orders." He counted on his fingers. "Bro, at this rate, even if it keeps climbing, a hundred orders on the eleventh would be the limit, right?"

A hundred orders at most—he had thought the same thing a week ago.

But that was not how the numbers worked now.

On November eleventh, the mall's promotions would blanket everything. People from all over the internet would pour onto one website. And those people would not obediently browse only the event pages. Once they typed into the search bar and sorted prices from low to high, Lin Fan knew exactly where his thirty-nine listing would appear. In his previous life, he could have found it with his eyes closed.

But that was not the real hurdle.

There were over nineteen hundred pairs of boots. Even if they only sold a thousand orders that day, two people packing in the garage could manage at most three hundred packages. How long would the other seven hundred be delayed? How many packages could their current stock of cardboard boxes, tape, bubble wrap, and shipping labels handle? And during the half month after the eleventh, what would courier depots across the city look like? Parcels piled to the roof, shipments stuck at transfer stations for ten days or half a month—this was not a guess. Seventeen years later, everyone would still talk about it.

Orders that sold but could not be shipped were not orders. They were bad reviews.

"Hasn't your cousin been pestering you about boots every day?" Lin Fan pushed the last box against the wall and dusted off his hands.

"She's been nagging me for half a month."

"How many people are in her dorm?"

"Six." Ma Le stubbed out his cigarette and looked up. "Why are you asking?"

"Ask them whether they have classes on the eleventh."