A little after nine on Monday morning, Lin Fan had just finished replying to the merchants' messages that had piled up over the weekend when a commotion broke out in the women's clothing group next door.
"Everyone, come look at this! Quick!"
The cubicle partitions didn't block sound. One shout carried across half the floor, followed by the squeak and scrape of chairs as a crowd rushed over.
"A dark horse has appeared in the leggings category. Has anyone been keeping an eye on it?"
"Which shop?"
"Here, look. Last month, nobody had even heard of this shop. Yesterday, it sold a little over two hundred units. Look at that curve—it's shot up like a rocket."
Lin Fan kept typing, his eyes on his own screen and his ears pricked toward the conversation.
He didn't need to go over and look. He could draw that curve with his eyes closed. Two hundred and thirteen orders yesterday, one by one—all of them the result of him spending hours in the garage, working his fingers to the bone.
The group next door kept discussing it.
"More than eight hundred reviews, all accumulated just this past month. They started pushing the product in early August."
"It's only 9.9 yuan, with free shipping. None of the merchants I work with could make that price. They must have a direct source."
"The strangest thing is when they stocked up. Late August, when it was thirty-seven or thirty-eight degrees out, and they heavily stocked up on winter goods. They're working off the calendar to a T."
Every comment hit the mark. The women's clothing group knew its business, and they'd picked the shop apart.
The only thing no one could imagine was that the answer sat right next door, just beyond a waist-high partition barely 1.2 meters away.
The commotion he'd expected had arrived, and it was even livelier than he'd imagined.
The shop's success was bound to make a splash. He'd thought that through from the start. He'd never feared people talking about the shop; he feared someone connecting it to him. From what he could hear, everyone was guessing which new talent had emerged in the industry. Not one person was looking inside their own office.
Good. Keep talking.
The excitement lasted for nearly half an hour before the crowd dispersed and everyone returned to their desks. The sound of typing soon filled the room again.
A little after ten, someone came around the partition and walked straight up to his desk.
"Are you Lin Fan?"
He looked up. The woman's badge identified her as Su Qing, from the women's clothing group. Her name sounded familiar. He'd seen it on the roster during new-hire training. They'd joined in the same intake.
"That's me. Hello."
"I'm Su Qing, from the group next door." She set a few printed pages on his desk and got straight to the point. "I heard the 3C Group has someone who's really good at reading data. Perfect timing. There's something I can't figure out, so I thought I'd ask for your advice."
The pages showed a sales curve that had slumped for more than half a month, then shot straight up.
His own shop's sales curve, printed out and slapped down on his desk.
Lin Fan picked up his water cup and took a sip, buying himself half a second.
She hadn't come with good intentions. "I'd like your advice" was just a pretext; she'd come to size him up. Word of his two successful calls in a row had reached the neighboring group. Another newcomer from their intake couldn't sit still and had come to weigh him up.
"Is this the shop your group was just talking about?"
"You're well informed." Su Qing pulled over the empty chair beside him and sat down without ceremony. "I've dug into this shop from top to bottom. Listing date, pricing, rate of review growth—it all defies common sense. Stocking up heavily on winter goods in late August, picking their timing so precisely, then staying completely flat for more than a month before sales took off. They quietly built up sales all that time. A beginner wouldn't have that kind of patience."
She tapped the line that shot toward the sky.
"My guess is, either it's a big seller testing the waters with a secondary account, or an offline wholesaler hired an expert to run things. What do you think?"
She asked directly and quickly, her gaze fixed on his face.
She was waiting for a useful answer.
If he said too much, the newcomer with the uncanny winning streak would seem to know the women's clothing business inside out. That wouldn't make sense, and if she thought about it any further, it would be trouble. If he said too little, fine. His reputation for being uncanny needed its limits.
"I work in 3C. I don't know much about women's clothing." Lin Fan pushed the pages back toward her. "But seasonal sales spikes happen every year. This shop probably stocked up early, then got lucky when a cold snap hit. Luck had a lot to do with it."
"Luck?" Su Qing raised an eyebrow. "Could luck tell them to stock up in late August? Could it get the price down to 9.9 yuan and still leave them a profit?"
"Then I can't say."
Su Qing stared at him for two seconds, gathered up the pages, and gave a soft laugh as she stood.
"Everyone says you're uncanny. You seem pretty ordinary to me."
She'd moved on to provocation. Lin Fan lowered his head and went back to typing, without taking the bait.
"Let them say whatever they want."
"I don't care what you think of this shop. I don't believe in anything uncanny." Su Qing stood by the partition, holding the papers. She seemed to be speaking to him, but also to herself. "The evaluation process is about to start, and we have to submit a seasonal-transition case study. Everyone else will turn in the same old stuff. I'll submit this shop instead. I'll dig up everything about it—who's behind it, how they've run it—and lay it all out. Our group can't sit there doing nothing when the first full-time position is up for grabs."
She took two steps, then turned back to add one more thing.
"Your group has had two successful calls in a row. You've already taken all the good luck for yourselves."
She left, her heels clicking all the way back to the neighboring group.
Lin Fan replayed her words in his mind, lightly tapping the edge of the desk twice with his fingers.
This was trouble.
Zhou Bin could investigate for ten years and still get no further than the front door. This woman was different. She started by digging into the data, and she was on the right track. She was serious about it, too. With the evaluation as her excuse, this wasn't a passing whim. She meant to produce results.
He needed to find out how far she could dig.
The shop's registered owner, business license, bank account for payments, shipping address—if she followed the trail all the way, she'd reach a young man named Ma Le from the Ma family in Hangzhou. Beyond that, the shipping labels used an alias, and the supplier in Yiwu only knew him as Manager Ma. Who sat behind the Wangwang account was something even the gods couldn't see. The trail had been cut off.
The real problem lay elsewhere. The shop belonged to the women's clothing category, and Su Qing was its account manager. It would take no more than a single conversation for her to contact the shop using her work identity. Whoever was answering Wangwang would have to be on high alert from now on.
There was another complication. Their group's application for the seasonal-transition promotion was in the review queue, and it should be scheduled in the next couple of days.
From today on, the fate of his shop rested on the desk of someone on the other side.
Thinking it through made the back of his neck tense. He finished the cold water in his cup and tried to settle himself.
Panicking wouldn't solve anything. Looking at the situation piece by piece, she was investigating the shop, not him. Everything on the shop's end pointed to the Ma family, and it could stand up to scrutiny. There was only one thing he needed to do: from now on, Lin Fan, the person at work, had to stay completely separate from anything to do with women's clothing.
His earlier line—that he didn't know much about women's clothing—was the first brick in the wall.
At noon, his phone buzzed with a text from Ma Le.
The goods arrived. A thousand pairs. Uncle Wang carried them in. Eighteen yuan—you owe me another barbecue.
A minute later, another message came in.
Boss He stuffed in a big bag of scarves, said it was for Manager Ma to test-sell. Who's Manager Ma? You get promoted again?
Lin Fan put his phone back in his pocket and carried on working.
He got home at seven that evening and went straight to the garage. He stacked the six newly arrived woven bags in the corner, then opened the sample bag of scarves to take a look. They were knitted, and the workmanship was decent. He'd put them in storage for now. After another cold spell, he could list them.
Today's total was two hundred and forty-one orders, another step up from yesterday.
The two of them packed orders until ten. Ma Le went to shower, and Lin Fan sat back down at the computer. Out of habit, he opened the search page and typed in "leggings."
As usual, his own listing sat on the first page.
He scrolled down. In the middle of the second page, one listing caught his eye.
The main image was the one he'd taken by the garage door: three pairs of pants laid flat, in black, gray, and brown. Even the wrinkles were the same. They'd copied most of the title, changing only two words.
The price was 8.8 yuan.
Lin Fan stared at the listing for a few seconds, scrolled to the bottom of the page, then back up again.
Someone had come to steal his business!
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