Chapter 34: A chance encounter
By the time Shushan Chain had established distribution centers in sixteen provinces and municipalities, recruited 400 regional partners, and opened nearly 8,000 retail outlets nationwide, Su Can was in a cafeteria on Nanjing University's campus, paying 4.50 yuan for a meal with a swipe of his card. He found a seat in the third row and sat down to watch the news on a suspended television.
Zhao Mingnong of Shushan Chain had clearly made a name for himself in Rongcheng. Before this, no one had known that a stationery business could reach such heights or operate this way. Previously, apart from a few well-known brands, stationery on the market from ordinary pen factories not only suffered from substandard workmanship but also offered little innovation in design. Some manufacturers did nothing but imitate famous pen brands.
Even the famous pen brands had presumably treated stationery manufacturing as a stagnant pool, plodding along without much life. Their quality might have been acceptable, but their designs were utterly uniform.
The rise of Shushan Stationery, however, had shown China's pen market a powerful new contender. It had also quickly made many people take a fresh look at the rapid changes in stationery.
For the first time, many people discovered that pen designs and patterns carried over from the seventies and eighties could actually be transformed like this. A ballpoint or gel pen with a streamlined body that felt good to the touch could firmly seize a buyer's interest.
When pens with all sorts of new, intellectual-property-protected patterns and packaging were neatly arranged on shelves, buying pens and stationery was no longer merely a matter of necessity for the girls at nearby high schools. Even if their pencil cases still held more pens than they could use, the sight of