Bai Lu got scammed, but I became a superstar through e-commerce.

On the morning the money arrived, Qingxiao sent Bailu a message: "Let's go look at houses."

What kind of house are you looking at?

"Warehouse, office."

Bai Lu responded with a series of question marks.

They spent the entire day exploring the entire industrial park in Jiubao.

Qingxiao remembers that in his previous life, he also found an office for SUNSA in Jiubao. At that time, Jiubao was already known as "China's No. 1 Live Streaming E-commerce City", and it was full of internet celebrities and MCN agencies.

But in 2013, e-commerce in Jiubao was still in its infancy, various entrepreneurial parks were just starting out, and local garment factories and wholesale markets were the main players.

The first place they visited was the Oriental E-commerce Park.

Many well-known e-commerce companies have already moved into Jiuhe Road.

Greentown E-commerce and Beibei.com are both there.

But even the smallest area is several hundred square meters, and the rent is more than one yuan per square meter per day.

"It's too big." Qingxiao stood in the empty office, looking up at the ceiling. "We don't need such a big space right now."

Bai Lu stood beside him, hands in her trench coat pockets, and whispered, "It must be expensive, right?"

"expensive."

"Let's go then."

They visited three more places.

The houses in Jiubao Jiayuan are too remote; even delivery trucks can't get in.

There's an entrepreneurial park on Hanghai Road, converted from an old factory. The environment is alright, but next door is a machinery processing company, and the noise is so loud that you can't hear people talking.

There was also a newly built office building, fully furnished with floor-to-ceiling windows, whose rent scared them away.

Finally, they found the Oriental E-commerce Industrial Park.

Despite being called an industrial park, it's actually just a converted old factory building with a gray exterior and a not-so-new sign hanging at the entrance.

The park was filled with tricycles and bread carts, and the first floor was full of small workshops for garment processing and warehousing, with the sound of sewing machines running from morning till night.

The upper floors were divided into studios of various sizes, some for Taobao sellers, some for photography, and some for e-commerce operations. The corridors were piled with express delivery bags and sample garments.

Qingxiao looked at a room on the second floor.

Two hundred square meters, with a ceiling height of four and a half meters, enough to divide into two floors.

The previous tenant was also a Taobao shop owner. They had just moved out, and there were still a few express delivery slips and a pile of unwanted clothes hangers scattered on the ground.

"This is it." Qingxiao stood in the center of the room and turned around. "There's a courier service point downstairs, and it's a 15-minute bike ride from Sijiqing."

"Isn't it too big?"

Bai Lu stood behind him, looking around the empty room with an astonishingly bright gaze.

"It's already big?" Qingxiao looked at her.

"Huge!" Bai Lu spread his arms wide, as if measuring the entire space. "Ten times bigger than your rented apartment!"

"Is it bigger than your dream of becoming a big star?"

"But my dream is bigger, hehe."

Bai Lu ran a lap inside, his footsteps echoing crisply on the cement floor.

How many clothes can be stored here?

"After the partitions are completed, the downstairs area will be used as a warehouse and packaging area, while the upstairs area will have partitioned rooms, offices, and sample rooms."

"And an office!" Bai Lu ran up to him, clasping her hands to her chest. "And a showroom! Qingxiao, you're really going to be a boss!"

The renovation took a week.

It's called renovation, but it's really just the simplest kind of modification.

Qingxiao drew the layout himself, separating the packaging area and the storage area downstairs. The storage area has two rows of shelves against the wall, and the packaging area has a three-meter-long stainless steel table in the middle.

Upstairs, two rooms were partitioned off with plasterboard; the larger room was used as an office, and the smaller room as a showroom.

Most young people starting e-commerce businesses start from scratch, saving money wherever possible and spending every penny wisely.

On the day the partition wall was torn down, Bai Lu stood in the still-unfinished showroom, turned around, and solemnly announced to the empty walls with her arms outstretched: "From now on, this will be SUNSA's showroom! All the new styles will be hung here first, so I can try them on and rate them one by one."

The expression on his face at that moment seemed to show him already seeing it filled with sample garments.

"You're an original shareholder, so you're in charge," Qingxiao said.

Bai Lu's eyes curved into crescent moons as she patted his shoulder with a grin.

The day we moved was the first Saturday of November.

Qingxiao hailed a van, the kind of Wuling Rongguang that's most common on the streets of Jiubao.

He loaded everything from the rented room into his car.

Three computers, photography lights, backdrops, shelves, over two hundred pieces of clothing that haven't been shipped yet, a large box of express delivery bags, and a printer.

Xiao Geng carried the woven bag up and down the hill, making no fewer than ten trips back and forth.

Bai Lu was in charge of packing Qing Xiao's personal belongings: several neatly folded T-shirts, a suitcase that had been used for a long time, a pair of sneakers, several books on e-commerce operations, and a charger.

She packed the items into a cardboard box, sealed it with tape, and then wrote two large characters on the outside of the box with a marker: "General Manager Qing".

When Qingxiao carried the last bag of goods down, he saw the cardboard box and paused for a moment.

"Did you write this?"

"That's right." Bai Lu squatted down, put the cap on the marker, looked up and smiled at him, "From today onwards, you're President Qing, you need to have some prestige."

Qingxiao hoisted the woven bag onto the bread cart, glanced back at her, and deliberately asked again, "Bai Lu, what did you call me?"

"President Qing." Bai Lu stood up, dusted off his knees, and repeated solemnly, "President Qing—"

She dragged out the two words, raising the final syllable, with a hint of jest, but the light in her eyes was serious.

Qingxiao bent down and carried the last cardboard box onto the car, then patted the dust off his hands.

"Get in the car."

The van departed from the rented house in Jiubao and drove east along Hanghai Road.

Bai Lu leaned against the woven bag, her legs curled up, her knees resting against the back of the chair in front of her.

Her ponytail was askew to one side, and there was a bit of dust on her forehead, which she had gotten from helping to move goods earlier.

She watched the street scene recede outside the car window.

The rented room in Jiubao was getting further and further away. The alley she had walked through countless times, the iron gate she had pushed open countless times, the room where she had squatted on the ground packing packages countless times, was gradually disappearing from her sight.

She suddenly spoke.

"Qingxiao".

"Um?"

"Do you remember? When you came to Hangzhou a year ago, there was nothing there."

Qingxiao leaned against the woven bag on the other side without saying a word.

"I told you to open an online store, and I said online stores are easy to run. But you just couldn't make it work, and what I was thinking was... Oh no, another person I'm going to drag down with me."

The bread cart lurched, and the cardboard boxes behind it made a dull thud.

"Later, when you opened your shop and lost money every day, I felt really regretful." Bai Lu's voice lowered. "I wanted you to quit, but I was afraid of discouraging you. I wanted to help you, but I was penniless myself."

She paused for a moment, then turned to look at Qingxiao.

"Now things are great. Our Qingxiao is going to be the boss."

Then she sniffed hard, stretched out her hand, made a fist, and held it up in front of him.

"Come on, give me a fist bump."

Qingxiao looked at her, raised his fist, and bumped it with hers.

The two young men's fists collided, making a crisp sound in the back seat of the bread cart piled high with clothes.

The car arrived at the Oriental E-commerce Industrial Park.

Xiao Geng had already parked his tricycle downstairs and was squatting at the door waiting.

Seeing the bread truck approaching, he stood up and ran over to help unload the goods.

Qingxiao was the first to jump out of the car.

After a busy day, everything was finally put in place.

The desk was placed against the window, and the computer screen was turned on.

In the sample room, burgundy sweaters and trench coats hung neatly on the racks.

The delivery bags and tape downstairs have all been placed in their new locations.

Bai Lu stood in front of the newly hung sign downstairs, looking at the black lettering that read "SUNSA Women's Clothing".

The evening breeze blew by, lifting the stray hairs on her forehead.

Today is truly a beautiful day.

Today is another melancholy day.

Bai Lu was extremely happy for Qing Xiao.

However, in the blink of an eye, he realized that his dream of becoming a star was still far from being realized, and he didn't know what to do next.

So how exactly does one break into the entertainment industry?

On the third day after moving into the new office, the job posting was put up.

Qingxiao posted job openings on 58.com and Ganji.com.

We are hiring an operations manager and operations assistant, a graphic designer, a customer service representative, and a warehouse manager.

The company address listed the floor and room number of the Oriental E-commerce Industrial Park, and the contact person was "General Manager Qing".

The first person to come for an interview was an operations assistant.

A 24-year-old male, wearing glasses, who had worked in operations at another Taobao store for a year, immediately asked how to improve the quality score of Taobao's direct traffic service.

Qingxiao talked with him for forty minutes, from click-through rate to audience premium, from time-based discounts to regional optimization.

After the conversation, the man said, "Mr. Qing, your skills are even better than the operations director of my previous store."

Qingxiao didn't respond to that. He simply stood up, extended his hand, and said, "Come to work tomorrow. Monthly salary is four thousand, with a one-month probation period."

In 2013, the average monthly salary of formal employees in e-commerce companies was about 4,400 yuan, far exceeding the average monthly salary of just over 3,000 yuan in Hangzhou at that time.

Qingxiao's salary wasn't high, but it was considered above average in this industrial park.

The graphic designer is a recent female graduate whose resume states that she is "proficient in PS, AI, and CDR," and her portfolio consists entirely of posters she created while at school.

Qingxiao asked her to edit a photo of Bai Lu wearing a burgundy sweater on the spot. She spent fifteen minutes adjusting the color tone to be clean and crisp, and Bai Lu's profile looked very three-dimensional against the plain white background.

"Monthly salary of 3,500."

The girl paused for a moment, then nodded vigorously: "Thank you, Mr. Qing!"

The customer service representative was a woman in her early thirties who previously worked as a telephone customer service representative for a telecommunications company. She had a gentle voice and typed incredibly fast.

Three people, plus Xiao Geng, that makes five.

SUNSA's first team was officially formed in the second week of November 2013.

That evening, Bai Lu stood in the sample room, hanging the next batch of new clothes to be photographed one by one on the hangers.

Burgundy sweaters, camel-colored knitwear, and several trench coats and woolen overcoats recently purchased from Shuya's stall were neatly arranged in a row.

She turned up the collar of each garment and straightened the hem, then stepped back, put her hands on her hips, and nodded in satisfaction.

"President Qing," she called out, turning around, her voice full of laughter, "your personal model is ready. When are we taking the photos?"