Chapter 71

"I had the batch that came in the other day spot-checked. It's a little short of the figures in your report, but within acceptable limits. Now it depends on whether this lot of sprays actually sells."

Zhang Lin discussed it with her hand on her stomach, and looking at the office packed with sprays she felt some excitement herself. Two months' work had come to the test. Whether it went off in one shot depended on tonight's sales.

Against the empty laboratory of two months ago, the place was transformed. The laboratory in particular: the Cerulean sign at the door, and inside it every kind of instrument. The empty office, meanwhile, had been taken over by the contract plant's first delivery.

Having no proper warehouse, the finished product had to be stacked in the office upstairs and the store below; fortunately there were few staff, so beyond the untidiness and having nowhere to put your feet it wasn't much in the way.

"We signed up for the Taobao flagship store's eleventh-of-the-eleventh promotion as you said, and the front-page advertising is paid for. The shop's had reasonable exposure the last few days and views are climbing fast, and the plant guarantees follow-on supply. But how much does this eleventh-of-the-eleventh actually do? Last year was only a few tens of millions in sales," Zhang Lin said, worried.

Online shopping was nothing new to her; what she hadn't expected was Li Lan going online first rather than into physical retail. The company had barely registered before she had Zhang Lin open an official flagship store on Taobao and sign up for this promotion of the site's.

Presumably it would work, though. The site had started publicising it a fortnight early, and searching for their own product and seeing the size of the discounts, Zhang Lin was rather tempted herself.

"Don't worry. It's one of the biggest events of this year and of the next several. We won't lose." Li Lan had complete faith in the shopping festival Papa Ma had invented.

This was its second year, and Taobao had brought in a marketing agency to build it up; the advertising costs would end up on the shops, but there was no denying that this was the year it properly entered history. Exposure at that intensity is not available whenever you like.

Listening to the message alerts going constantly and the typing of the customer service girl they'd hired, Zhang Lin found some confidence too. "You're right. An'an says the spray is astonishingly good when she's up late — I ought to have faith in our own product. And half price with free postage has genuinely pulled people in. Views on the shop and on the spray have both been doubling."

Li Lan checked the time. "Sister Zhang, it's late. You go home. An'an and I will stay on a bit."

An'an was one of last month's hires, currently handling Cerulean's Taobao enquiries.

Zhang Lin knew tonight was different and that the two of them would in all likelihood be up all night, and would have stayed; the will was there and the body wasn't. Having issued a few instructions she went home. "Text me the figures the moment they're in."

Li Lan saw her out, smiling. "The moment they're in. I promise."

Then she sat back down at the computer. There were none of the pre-sales and deposits and dazzling contrivances of later years; the discounts were simply discounts, so anything you wanted had to be fought for at midnight exactly. A second slow and it was gone.

Views climbed steeply as midnight approached. Cerulean had put a hundred-odd thousand into advertising to get one promotional slot, and fortunately this being only the second year, not many shops had signed up — a few hundred, most of them not voluntarily — so the competition wasn't fierce. A few years on, it would take a million to get onto the front page at all.

Beyond Taobao itself, Li Lan had paid for a good many advertorials on Douban and Weibo to drive traffic, and it seemed to be working; by eight on the evening of the tenth, cumulative views had passed five hundred thousand.

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An'an watched the countdown, nervous. As customer service, she'd been told by Sister Zhang and Xiao Lan that sales and commission were connected, and she met every enquiry with a smile and wanted every last spray sold.

Perhaps her prayers worked. After midnight she refreshed and saw the stock of a hundred thousand drop by two thousand; refreshed again and it was four; and the figure that had sat still all evening began falling at a terrifying rate with every refresh.

She put a hand over her heart. So this was the power of the eleventh of the eleventh. It was thrilling. People had bought sprays before tonight, but a bottle or two at a time — at fifty yuan normally, against twenty-five tonight. Half.

Two hours in, Cerulean's flagship mint spray had sold nearly sixty thousand bottles, which with the following day would come to about ninety thousand, and selling out entirely was only a matter of time. Even the other products — a thousand-odd sets of them, put up so the shop wouldn't look threadbare with a single line — sold through steadily.

Li Lan, watching the numbers, knew a great deal of it was the advertising. Choosing the mint spray as the flagship had been deliberate.

Online shoppers being mainly students and office workers, she'd written some deliberately arresting titles — the sort common on Taobao later and rare now, and very good at catching an eye: essential for end-of-term exams, for burning through overtime.

November wasn't the end of term, but it wasn't far off, and with a time-limited half price, the words all-nighter and miracle between them shifted a considerable quantity. Nothing beside the big shops' figures; for a shop that had just opened, Cerulean had made a very good start.

Having not slept or gone back to the dormitory, Li Lan looked at the first few hours and breathed out. Cerulean's opening was secure. From here it was steady work, and finding professionals to run it.

Neither she nor Zhang Lin was one, and neither had any gift for management. The eleventh of the eleventh was the limit of what she had, and two months of chasing manufacturers and suppliers had emptied her out. If it weren't for wanting money to buy equipment and freedom to run her own experiments, she'd never have put herself through it. Start a business? Wouldn't being a quiet researcher be nicer?

So the professional work would go to professionals. She'd do the research and develop the products.

Having settled that agreeably, she locked the office and caught the first bus back to the university as the sky was starting to grey.