Grass hairpins make business profits shoot up

If you've taken a walk recently, you may have seen people of all ages who appear to have grass growing out of their heads.

They are actually just following a bizarre trend for wearing hairpins with plastic grass glued onto them.

This simple accessory, which costs less than 0.5 yuan ($0.07), is sweeping China by storm.

Vendors on the street are selling them. Tourist attractions have groups of people wearing them and taking pictures. Celebrities are uploading pictures on social media in which they are wearing the hairpins.

The trend has even traveled overseas to Japan, with young people following the fashion and media organizations giving coverage to it.

In ancient China, by the way, people who stuck a piece of grass on their head were showing they were so poor that they had to sell themselves or their children as servants to rich families.

E-commerce platforms are the easiest way for consumers to buy the pins. The top-selling shop has delivered more than 28,850 orders within a month on Taobao.com.

Wholesalers and manufacturers alike have also seized the opportunity for business. Yiwu in East China's Zhejiang province has taken the most orders for the grass hairpins.

Huang Jun, sales manager of Yiwu Zonghui E-commerce Company, said they have had more than 1.74 million orders within the past three months, over 73 percent of which are repeat buyers. The pins are especially popular at tourist attractions, and most of Yiwu's buyers say they can sell all of their stock in a day.

Yiwu Ceshuai E-commerce Co, which operates on Alibaba's business-to-business platform, has placed 4.3 million orders for grass hairpins on the platform in the past month, making them the biggest buyers so far.

Luo Xianyou, sales manager of the company, said orders flooded in on Sept 3, with the majority coming from Beijing.

But he said they are trying to clear out all the inventory because he believed that the trend will die down by the seven-day National Day holiday from Oct 1.

Luo said that with orders for fewer than 1,000 hairpins, the price is 0.35 yuan each. For orders between 1,000 and 1 million, each hairpin is priced at 0.25 yuan. For those larger than 1 million, the hairpin is priced at 0.1 yuan each.

Even though the hairpin is sold at a very low price, it has already brought in good money for the company.

Luo said that on smaller orders, they can get 0.1 yuan profit for each hairpin. Therefore, he said, an order for 200,000 hairpins means 20,000 yuan of profit.

shijing@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 09/19/2015 page4)