In Shanghai, take a Suzhou River cruise ship, pass through several river bends, and pass the old site of the Shanghai Mint. When you are about to reach Xikang Road Bridge, the audio guide on the ship will remind you in a pleasant voice to look up at the shore. That small building has a European classical architectural style, and a line of words on the door reveals its origins as "Fuxin Third Flour Mill."

This building built a hundred years ago tells the business legend of the Rong family in the last century. Now, its interior has been completely renovated. Few people know that this is "pidan by the river", a family business. Pet supply company offices, showrooms and cafes.

The three-story single-family space is full of money, but pidan only uses half of it. . Ma Wenfei founded this company eight years ago. He is 34 years old, thin and has some long hair. He was wearing all black that day. The sufficiency of office space is the relaxation he insists on releasing outwards. "I have always been a person who is relatively extravagant about office space. My consistent principle is to use half of it empty and half of it."

2,000 square meters of space , shared by 40 people and two "cats" - Egg Yolk and Dantou. The cats occupy far more space. What's even more advanced is that, except for the outdoor balcony, there are only places in the building that people can't reach, but there is no ban on cats. The stairwell is designed as a giant cat climbing frame that runs through the three floors. The two small rooms facing the southwest on the second floor are the cats’ exclusive lounges. In the autumn afternoon, the golden sunshine will shine on the little nest where Egg Yolk and Dantou sleep.

From opening the market with an "igloo" cat litter box, pidan has become an unavoidable name when discussing the Chinese pet market. According to Tmall’s “Double Eleven” data, in the fields of cat litter, cat food and cat supplies, pidan’s sales performance ranks among the top three in the list of similar brands.

pidan achieved this result with only thirty or forty SKUs, which were selected from four to five hundred products. The standard is "simple" and "consumers choose to stay with their money." Ma Wenfei's framework is very clear, "On a 90-day basis, products that cannot sell a minimum production unit will be cut off. For example, this product factory is If the starting quantity is 3,000 pieces, if these 3,000 pieces cannot be sold within 90 days, they will no longer be produced.”

pidan is Ma Wenfei’s first entrepreneurial project in life. Choosing the track of pet cats, "If you choose puppies, you may go bankrupt, because in the past two years, only kittens have grown, and the puppy business has not grown." Ma Wenfei also gave an example. Before the overall economic downturn, pidan raised 100 million. It was not intentional or deliberate, "it just came."

Business is definitely difficult, but Ma Wenfei said that he felt very relaxed, "This company It perfectly matches my personality, and it also matches the current situation of the pet industry. Just like if you find a lover with the right personality, long-term relationship management is difficult, but it doesn’t seem so tiring because of the fit.”< /p>

Under this agreement, pidan is running a company with annual sales of 600 to 700 million yuan with a team of less than 80 people. At the same time, the number of pet companies nationwide expanded from 30,000 when pidan was founded in 2015 to 450,000 at the end of last year.

How to make a big difference in the fierce competition? Ma Wenfei has his own set of business management methods. pidan's team is divided into two sections. The "Creation and Computing Center" includes four departments: product design, content creation, supply chain and finance. The "Communication and Dissemination Center" consists of three departments: channel, marketing and personnel. Week" is the node discussion work.

Meetings must also be efficient and brief. The largest conference room in the entire pidan uses high tables and high stools to artificially speed up the meeting with an "uncomfortable" feeling. speed.

“Earn money on Monday, create on Thursday.” Under this structure, pidan’s channels, markets and product design are parallel. In the first 50% of the product design process, you only think about what you want to do. , and then improve the product to 80% based on feedback from channels and markets. “We don’t summarize at all, we don’t talk about what happened last month, we only talk about what we will do next week, and all actions are executed and adjusted on a weekly basis.”

The way Ma Wenfei manages the company is to look forward, "What I pursue is not whether it is right or wrong at this moment, but that we must act first at this moment. After taking action, adjust your posture and movements according to the progress of the action. You can run faster by adjusting your movements. You will not be able to run fast if you don’t run.”

At a recent meeting, Ma Wenfei did this. The bigger decision is that Pidan will not spend money to promote any products until the cat food sales reach 20 million a month.

According to Double Eleven data, pidan’s cat food has ranked first in its category, with monthly sales reaching about 13 million, but Ma Wenfei feels that is not enough, “Only by selling cat food can the company be brought up and down. A step up”, because he believes that food will be the main battleground for the pet industry in the future.