Pawnstar on Radio

Neville from Entrepreneurs Asia Magazine conducted this extensive interview with Jane Jia that provides overviews of her background, how she got into recycling fashion and plans for the future development of Pawnstar. This is about a half-hour interview. Jane explains how her irritation with waste of plastic bags when she was little and working on energy savings while in her former automation jobs were the first seeds that led to her start a business involving giving secondhand goods a second life.

Jane explains that many people in China really are ready for secondhand clothes but that the big challenge is finding an appropriate platform and how in the end, a small business like this really has to be on every platform, which is something of a drag and a risk. Wechat works best for attracting loyal users and for interacting with them in a direct way via the personal accounts. It’s also quite possible to sell items through wechat moments. However, the wechat store system has simply not become a preferred way for customers to shop. Thus, Taobao is still important but on taobao one is at the mercy of taobao’s rules The trick of trying to sell one-off secondhand items in a marketplace that is customized to fit the demands of manufacturers with thousands of products available.

I will follow-up in the next post about the perennial question of the website.