The story behind the "unpopular" merchandise
"Because we serve a small number of people, our products may never become popular." There are only 8 products in the "transparent" store. different.
There may be several orders a month in the store, and sometimes there may not be a single order.
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Some products may never become popular items, but they bring no less warmth than popular items, and even make up for some people's "regrets".
The post-90s special education teachers in Chengdu, the girls with the sign language name "transparency" and their friends not only helped the hearing-impaired people “whiten their watches” through their “side jobs,” they also cleared up the “wrong” for a group of hearing-impaired people who collectively flirted with cats; The post-80s Taobao shopkeeper Xu Chao will customize nearly 4,000 silicone hands, feet, and ears for customers every year.
He said that if it weren’t for the design of prosthetics, it would be impossible to come into contact with so many people with severed fingers and limbs in this life; from designing Victoria's Secret underwear to designing professional bras after breast surgery, the internationally renowned designer Yu Xiaodan made a lot of them. Women who had breast surgery felt "complete" again.
A job to make up for "regrets"
Under the new crown pneumonia epidemic, many hearing impaired people face obstacles in their actions.
At the beginning of 2020, seven or eight hearing impaired people wearing masks suddenly "broke into" a cat cafe, and when they entered, they "made gestures" to a wall of cats without saying a word.
The owner tried to communicate with them, but they did not respond.
After a few people left, the shopkeeper became more and more worried about whether they were communicating with the cats using "cryptowords", wanted to "carry away" the cats, and even thought about calling the police.
Subsequently, the owner sent the surveillance video to the "transparent" translator.
"Transparent" saw that they were just discussing that these cats are cute and helped them clear the "suspicion".
The shopkeeper breathed a sigh of relief.
This is the daily routine of "transparency" as a sign language interpreter, helping people with hearing impairments to reduce troubles and regrets.
In the second year after graduating from university, because of the love of sign language, "Transparency" opened an online shop of professional sign language translation service group.
The first order in the shop is to help customers "confess".
"Transparent" vaguely remembers that one night two days before the opening, a customer sent a paragraph asking her to translate it into sign language. This sentence was "I look into your eyes, and the sea of stars is hidden."
In the four years since the store opened, the most impressive thing about “transparency” is that a customer came over with a B-ultrasound image of a child and asked what is the meaning of the baby’s gestures?
Seeing "transparent", the baby's index finger and middle finger stick out like a sword on the face, and the other fingers are held up. This means "hearing impaired" in sign language.
"Transparency" worried that parents would think that the child was defective, so he explained before the translation: the child may have any kind of gesture in the stomach, but the machine just captured this moment.
When a child’s index finger and middle finger are closed, it means "hearing impaired", and when opened, it is yeah or the letter V, which can be understood as victory or "comparison".
Similar to "transparency", Xu Chao feels more like he is doing a job to make up for "regrets."
He said, "Every'imperfect' body may have inferiority and anxiety in the heart. Maybe what I made for them is just a finger, but for them it may be to help them fill it up and become'complete'. ."
An accidental opportunity gave Xu Chao the idea of customizing prostheses.
In June 2017, Xu Chao was still doing sales in the medical equipment industry. A customer asked him if he could customize prostheses, because the prostheses on the market are not only high in price but also of uneven quality.
In September of the following year, Xu Chao opened an online shop for custom prosthetics.
Most of the customers who came to the store had congenital shortcomings or encountered accidents. Among them, the more typical people were migrant workers on the construction site and female workers on the assembly line of the factory. Due to various factors, their limbs could no longer be connected.
Xu Chao remembered that not long after the store opened, the parents of a 7-year-old boy asked him to customize a pair of manipulators.
According to the child’s parents, the boy has no hands due to congenital dysplasia of his forearms, and due to family conditions, he has not been able to customize a pair of hands for his child for 7 years.
They worry that as their children grow up, psychological problems may arise due to physical imperfections.
After listening, Xu Chao almost made a pair of prosthetic hands for the boy at the cost price.
What impresses Xu Chao is that not long ago, a woman in her 20s asked him to customize her left ring finger because she was getting married.
She said that her finger was cut off by a cutting machine in a plastic processing plant. At that time, her finger was mixed in the waste plastic pile and could not be found.
Since then, she has been depressed for a long time, always clenching her fists when going out, trying not to show her fingers.
During the National Day this year, this lady put her custom-made ring finger in the wedding gloves. When exchanging the rings, the husband put the ring on this ring finger.
Her husband said that this also allowed his wife to have a "complete" wedding ceremony under the witness of family and friends.
Over the past three years, Xu Chao has encountered many such situations.
Many buyers gave him feedback: "It's the same as it is, I won't be embarrassed again when I go out." "It's easy to use, it's easy to use it with confidence." Xu Chao's most fulfilling moment.
"Forget the scars and pains"
There are similarities and similarities between "Transparency" and Xu Chao's work. From fashion to post-operative bra design, Yu Xiaodan has spent more effort to make the appearance of some small groups of people look more "complete".
This year is Yu Xiaodan's 22nd year of designing underwear.
In her view, designing conventional underwear in the first 20 years is more like playing a "game": using flowers, lace, and fabric to design sexy and beautiful underwear; now designing underwear for women after breast surgery, she is very clear: first To solve their problems, this is the most different place from before.
A woman in her early 30s found Yu Xiaodan's studio shortly after the operation, and her hair had almost fallen out due to chemotherapy.
When she took off her silicone breast, Yu Xiaodan saw that her wound became red and swollen under the sweat.
Yu Xiaodan saw the pain points of many women after breast surgery.
Many women choose to wear silicone breast implants after surgery. However, most of the silicone breast implants on the market are very expensive and generally fixed in size, which cannot solve the changes that may occur at any time on the healthy side of women after surgery and the difference in height of the resected side. The problem.
She thought, this problem must be solved.
After constant modification and testing, the product is finally designed.
Instead of inviting professional models to try on them, they invited more than 100 ordinary people to try on them.
At the try-on meeting, a girl poked her finger at the filling designed by Yu Xiaodan and said: "How is this empty?" Yu Xiaodan immediately thought that girls often face crowding of buses and subways, etc. If they are accidentally caught It will be embarrassing to find that it is empty.
So, she asked the factory to change the product to solid overnight.
A 28-year-old woman once cried to Yu Xiaodan on the phone: When she was two or three years old, her breasts were necrotic due to scalds. From adolescence to the present, she has never bought suitable underwear and can only sew it by herself. Making underwear.
One time when I was doing vigorous exercise at school, the stuffed cotton in my underwear fell out.
The classmate who picked up the cotton asked: "What is this?" She said that she was surrounded by shame and despair at the time.
A woman who had undergone breast surgery reported to Yu Xiaodan, “Life has taken away a part of us. The defects remind us to cherish the present, cherish ourselves, and cherish the people around us. Underwear can restore the previous body shape perfectly. Let me forget my scars and pains."
More and more people know about Yu Xiaodan, and someone keeps coming here admiringly.
On the eve of Double 11 this year, a girl who had just had breast surgery rushed from Shenyang to Yu Xiaodan's studio in Beijing.
When Yu Xiaodan saw the girl, the infusion port was still buried in the girl's chest, and her arms could not be raised, but she hoped to return to work as soon as possible.
"Hot thinking" of unpopular products
Sign language translation, prosthesis customization, and post-operative bras are niche commodities that mean fewer people are covered, and it also means that it is more difficult to open the market.
"Because we serve a small number of people, our products may never become popular." There are only 8 products in the "transparent" store. different.
There may be several orders a month in the store, and sometimes there may not be a single order.
She admitted that the store was not professional enough from design to operation.
In the future, we will do all of this, especially the display of sign language.
For “transparency”, operating this store is more about establishing a channel to reach the hearing impaired, which allows her and the other three partners who love sign language to be useful, and it also allows more people to understand the special meaning of sign language. It is a special language of natural sign language.
From the general public to the niche, Yu Xiaodan faces many challenges.
For example, as an introvert, he used to "deal with" works more often, but now he has to face more audiences from the design side of the product; at the same time, it is difficult to see the results with greater investment.
Many times, Yu Xiaodan felt that he couldn't hold on, but when he saw the customer's message, he felt that he should hold on again.
"Even if it is a minority, it satisfies the dignity that women need as a human being. In this sense, it is not a minority."
Previously, the latest global cancer burden data released by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization in 2020 showed that breast cancer has replaced lung cancer as the world’s largest cancer, with up to 2.26 million new cases. In 2020, China’s new breast cancer The number of cases has reached 420,000.
Next, Yu Xiaodan wants to design a post-operative bra that can cover a wider range of people and more scenes on top of the current basic models.
During the "Double 11" this year, Xu Chao sold nearly 30 sets of silicone prostheses, which is his best performance in the three years since he opened the store.
He said that when customizing prosthetics online, it may not be accurate enough to make face-to-face data. Some people will have some concerns because of this.
At present, Xu Chao is working hard to save money. He plans to open his first store in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province in two years. He hopes that this kind of niche products will reach a wider range of "public".
China Youth Daily·China Youth Daily reporter Zhao Limei Source: China Youth Daily