[“To many Chinese people, shopping [through live-streaming] can evoke joy, comfort and fun,” Shan said. The trend was already gaining steam pre-pandemic, but hit its stride during the height of China’s draconian lockdowns. During February 2020, the total number of live streams on Taobao’s marketplace doubled, said owner Alibaba.]
By Rebecca Tan
Succulents.
The thick, fleshy plants have been
growing in popularity in China for nearly a decade, but only recently collided
with live-streaming in e-commerce, a $60 billion industry that got a massive
boost during the pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of people are logging on daily
to admire these vegetating celebrities, oohing as chattering hosts turn and
twirl them around, showing off blushes of new color, entire centimeters of
growth, or — what a treat! — some velvety new leaves.
“For me, it’s a must-watch every
day. I can’t not watch it, I’ll feel like I’m missing something,” said Yang
Weichun, 39, of Zhejiang province. Before live-streaming drew her into a
passion for succulents, or “duorou” in Chinese, her phone used to be filled
with pictures of her two sons, 13 and 16. Now, her phone has space only for
pictures and videos of her several hundred plants, which she scrolls through
daily to feel at peace. Unlike teenage boys, she noted, succulents never throw
tantrums.
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“My sons say, ‘mom is silly to buy
so many succulents, what is it for?’ But when I look at my succulents, these
useless things, I feel really happy,” said Yang, a business executive with
14-hour work days. “It’s like unconditional love.”
Yang is a top client at Gumupai
Succulents — one of the many succulent nurseries in the mountainous region of
southwest China run by 30-somethings fleeing their former lives in cramped
cities. Equipped with selfie sticks and ring lights, these online-only
merchants are part of what Chinese media calls “new farmers.”
A former fruit-peddler who auctions
off fruit online as “Brother Pomegranate” garnered 7 million fans. A
once-struggling beekeeper found riches through Douyin, the Chinese
version of TikTok.
Succulent sellers have found their
success through live-streaming, described by Forbes as “the Home Shopping
Network, but with charismatic, trendy anchors.” On platforms like Taobao Live,
sellers host videos that last 16 hours a day or more, blurring the lines
between commerce, entertainment, and social media.
Jialu Shan, an economist who
studies China’s digital market at the International Institute for Management
Development, said live-streaming caught on because it cut out the middleman
between buyer and seller, offering more transparency and intimacy in a country
often short of both. Instead of relying on Photoshopped or filtered images,
buyers can examine products in real time, pose questions to sellers and swap
notes with other users.
[The
Jean War between millennials and Gen Z cannot be won]
“To many Chinese people, shopping
[through live-streaming] can evoke joy, comfort and fun,” Shan said. The trend
was already gaining steam pre-pandemic, but hit its stride during the height of
China’s draconian lockdowns. During February 2020, the total number of live
streams on Taobao’s marketplace doubled, said owner Alibaba.
“To me, it’s going to be a new
normal channel, a big new channel to drive new sales and create new revenue
streams,” Shan said.
Many succulent-lovers, or rouyou,
are members of China’s rising middle class, born in the ’80s or the ’90s. They
tend to be women, sellers say, and often also pet-owners. They accumulate
succulents for some of the same reasons American millennials obsess over fiddle
fig leafs and variegated monsteras: The plants are pretty, grow well indoors,
and provide some relief for urban lives estranged from the natural world.
Succulents have the added draw of being inherently resilient — plucking off a
leaf spawns a brand new plant — which offers a handy, life-affirming metaphor
for the work-weary professional.
And yet, in China, home to nearly 1 billion Internet users, there are some unique
outgrowths to traditional plant-rearing.
Demand is on the rise for
“succulent fostering,” merchants say. A growing number of (wealthy) clients
want to own succulents but aren’t in a rush to get them right away — or ever,
actually. They prefer to outsource the parenting part of plant parenthood,
content with watching their wards grow through pictures, videos or maybe the
occasional visit.
According to state-run broadcaster
CCTV, more than 80 percent of succulent sellers now provide fostering. One
seller told local media that when he started fostering
mid-pandemic, he only wanted to take care of a few succulents on behalf of
friends in hotter places. Now, he has 5 acres of land and 270,000 foster
plants. A 37-year-old seller from Yunnan, who asked to be identified by her
live-streaming name Queen of the Strange Flower, said she has 600 clients who
have left plants under her care — some for as long as four years.
“Sometimes, I also find it hard to
understand why they do this,” the seller said, laughing. Some of her clients
say they have no space in their homes but still want more succulents; others
say they’re worried they aren’t equipped to care for the plants, especially if
they’re rare or expensive.
[Online
plant sellers are having a moment. Here’s where to shop.]
“The most important thing about
succulents is that they’re good-looking. So if [buyers] are worried they won’t
raise it well, they’re more at ease if we take care of them,” she said.
One recent afternoon, Xie Xin, the
31-year-old co-owner of Gumupai Succulents, strolled through a tent in her
Yunnan nursery, wielding, as she often did, a gimbal stabilizer attached to her
phone.
“Now, look at this one, this one is
too pretty,” Xie said, placing her fingers gently on the underside of a dusty
pink, windmill-shaped Echeveria. There were up to 20,000 succulents here, some
several feet tall with chunky stems; others small enough to fit on her palm.
“This one, here,” Xie said,
gingerly picking up a miniature, treelike Crassula specimen between her thumb
and index finger, “you think it’s small, but it’s been growing very diligently
for three to four years.”
Gumupai, which hosts live streams
on Taobao from 8:30 a.m. to midnight daily, has cultivated 100,000 online fans
since starting in 2018, said Xie. Most of the company’s revenue still comes
from sales, but in recent months, it has ramped up fostering services in
response to growing demand. Requests hit a record this summer, though as the
weather cools in China, some clients may start asking for plants to be shipped
over.
“If we’ve grown [the succulents]
from scratch and fostered them for a long time, we do get sad,” said Xie, a
Shanghai transplant. “It’s like giving a daughter away on her wedding day.”
Yang is Gumupai’s biggest foster
client, with hundreds of succulents under their care. She wants eventually to
retrieve all her dourou — she recently bought a house with a large garden
expressly for this purpose, she said — but she’s in no rush. She’s working
toward retiring at age 50, at which point, her succulent-rearing skills will be
more up-to-mark, she said. And in the meantime, she can see her plants whenever
she wants, a collection of pin-sharp pixels on her phone screen.
“In the past, I wanted to travel
and see all of China’s grand rivers and mountains. Now, I don’t have any of
that desire at all,” Yang said. “I just want to be in my garden, raising my
succulents — just that simple.”
“I don’t have other dreams,” she
added. “Just this one.”
Lyric Li and Alicia Chen
contributed reporting.
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