Opening a Secondhand Bookstore in China

He told me that because the earlier speakers had finished faster than expected, he had ten extra minutes to talk, so, as he put it, “I’ll start with some nonsense.”

He said that he had prepared a lot for this talk — “I spent the past month trying to lose weight, working very hard,” he said. “But when I weighed myself yesterday, I found I had gained two pounds.”

Then he introduced the topic: “Today’s talk is called Opening a Secondhand Bookstore in China.”

He said that his original title had been ‘A Silly White-Collar Worker Ventures into the Venture Capital World’, but the YiXi program directors thought that sounded too tacky, so he changed it.

“But,” he said, “I really was a silly white-collar worker — very ordinary, just like most of you sitting here.”

He smiled and said, “So, let’s begin.”

He introduced himself: “Hello everyone, I’m Maozhu, the founder of Duozhuayu.”

For those who didn’t know the company, he explained, “We’re a store that promotes the circulation of quality books — in plain language, a secondhand bookstore. The only difference is that we’re built inside WeChat.”

“As an entrepreneur,” he said, “people often ask me: why did you start Duozhuayu?”

He said that in this era, if you run a company, you must have a mission statement. “Even if you don’t have one,” he laughed, “you have to make one up.”

He recalled once visiting a traditional company, where a leader onstage was talking about KPIs and performance, and the audience was dozing off.

“Then,” he said, “that leader suddenly asked, ‘What is our original mission?’ The people below shouted, ‘Listing! Profit! Team!’ But the leader said, ‘No — you’re all wrong. Our mission is love.’ Then he projected a huge red heart onto the screen.”

He said, “You can imagine the atmosphere in that room.”

He said that because Duozhuayu dealt with books, people often misunderstood them — assuming they were a “company selling feelings.”

“But that’s not true,” he said. “We’re a serious business.”

“Yes, our employees love books and secondhand stores,” he said, “but to do anything well, you need a solid business model behind it. Otherwise, you can’t go far. You can’t just power the company with love.”

Then he told me how the idea for Duozhuayu had come about.

“It goes back to my college days,” he said.

He described himself then as “a complete literary youth.”

“Why a literary youth?” he said. “Because we have two traits: we consume a lot of culture, and we can’t make any money.”

“When I entered college,” he said, “I let myself go completely. I stopped going to class and just watched films all day. Fresh out of the intense high school years, I only wanted to watch movies and read — not study.”

But back then, he said, the internet wasn’t cheap. “You had to buy data from the school — it was expensive, not cost-effective.”

“So,” he said, “to watch films, I bought DVDs; to read, I bought printed books. Over time, I ran out of living expenses.”

“What to do?” he said. “I saw that the school was hosting graduation-market stalls. I pretended to be a senior and set up a stall to sell my books and discs.”

“Maybe because I had some taste,” he said, “my sales were great — some DVDs even sold at their original prices.”

He said, “That felt amazing. I hadn’t spent money, but I’d enjoyed myself.”

“After that,” he said, “whenever I ran out of money, I’d set up a stall again.”

“Until one day,” he said, “a student recognized me and asked, ‘Senior, why haven’t you graduated yet?’”

He laughed. “But that process gave me an insight,” he said.

“With some durable goods, if you have a convenient resale channel, the cost for every user decreases — and it doesn’t even suppress new consumption, because people’s spending budgets stay the same. It just means we enjoy more goods and services for the same money.”

“Later,” he said, “I realized that every generation of literary youth is the same. Our users do exactly what I did.”

“They say,” he laughed, “they sell their books on Duozhuayu and use that money to pay off last month’s book purchases.”

“I call that selling to feed your habit.”

“If you search Weibo for the words ‘Duozhuayu selling to feed the addiction,’ you’ll find lots of people saying the same thing.”

He paused and said, “Of course, I’m pure — I didn’t know what that phrase meant at first. I looked it up and found it was extremely accurate.”

“I won’t explain it,” he said, smiling. “If you’re curious, you can look it up yourself.”

Then he said that after graduation, like most students, he “naively walked into society and began the diligent life of a worker.”

“Looking back,” he said, “I was really stupid as an employee. I never wondered why the boss was the boss — I thought bosses were a different species, born to lead me.”

“Then one day,” he said, “I went to the Administration for Industry and Commerce to register a business license, and realized that being a boss was that simple.”

“So now,” he said, “when people say, ‘I envy you, you became a boss so young,’ I tell them: you can too — just go register one. It costs about a thousand yuan. Very cost-effective.”

He said it lightly, but back in 2016, when he decided to quit his job to start a business, he had felt nervous.

He said, “I owe everything to meeting my co-founder, Chen Tuo.”

“Chen Tuo is here today too,” he said, “but I can’t see you — don’t raise your hand.”

They had worked at the same company and collaborated on a project together — one that many people might still remember, an early viral WeChat experiment.

“You could post a message on your Moments,” he said, “and blur part of it with a price tag. Your friends would have to pay to unlock and read it.”

He said they had built it as a playful social experiment — but it unexpectedly became known as “the prototype of paid knowledge.”

After that project ended, he said, he resigned and planned to move to Hangzhou.

“Because the project had gone well, Chen invited me to dinner,” he said. “We went to an expensive restaurant a user had recommended.”

“That dinner,” he said, “established our bond of trust.”

He explained what happened: “I was about to leave, feeling sentimental, and kept saying, ‘Chen, cheers!’”

“Chen just kept smiling silently, his face turning whiter and whiter — and then suddenly, he threw up.”

“He passed out completely,” he said, “and I had to carry him home.”

“At the time,” he said, “I thought, wow, this guy is so genuine. We’re not even close, and the first time he treats me to dinner, he drinks himself unconscious. He’d rather suffer than admit defeat. Isn’t that exactly the kind of person you’d want as a partner?”

He said that Chen’s background was different — he’d been a programmer at startups, had gone through multiple 0-to-1 stages.

“I wasn’t like that,” he said. “I was just a silly office worker fighting my way up in a big company.”

Chen, he said, kept encouraging him: “Don’t you want to start something yourself?”

“I told him,” he said, “I always wanted to open a secondhand store — I even joined my new company to study the secondhand market.”

“It’s a good time for secondhand,” he said. “You’ve probably noticed how many platforms have appeared recently.”

“In a fast-growing economy,” he said, “people feel optimistic about income and spend freely — creating overconsumption.”

“When the outlook turns uncertain, they begin to reflect.”

He said, “Today’s China is like Japan in the 1990s.”

He told Chen he had gone abroad to study used-book markets, visiting many secondhand shops.

“But,” he said, “I had no idea how to be a boss or start a company.”

“Chen said starting a company was easy — he’d done it before. But I was still anxious.”

“Working in a big company,” he said, “gave me a false sense of glamour — titles, salaries — all those things that had nothing to do with who I was or what I wanted to do in the world. They gave me safety, but also confusion.”

“Still,” he said, “Chen awakened my desire to do something of my own.”

“I became increasingly unhappy at work,” he said. “Eventually, I fell into depression — every morning before work I’d cry, then pretend nothing had happened.”

“One day,” he said, “I quarreled with my boss over strategy — we couldn’t agree.”

“I ran downstairs and called Chen,” he said. “That was when he first said, ‘Then let’s start a business together. Think about it.’”

“I thought the whole day,” he said, “and texted him at 1 a.m.”

“I said, ‘I’ve been thinking carefully today.’ He asked, ‘What’s your conclusion?’ I said, ‘I’m not afraid of stress or hardship — I’m afraid of not being able to perform because of external constraints.’”

“He replied, ‘I get it. Then let’s do it seriously — otherwise, we’ll get old.’”

“Then he said he was sending me a determined look,” he laughed. “And at 1 a.m., he sent a photo of himself staring — it nearly scared me to death.”

He said that during a later holiday, Chen secretly came to Hangzhou — both were still employed — and suggested they buy a whiteboard.

“Every startup,” Chen said, “must begin with a whiteboard.”

He agreed. “Hangzhou has great online shopping — let’s order one.”

But Chen insisted: “No, we must buy it in person. It’s about ceremony.”

“It was over 40 degrees,” he said, “and he dragged me from store to store until we found a small whiteboard.”

“We took a photo with it,” he said. “That tiny board recorded our earliest ideas about what Duozhuayu should become.”

After that, Chen went back to work — then got busy with his wedding — and the plan paused.

“But I’d already made up my mind,” he said. “So I started researching China’s secondhand platforms.”

He found that mobile internet had made it easy for people to sell things online — but two key services were missing: trust and efficiency.

“Everyone’s had that experience,” he said — “you buy on C2C and worry if it’s fake, or sell and wait endlessly while buyers haggle.”

“So,” he said, “if we were to do this, we’d have to solve those two problems.”

He studied e-commerce history and found that books were the perfect category.

“Books are standardized,” he said. “Each one has an ISBN — a global identifier. Scan it and you get all its info.”

“Neither Chen nor I came from manufacturing,” he said. “Our strength was in internet products.”

“So,” he said, “if we built a database, we could give users a new kind of service.”

But was there a market for books?

He investigated China’s publishing trends and discovered something surprising — paper book production and reading time were increasing.

“That’s contrary to what everyone thinks,” he said. “People assume no one reads anymore — especially not paper books.”

“But if you go to bookstores now,” he said, “you’ll see how far Chinese publishing has advanced — in content and design. The quality is now on par with Hong Kong, Taiwan, even the U.S.”

He said, “That’s when I decided — this is perfect. A secondhand Amazon. We’ll start with books.”

He wanted to quit immediately and call Chen.

“But,” he said, “I found he was in Japan — on his honeymoon.”

“I’m impatient,” he said, “so I bought a ticket and flew to Osaka to ambush him.”

“I said, ‘Where are you? I’m in Osaka.’ We met at a small tavern, and I started pitching him all my ideas.”

“But this time,” he said, “Chen hesitated. Maybe because he was married now — he started worrying about finances.”

“Secondhand books sounded like a 20th-century business,” he said.

“I kept convincing him,” he said, “telling him the market was growing — that even just starting with books, we could become a big company.”

“Chen and his wife looked totally lost,” he laughed. “Who was this person interrupting their honeymoon?”

“But eventually, they agreed.”

“They even took a photo with us,” he said. “I still thank those two spouses who supported our ridiculous dream.”

“At that time,” he said, “we hadn’t raised a cent.”

He posted the photo on his Moments with the caption: What a coincidence, meeting an ex-colleague in Osaka!

He then took Chen to visit BOOK OFF — “my enlightenment store,” he said.

He had visited many secondhand shops in Tokyo and New York. “Some smelled terrible,” he said.

“Others had great selection but intimidating atmospheres — you’d pick up something worn, check the price tag, and it’s absurdly expensive. Then you look up, and the owner’s staring daggers at you until you flee.”

“But BOOK OFF,” he said, “was different — bright and clean, like a supermarket.”

“The first time I went,” he said, “I thought it was a discount new-book store — the books were cheap and spotless. Only later did I notice the words ‘used books.’”

He described people standing there reading manga — “there’s even a word for them,” he said, “tachiyomi — the standing readers.”

“They’re not browsing,” he said, “they never intended to buy. They read all day, maybe go for ramen at noon, then come back. Some shelves even have signs saying: ‘Please return the book after reading.’”

He said, “I wanted to create that kind of easy atmosphere in China — a place where you could sell your books directly to us, get paid immediately, and where we’d clean and resell them efficiently. Standardized, comfortable, no haggling.”

“But,” he said, “BOOK OFF is offline, and I’m good at internet — and offline chains are hard to scale in China.”

“So how could I move that model online?” he asked.

He smiled and said, “You can guess what early Duozhuayu looked like — a WeChat group and an Excel sheet. Very luxurious. The real micro-business.”

“The process was simple,” he said. “We invited friends who wanted to sell books. If you wanted to sell, you’d @ the group admin. The admin would schedule pickup, pay you, record your book titles in Excel, and post updates: ‘We have new arrivals today!’”

“That was the first version of Duozhuayu,” he said.

He showed the date — March 2017.

“Back then, we were just an Excel-driven shell company,” he said. “Now, hundreds of thousands of people buy and sell on Duozhuayu.”

“It’s only been a year and a half.”

He said, “At the start, none of us knew anything about publishing. We were all internet people — book lovers, but clueless about the industry.”

“So we made a naive rule,” he said. “We’d buy all books at 10% of retail, and sell at 30% — just to see what people would send us.”

“At first, things were okay — friends sold us decent books. But once strangers joined, everything changed.”

“We got books like The U.S.–North Korea Intelligence Contest, Programmers 2007, Bad Women Get Married — the English title was Bitch = Babe In Total Control of Herself — and the owner had read it so carefully she underlined everything and wrote comments like ‘So true!’”

“We also got Buying Your First Home,” he said, “which warned: ‘In Beijing, homes inside the 2nd Ring cost 8,000–12,000 yuan per square meter; don’t overpay!’ If that author really bought one then, he must be rich now.”

He laughed. “Those were the interesting ones. The rest were pirated or awful — fake Complete Works of Lu Xun, printed so small you’d need a magnifier. Price tag: 18.8 yuan.”

“They were terrible. Unsellable. I thought I’d doomed Chen.”

“But we didn’t lose heart,” he said.

“I was smart enough to set aside 500,000 yuan from our first investment solely for book acquisition — assuming none would sell.”

“And indeed, none sold. Luckily, we’d budgeted for that.”

“So we held a big discussion — what should we not sell?”

“Our staff believed a bookstore’s character is defined by what it refuses to sell.”

They decided on four categories: pseudoscience, anti-intellectual content, fake books, and outdated information.

“Of course,” he added, “anything in unreadable condition or pirated, we reject too.”

He explained “fake books”: titles falsely attributed to nonexistent authors — “like some ‘American PhD’ writing How to Find Happiness in Life — Google the name and find nothing.”

“The only book by that author is this one — in Chinese.”

“That’s just a pile of random content pretending to be authoritative.”

“So next time you buy a book,” he said, “check unfamiliar author names carefully.”

“But,” he said, “with over ten million books circulating in China, manual judgment is impossible.”

“So we built a scanning and pricing system.”

“You just scan the book,” he said, “and instantly see if we’ll buy it and at what price.”

He said that interface had since been copied by many, but “it was entirely Duozhuayu’s own creation.”

“All data,” he said, “comes from our platform only.”“The decision to take or reject a book,” he said, “is actually made by a machine that learns from human judgment.”

“At first,” he explained, “we divided the books our staff had already reviewed into two sets — those we accepted and those we didn’t.

The machine then analyzed the traits of each set, and when new books came in, it predicted which group they were closer to.”

“In the beginning,” he said, “over 90% of the books were judged manually. The machine would judge in parallel, and gradually it learned to match human decisions more and more closely. Now, only about 5% of books still require manual review — mostly foreign editions or newly published titles that lack enough data.”

“Next came the question of pricing,” he said.

“We built an algorithmic model based on basic economics — treating all transactions on Duozhuayu as a perfectly competitive market.

In this market, we look at each book’s supply, demand, and condition to determine its most efficient price at that moment.”

“So if a book’s supply exceeds demand,” he said, “its price gradually drops — maybe to 10% of retail, or we stop buying it entirely.

If demand rises, the price climbs.

For books with balanced supply and demand, we usually buy at 30% of retail, and for scarce or well-preserved books, 50% or more.”

“Once we launched this system,” he said, “we discovered people were using it for all sorts of things.”

“Some users said, ‘You can test how good your books are — just see if Duozhuayu accepts them.’”

He smiled. “Others said that scanning books on Duozhuayu felt like reading reviews — you’d see which titles got 30% or 10%, and it was like a rating system.”

He said, “If you don’t have books to sell now, you can try scanning the ones on your shelf to see their value — you might find which ones were bad purchases.”

Then he talked about trends: “People often ask which writers are most popular on Duozhuayu.

For our first anniversary, we made a red-and-white list — the bestsellers and the unsold.”

“People loved the unsold list,” he said, laughing. “But authors shouldn’t feel bad — to be on that list, you need to have published at least five books.

Publishing five books already makes you a winner in life.

Maybe you’re not hot right now, but you can come back.”

“As for the bestsellers,” he said, “there was one surprise — the second place was Raymond Carver.”

“We even held a Weibo contest,” he said. “People guessed Márquez and Qian Zhongshu — and they were right about those — but no one guessed Carver.”

“When we announced it,” he said, “people said, ‘Oh, that makes sense — Carver is Murakami’s favorite writer, and Murakami is a famous influencer in publishing.’

Yet,” he added, “Murakami himself didn’t make our list.”

He laughed. “Then came a new problem — unique to secondhand goods: flaws.

Unlike new products, every used book has its quirks — especially in southern China.”

“Readers in the South really suffer,” he said. “Their books often arrive with spots — mold stains.”

“One southern user told me, ‘That’s just mildew.’

Because of the long rainy season, books get sticky, spotted, even smelly.”

“I have allergic asthma,” he said, “and once, after opening a box, I couldn’t breathe.”

“So we realized,” he said, “if we wanted true circulation, we had to treat and clean every book until it was safe to handle.”

“We started researching methods of disinfection and restoration.”

He showed a photo. “This was our first office,” he said. “The floor gives it away — it was just a residential apartment. Those two people were classmates cleaning books.”

“We eventually settled on ozone sterilization,” he said.

“Every book from Duozhuayu goes through at least one hour of ozone disinfection.

Only ozone can kill bacteria inside the pages — ultraviolet or alcohol can’t.”

“For surface stains and mildew,” he said, “we developed polishing tools — sanding sticks, boxes.

Later, we got so good at cleaning that users began asking if they could pay us to refresh their home libraries.”

He smiled. “Here’s a tip,” he said. “Most stains can be erased with a rubber eraser.

But for real disinfection, use professional equipment — it’s not safe to do at home.”

He showed another photo: “That bedroom became our first warehouse,” he said. “By June last year, it held about 2,000 books, and we shipped only two or three orders a day.”

“Then one day, writer Jiang Fangzhou sold books on our platform,” he said.

“Since buyers could see the seller’s name, people rushed to buy her books — and overnight we had 17 orders.”

“We were stunned,” he said. “Seventeen! We spent all day packing them. We couldn’t imagine that a year later, we’d be shipping ten thousand a day.”

“I said earlier,” he reminded, “a secondhand market needs to solve efficiency and trust.

Our pricing system solved efficiency — sellers could sell fast.

Our cleaning process solved trust — buyers could buy safely.

Once those were fixed, Duozhuayu grew rapidly.”

“Investors started showing up,” he said. “Many wanted in, and soon we raised a big round.”

“With that money, we moved to a new office — huge — and converted one floor into a warehouse for 20,000 books.

We thought it’d last six months.”

“We even turned the basement into a cozy café-style reading room,” he said.

“We hosted a small thank-you party for early Beijing users.”

“Turns out,” he said, “we were naive.”

“Less than a month later, a courier station sent us a photo: our parcels had exploded all over their depot.”

He smiled and said, “That was this January.”

“One day, a writer tweeted, ‘Duozhuayu is great.’

Other writers retweeted, saying, ‘Yes, it’s great.’

That’s when we discovered — we had so many writer-users we didn’t even know about.”

“But it came too suddenly,” he said. “That day alone, users sold us more than thirty thousand books.

Our warehouse could only hold twenty thousand.

So within twenty days, it was full — and obsolete.”

“Our reading room,” he said, “became our war room.

We turned it into an inspection and quality-control site.”

“The first night, we were excited,” he said. “We wrote code by day, checked books by night.

At 7 or 8 p.m., after dinner, we’d say, ‘Let’s move bricks!’ and go downstairs to work.”

“Operations assigned us quotas — at least a thousand books per person.”

“Chen and I both joined, working past midnight.”

“The first night we arranged books neatly and took aesthetic film photos,” he said. “By the second, the place was chaos — coworkers eating late-night snacks, me chugging coffee.”

“By the third night, it had turned into a warehouse,” he said, showing a photo of Chen bending over boxes.

He said, “We were lucky that SF Express helped us — they gave us big cartons to store books.”

“Every night we stacked boxes like mountains,” he said. “Our building’s recycling man was thrilled.

He came daily and said, ‘Just leave them there!’

We even made money selling cardboard. We joked that last year we were a shell company; this year, we’re a cardboard company.”

“People often ask what Duozhuayu looks like now,” he said. “Here’s a short video I shot on my phone — with my own voiceover. Don’t mind it.”

He described it — rows of automated shelves, conveyors, boxes — “From a simple idea to an automated factory,” he said. “It took just a year and a half. We’ve given it everything.”

He paused and grew softer. “Secondhand goods move me,” he said, “because they all carry stories — traces of their previous owners.”

“That’s also where our name came from — from the French word déjà vu, meaning ‘already seen,’ that feeling of familiarity.”

“I thought it perfectly captured what we feel when we find a beloved item in a secondhand shop — that sense of fate.”

“You rarely feel that in new stores,” he said. “So we transliterated déjà vu into Duozhuayu.”

“For our first anniversary,” he said, “we held an exhibition — Creatures in Books — still showing now in Shanghai, at Hengshan·Heji.”

“We curated it because early on, we noticed users often left personal items between pages — sending them along with their books.”

“What have we received?” he said. “Household registers, divorce certificates, cash — all kinds of things.”

“For important items, we always contact the owner to return them.”

“For harmless ones, we let them travel with the book to the next reader.”

He said he began collecting interesting inserts — noting the book, date, order, sender — and for the anniversary, they displayed them together.

“Can you guess,” he asked, “what people leave most often?”

“Boarding passes,” he said. “Makes sense, right? You turn off your phone on flights, so you read.

I’ve lost a few Kindles on planes myself.”

He paused. “There was one special item I want to mention — a letter from an elderly man.”

“He’s 73,” he said, “one of our earliest users. He often sold us books.”

“He wasn’t familiar with WeChat, so every time he got our automated payment notification, he’d handwrite a receipt: ‘Today I received X yuan from Duozhuayu for books sold,’ and send a photo of it back.”

“After a while,” he said, “we asked him in a user interview, ‘Grandpa, why don’t you buy books? You could find rare ones here.’

He said, ‘I won’t buy anymore — I can’t read now; my eyes are failing. My children and grandchildren don’t like reading, so I can only sell my books, hoping others will read them.’”

“That touched us deeply,” he said.

“We modern people love to own things — we buy and buy, thinking they’re ours. But most things are external. You can’t take them with you.

Maybe the only things that truly belong to us are knowledge and memory.”

He took a breath. “Before I end,” he said, “let me tell you something else.”

“Once, while fundraising, an investor asked me, ‘Dangdang earns a 20% margin selling new books; you earn 20% too, but you also handle cleaning and logistics. Isn’t that stupid business?’”

“I was a little angry,” he said. “I told him, ‘Maybe so — but someone has to do it.’”

He said, “I thought of one of our users — he lives in a small town in Qiandongnan. He often buys new social-science books from us. I imagine his town has no real bookstore.”

“Everyone knows how few good bookstores survive now,” he said. “Books are expensive, and by local standards, he couldn’t read so freely otherwise.

If Duozhuayu lets him do that, then what we’re doing is meaningful.”

“In the early days,” he said, “we had little funding — few believed in us.”

“One employee told me later that her friends warned her not to join: ‘A secondhand-book startup will die in a year.’

She said, ‘Maybe — but at least I’ll be happy that year.’”

He said, “Later, things went well — we got more funding.

Now many new platforms copy Duozhuayu’s interface, categories, even our push notifications word for word.”

“When I see that,” he said, “I wonder — do the employees carrying out those orders really want to do such uncreative work?

Or are they, like I once was, afraid to lose safety, afraid to resist?”

He paused. “Of course, making money is natural.

But when I see China’s most capable young people profiting through imitation and opportunism, I feel sad.”

“Look around,” he said, “our society isn’t perfect yet. That means there are still chances to build things that combine social and commercial value.”

“Those opportunities may not be the most lucrative — they’re tiring — but they’re worth our creativity.”

“Security doesn’t come from your salary,” he said. “It comes from what you create.”

“I hope my story today encourages you to choose the work you truly love,” he said.

“And that when you think of secondhand goods in the future, you won’t picture dirt or shame, but convenience, trust, and Duozhuayu.”

He smiled, looked up, and ended simply:

“And finally — may the Force be with you.”