Real Estate Developer's Flower Obsession Creates a Wealth Legend

An ordinary flower cake. Yet he discovered a major industry. He wanted success, longed for success, but success came too early, and it broke his heart. With fierce market competition, flower cakes once again helped him open up the situation. See how Yao Yuxin of Lijiang City, Yunnan Province, used a tiny flower cake to leverage an industry spanning cultivation, processing and tourism; in a crisis-ridden market, he created thorny wealth!

This rose estate beside Lashi Lake covers nearly 1,000 mu. The owner of the estate is Yao Yuxin. In the morning, he needs to find some female tourists from out of town here.

Yao Yuxin: From Sichuan? Sichuan beauty, from Chengdu?

Tourist: Yes.

Yao Yuxin: Good, please, let's come over here and do an activity.

Yao Yuxin wants to take them to do something they have never done before, and it starts with picking flowers.

Yao Yuxin: Pick them one by one, and when you're done, take them over there to strip the petals. Watch out for the thorns, roses have thorns. You can pick them, one by one, like this.

After picking the flowers, Yao Yuxin finally got to the main point of this activity.

Yao Yuxin: This flower can be eaten directly, it beautifies and nourishes, eating it makes you pretty and young, watch me eat it.

Yao Yuxin: Beauty, I'll tell you, if I eat one, you have to eat one too, you can't normally get this, where are you from?

Tourist: Guangdong.

But having everyone eat the flowers was not the ultimate goal. The most crucial step of the activity was to teach the tourists to use these petals to make a kind of food.

Yao Yuxin: Our flower cakes are all made with this kind of flower.

In the ancient town of Lijiang, there is a flower cake specialty store almost every ten meters, and a rough estimate puts annual sales here at over 100 million yuan. But many tourists who have bought flower cakes don't know that the filling inside is made from rose jam.

So Yao Yuxin came up with this kind of jam-making experience project.

Yao Yuxin: Come, come, come back, let's move on to the next step.

First wash the petals clean with water, add white sugar, then keep kneading in one direction for twenty minutes, so the sugar fully penetrates the petals. Then jar it, and a portion of rose jam is done. Once sealed well, the longer it sits, the sweeter and more fragrant the taste.

Yao Yuxin: This is rose jam, it beautifies and nourishes, and it can improve endocrine disorders, especially since you're all women. But we're missing one thing, we're missing honey, you can add some honey when you get home.

Sure enough, this kind of experience activity attracted many tourists to come and ask questions.

Tourist: Is this rose sugar?

Yao Yuxin: Yes.

Employee: Rose jam.

Yao Yuxin: Rose jam is rose sugar, in Yunnan it's all called rose sugar. Little girl, this can be eaten directly. It can be eaten directly, it's best after three months, you can spread it directly on bread, or brew it as tea, all works.

Yao Yuxin's processing factory produces large quantities of rose jam every day, and part of it is also made into rose flower cakes, sold at two specialty stores in the ancient town of Lijiang. But he says these rose flower cakes are actually all meant to be given away.

Yao Yuxin: I don't expect anything from this, I don't expect this cake to sell much. When tourists come I give it to them, when people from relevant departments come I give it to them, or when business partners come, I mainly give it away, not for profit.

Lijiang, a place where many people want to come and make money, where business opportunities and risks coexist. Here, in just over three years, starting with flower cakes, Yao Yuxin leveraged an industry that no one locally had made big, not only boosting tourism, but also opening up deep processing of roses, with sales of over 20 million yuan in 2015. And all of this started from a single bite of a flower cake three years earlier.

In 2012, when Yao Yuxin first came to Lijiang, it was not for roses. Born in 1978, after graduating from university he had always been in his hometown of Wenzhou, doing foreign trade in industrial drill bits. By 2012, he had saved up tens of millions in capital, and he and a few friends came to Lijiang to go into real estate together.

This commercial street located in the ancient town of Lijiang was developed by Yao Yuxin and his friends together. After it was completed in 2013, the rental income alone was calculated in the tens of millions per year. This stable income made others deeply envious of Yao Yuxin. But walking along this pedestrian street he had developed himself, a strange feeling gradually spread in his heart.

Yao Yuxin: Real estate is like guerrilla warfare, if this city has a project you definitely come to this city, if that city has a project you definitely go to that city, it's a fast-paced type. When the project is done, all you face is reinforced concrete, facing these, I feel quite tired.

Short-term, fast, guerrilla-warfare-like investment planted a great sense of instability in Yao Yuxin's heart. And after staying for a long time in Lijiang, a city focused on leisure and tourism, some changes gradually took place in his heart as well.

Yao Yuxin: I used to satisfy that kind of vanity, driving a nice car or showing off my house and so on. When I started getting into real estate, I thought about what I should do next, how I could keep changing things up, how I could settle my career down.

The change in mindset prompted Yao Yuxin to start searching again for where there could be a more stable and long-lasting career. Until one day, right on this Qiyi Street in the ancient town, he accidentally walked into a flower cake shop and bought a rose flower cake. With one bite, his life changed enormously from then on.

This is the back kitchen of Yao Yuxin's home. Ever since he ate that rose flower cake, almost every dish made at home had to have roses added.

Yao Yuxin: Rose chicken, rose shrimp, rose yam, whatever dish you serve you think about whether you can use roses, at the beginning my mind was all roses.

Hu Guoping: He's already become a flower fanatic, everything has to have roses.

So that day on Qiyi Street, what exactly did Yao Yuxin taste in that bite of rose flower cake that made him love it so much?

Yao Yuxin: A very tempting fragrance, making you unable to resist wanting to eat a second one, a third one. So I felt this could be a business opportunity, this was a blank space. In people's understanding, roses can also be eaten, this concept is relatively fresh.

The sweet taste deeply attracted Yao Yuxin to roses. Not only that, he even brewed his drinking water with roses. And this brewing led him to discover a little secret: with the same batch of roses, Yao Yuxin brewed them with two different kinds of water, and two different colors actually appeared in the cups.

Yao Yuxin: Aren't the colors different?

Reporter: This one leans a bit pink and red, this one is green.

It turned out that what Yao Yuxin had just poured in was respectively slightly alkaline water and slightly acidic water. Why exactly would this happen when they met the roses?

Yao Yuxin: The most important nutritional component of roses is called anthocyanin. When anthocyanin meets alkaline water it turns green, and when it meets acidic water it immediately turns pink, rose-colored.

Afterward, Yao Yuxin visited many experts and learned that roses grown in high-altitude areas have a higher anthocyanin content, which means their economic value is relatively higher. So he set aside two hours every day to make a round of Lijiang's ancient city district. A few days later, he actually calculated an astonishing number.

Yao Yuxin: Each store's revenue is around two to three thousand. The high ones are five to six thousand, there are about 150 flower cake shops in the ancient town of Lijiang, and flower cakes in the ancient town of Lijiang are about 200 million a year.

Most of the rose flower cakes in the ancient town use roses grown in the Kunming area. But locally in Lijiang, no one had yet grown high-altitude roses on a large scale. At that time, Yao Yuxin had plenty of capital on hand, and he thought, why not grow some himself and sell directly to the manufacturers making rose cakes. But this idea met with opposition from many relatives and friends, and even the local people deeply doubted this project.

Employee, Mu Jinjiang: At that time I was still quite doubtful, because the ordinary people had never seen it.

Moreover, Yao Yuxin had never done farm work, let alone grown roses, and knew absolutely nothing about cultivation techniques.

Yao Yuxin: Anyway, for me it was all a blank, including a blank on technique, a blank on growing flowers, a complete blank, I listened to others for everything.

Yet under these circumstances, he still contracted 200 mu of land in one go beside Lashi Lake to grow roses. The reason he chose Lashi Lake was that it was already a famous tourist attraction in Lijiang, and he could use the existing tourist resources locally.

However, Yao Yuxin's method of growing roses was somewhat unusual. He brought in technicians from Taiwan, China to research a special cultivation plan, with costs a full double that of ordinary cultivation.

Not only that, this wheat field belongs to other farming households, but because it is right next to Yao Yuxin's rose base, he was actually willing to give his fertilizer to the wheat field's farmers for free.

Yao Yuxin: It starts from over here, all the way to that wheat field, and over there are roses again, see that. The purpose of doing this is to ensure that the roses I grow have no chemical residue in any corner.

Besides giving away fertilizer for free, Yao Yuxin's rose fields also have many yellow-and-blue sheets hanging in them, and these sheets also have a special purpose.

Technician: What are they used for.

At this moment, Yao Yuxin, standing beside his endlessly talking employee, looked a bit awkward, because he still didn't understand these cultivation techniques to this day.

Reporter: If you don't understand any of these techniques, how do you make the decisions?

Yao Yuxin: That's a good question. I generally don't go and learn about how to grow things, in management I have a supervisory role. I want to look at his data, I want to see what his annual output is, what the quality of the flowers is each year, and what the picking efficiency of the picking workers is.

Yao Yuxin felt that understanding business was his strength, and whether he understood the techniques was not the key issue. However, the emergence of one technical problem troubled him greatly: with several hundred mu of roses, the daily weeding work exhausted the workers, who complained bitterly, yet the effect was not good, no sooner had they finished pulling weeds on one side than they grew back on the other. But even so, Yao Yuxin insisted on not using herbicides. Instead, he came up with a clever trick himself: he brought in over two hundred free helpers from outside, and it was said that as soon as these experts arrived, the weeding problem could be easily solved.

With the help of the geese, Yao Yuxin not only saved half the labor, but could also use goose droppings as natural fertilizer.

Currently in the world, there are already over a thousand known rose varieties, and dozens are grown domestically. Using high-cost fertilizer, physical pest control, and no herbicides, Yao Yuxin's approach was both laborious and costly, all in order to grow high-quality roses in Lijiang. Because he knew this was the only advantage that could compete against roses from elsewhere.

Yao Yuxin: We need to highlight the advantage of growing on the plateau, the difference between low altitude and high altitude, why mine is natural, why I can take it out and eat it directly, tell others these things,

Because he didn't understand the techniques, Yao Yuxin kept using the money he earned from real estate to subsidize the roses, and was prepared for not being able to grow them for two or three years. Afterward, he also built some dining and tourism facilities at his rose base.

With all these efforts, just one year later in 2014, the roses actually all bloomed.

Mu Jinjiang: This sea of roses here and our Lashi Lake form one continuous stretch, so visually it's very beautiful, previously Lijiang didn't have such a beautiful sea of flowers, so it still attracted a lot of local visitors.

Yao Yuxin hadn't expected success to come so easily. But this thing that should have been cause for joy felt to Yao Yuxin like a knife stabbing into his heart.

Yao Yuxin: On the surface very happy, so many flowers, so many tourists coming, but inside it was bleeding, my heart was bleeding.

The reason Yao Yuxin was so sad was that next he was about to make an extremely cruel decision about these roses!

Yao Yuxin: I spread this whole batch of goods onto the farmland as fertilizer. Dried in the sun and all returned to the fields, spread back onto the ground.

Why throw perfectly good roses all back into the ground? Because from the very start Yao Yuxin did not grow roses for viewing, but as raw material for food processing. He had originally thought these roses would take at least two or three years to grow successfully, but he never expected that the roses would bloom in large quantities in just one year, so all the subsequent deep processing and sales channels were simply not ready. Without these, the roses could only be viewed, but could not be sold.

Yao Yuxin: We prepared too late, the blooming passed, by the time we were ready the flowering season was almost gone. So a lot was wasted on the ground, which caused me great pain at that time.

Watching the roses that could only be thrown back into the ground, Yao Yuxin felt very dejected. But he still decided to grit his teeth and persevere. In 2014, his planting area had already exceeded 1,000 mu, and a rose processing factory with an investment of 5 million yuan was also put into use, mainly processing the two rose varieties he grew, Dianhong and Mohong. These two roses, whose colors are not very different, had completely different uses for Yao Yuxin.

Yao Yuxin: This is Dianhong, this is Mohong. Mohong has a stronger fragrance, better color, and a longer flowering period. This Dianhong has a lighter fragrance, but its taste is better. Dianhong is mainly used for jam and filling, and Mohong we mainly make into fragrance-bearing products, or color-bearing products.

Facing such a large quantity of roses every day, how can the workers pick the petals quickly and neatly?

Yao Yuxin: Actually it's very simple, but there's also a method, I can't possibly pull them off one by one, just grab this, the top of the flower, pull like this, done, this is the petal.

Reporter: Grab this top part, pull it out, and after picking it off the petal is still intact.

Yao Yuxin: This manual petal-pulling method doesn't damage the quality of the flower.

These processed petals are made into rose jam. Then Yao Yuxin sells them as raw material to major food processing enterprises, for making rose flower cakes and other desserts. In 2014, Yao Yuxin also opened two flower cake specialty stores in the ancient town of Lijiang himself, but at this time, he suddenly smelled a dangerous signal in the market.

As if overnight, flower cake shops in the ancient town suddenly multiplied, with one almost every ten-odd meters, and they all sold lower-cost rose flower cakes, often priced at only one-tenth of Yao Yuxin's.

Fierce competition made many stores begin to struggle. Peer pressure was great, and they tried every trick to attract tourists. Yao Yuxin's employees also urged him to make more flavors, but he only sold one flavor of flower cake, and the cake's filling was especially simple, only roses, sugar and honey.

Unexpectedly, it was precisely because of this counterintuitive move that in the fierce competition, his company's overall sales actually rose instead of falling. How exactly did he do it?

Yao Yuxin: Hello, beauty, sorry to bother you, our company has just come out with a cake, could you try it, taste it. Sir, handsome guy, sorry to bother you, we are a cake manufacturer. Free tasting, not selling products, we won't make you buy, just taste it. Hello, two beauties, sorry to bother you, we are Lijiang. We're doing an activity, would you taste it? Beauty, could you taste our fresh one, no need to buy, no need to buy, it's not poisoned.

Others selling flower cakes cut the cake into small pieces for tourists to taste. Yao Yuxin, on the other hand, often carried out whole plates to give away to others. He did things like this often.

He kept hitting walls, having passersby taste his rose flower cakes, but the purpose was not to sell, but to make everyone notice his rose filling and rose estate.

Yao Yuxin: Mainly because of our whole company's positioning, if we do one flavor well and sell our filling, if I develop other varieties there are also requirements, but I feel that investing in that development is not as good as doing my flower itself well.

Tourist: This is very tasty. Pretty tasty, tastier than the one I just bought,

Yao Yuxin: What aspect do you find tasty?

Tourist: It's just more fragrant. This tastes better than that one, seems fresher.

Once the tourists tasted the rose flavor in the filling, Yao Yuxin began, without missing the opportunity, to guide them toward the rose estate.

Yao Yuxin: Ours is made from Lashi Lake roses, have you been to Lashi Lake? We are at the rose base at Lashi Lake in Lijiang, you know our roses are right there in Lijiang, Lashi Lake, do you know it? The flowers are grown right over there.

Relying on this unique promotion method, Yao Yuxin attracted many tourists to the rose estate. He priced a package including sightseeing, horse riding, boating and a meal at 290 yuan per ticket. When the roses bloom, the peak can reach five to six thousand people per day.

Locally, Yao Yuxin focused on developing tourism; while for out-of-town sales, he sold his roses as raw material to food processing plants, cosmetics and beverage processing plants all over the country, quickly opening up sales channels amid fierce market competition.

Cosmetics: The oil yield is a bit higher, so as far as our cost goes, the higher the oil yield, the better the quality of the extracted essential oil.

Food factory: Specifically it's mainly about taste, one is that theirs is really quite good, another is that it has no astringency.

Even some local restaurants replaced the xi bing (wedding cakes) on the richly ethnic Naxi happy banquet with Yao Yuxin's flower cakes.

Restaurant: We give them to guests, and guests find them quite good, because on our side, from its crust to its filling, it's all quite popular, all made well.

Now, Yao Yuxin's rose estate also has Naxi ethnic specialty performances. Next, he plans to devote himself wholeheartedly to developing the high-altitude rose industry, dreaming that one day, his roses will be planted in more places.