Post-80s sisters give up city life to return home and raise chickens
Post-80s sisters Guo Meitao and Guo Aitao originally had jobs in the city. In 2012, the two made a bold decision——to return to their hometown to raise chickens, so they gave up their comfortable jobs in the city and went back to their old home to set up a chicken farm.
In the early days of starting the business, they experienced many difficulties and setbacks
The Guo sisters' hometown is Xihuaying Village, Sha'erying Township, Tumed Left Banner, where the fields are fertile and the water abundant, and the ecology is very good, making it uniquely suited to starting a breeding farm. The reason they had their eye on this market was that they had learned about and investigated it from many angles: many chicken farms today feed their chickens synthetic feed, and the eggs the chickens lay contain hormones, making them unhealthy and poor in taste; the various free-range eggs and "ben" eggs sold in supermarkets are not only expensive but also hard to tell genuine from fake, which is what made Guo Meitao see a business opportunity. Nowadays, both city people and rural people care about healthy food, and genuine free-range eggs have a market not only in the city but also in the countryside, so starting a chicken farm back home would surely be feasible.
After more than a year of investigation and preparation, they made up their minds, persuaded their parents, relatives and friends, and raised the start-up capital to build the farm and raise chickens, spending more than 1.1 million yuan to build a new outdoor free-range chicken farm. After the early-stage investments such as choosing the site, building the chicken coops and purchasing equipment were completed, their chicken farm was built.
At the beginning, because of their lack of technical expertise, they encountered many difficulties and setbacks. When selecting breeding chickens, they carefully compared various chicks online, again and again without tiring of it, and finally settled on the Sichuan Macheng green-shell layer as their first choice of breeding chicken.
In May 2012, the Guo sisters brought in their first batch of breeding chickens. The chicks were flown from Macheng to our city as soon as they hatched out of their shells, and the sisters, full of confidence, tended them carefully, hoping their chickens would grow quickly. But things did not go as they wished: more than 2,000 chickens mysteriously died, nearly a third of them, within a few days, and faced with the reality before them they nearly broke down. But in the end they did not lose heart. They kept looking up information online and traveled great distances to the breeding-chicken production area to consult and investigate, and finally found the cause. The next year they chose the right timing and brought in layer chicks again. When the layers grew up and began to lay eggs, the eggs did not sell well because they lacked sales channels. The Guo sisters had no choice but to get up early and stay up late, taking the eggs everywhere to peddle them. In this way, over more than half a year, they gradually built up a group of loyal customers.
Using modern methods to open up sales channels
In order to set their chicken farm on a path of healthy development, the Guo sisters named their chicken farm "Fulaifu" and named their eggs "Chengpin Rural Native Eggs", meaning to run the business with a conscience, win customers with sincerity, and bring good fortune to their customers.
Because the business had just started and their start-up funds were limited, with most of the money going into production, the Guo sisters were not able to open a physical store or get into supermarkets to sell. Through investigation, they decided to develop online marketing. The sisters posted photos and information about the chicken farm on forums, Weibo, Douban, WeChat, QQ groups and so on, promoting their "Chengpin Rural Native Eggs" with an original-ecology angle. At the same time, they also set up their own website, opened a Taobao shop to sell eggs, and developed a "private customization" model for VIP members. When members wanted to buy "Chengpin Rural Native Eggs", they could place an order in advance on the website or the Taobao shop, and the sisters would deliver the freshest eggs to members' hands in the quickest way.
In addition to online sales, the Guo sisters also pushed forward offline, constantly consolidating existing customers and developing new ones. In this way, "Chengpin Rural Native Eggs" gradually gained a decent order volume in our city. As "Chengpin Rural Native Eggs" sold better and better, the Guo sisters' chicken farm was no longer simply free-ranging mountain chickens; they also planted corn, soybeans, vegetables and so on, gradually developing into a green ecological farm that combines breeding and planting in ecological three-dimensional cultivation together with product processing.
Today, the farm has begun to take shape and is becoming more and more well known, and the Guo sisters have become locally known figures.