An entrepreneurial couple builds a wooden cabin deep in the mountains

Luo Li and Xu Ming never imagined that a "one-off deal" would end up "nailing" them to the foot of Wuling Mountain deep in the Miyun mountains, where they would go into the "business" of rural tourism. Two years ago, this entrepreneurial couple, who work in courtyard design, became tied to a patch of "barren land" because they helped someone else build a wooden cabin. With sheer pioneering drive, the couple built a resort here with mountains, water and wooden cabins, naming it "Naxi Tribe." Today, this entrepreneurial couple has not only run their own cabin resort flourishingly, but also wants more cabins to take root in the Beijing suburbs.

Seizing the Opportunity and Venturing into the Outdoors

Luo Li was first in the furniture business. As early as around 2000, he set up a factory in Zhaoquanying Town in Shunyi, mainly making solid wood tables and chairs, and rented a stall at Lanjing Lijia in Dazhongsi, Haidian, for display and sales. After the 2003 SARS outbreak, many people began to value outdoor activities, and outdoor home improvement became popular along with it. "At first, some clients from villa communities came to us, wanting to put up a grape trellis, a small pavilion, or build a wooden stair railing in their courtyards," Luo Li said. From that time on, they began trying to do small outdoor wood-structure jobs according to clients' needs, with each order worth only around a thousand or eight hundred yuan. Later, as client demand increased, they shifted their focus from indoor solid wood tables and chairs to outdoor wood structures.

"Although it is all carpentry work, indoor and outdoor needs for wood are completely different, because wood used outdoors has to take into account a series of requirements such as waterproofing and rot resistance," Luo Li said. When he first did outdoor home improvement, things did not go so smoothly either. He traveled all over the country to find materials and learn experience. Fortunately, some experience was transferable, and soon his outdoor home improvement business was on track.

When Luo Li shifted his main business to outdoor wood structures, Beijing's outdoor home improvement market was just beginning to emerge, so Luo Li could be considered to have seized the industry's early opportunity. As the market continued to develop and gradually mature, more and more people entered the outdoor wood industry, and currently there are more than a hundred in the Beijing market alone. Especially after the 2008 Olympic Games, the market became increasingly mature, and major universities also opened landscape design programs, producing many professionals, and competition became increasingly fierce. However, because Luo Li entered this field early, he accumulated a lot of popularity and reputation in the industry, and many people were still willing to hire him.

Founding a Company and Encountering Setbacks

As he accumulated more and more experience in this field, the projects Luo Li handled also grew larger and larger. After the Olympic Games, Luo Li and Xu Ming, who also ran a stall in the Lanjing Lijia market, formed a family and registered and established Shuntian Liye Trading Co., Ltd., starting a new journey of entrepreneurship as a couple.

"Founding a company was also a business necessity," Luo Li said. After the 2008 Olympic Games, the orders he took had gradually expanded from scattered jobs to independently building small wooden cabins and undertaking landscape projects. Because taking on these businesses required qualifications, registering a company was imperative. "I thought that after founding the company, the two of us would do bigger and bigger business, but I never expected that at one point we would sink so low that we had only 3.7 yuan left in our pockets," Xu Ming said. At that time, Luo Li was in charge outside while she was in charge inside, responsible for company management. Because she had previously had little contact with the business and was purely a layperson managing professionals, and on top of that spent money lavishly, the company once became difficult to sustain. Fortunately, she "turned back from the wrong path," and afterward personally took charge of everything, turning the company around from crisis to safety.

After hitting a wall, Xu Ming learned financial management, learned business negotiation, and also understood the old saying, "No effort, no wealth." Through her hard work, the company's business gradually reopened. Shuntian Liye Trading Co., Ltd. undertook the construction of many small wooden cabins and bus stop shelters in the suburbs, and even participated in the outdoor wood structure project at the APEC venue.

"Our company now has a very good reputation in the industry in the capital, and its online ranking is also very high," Xu Ming said. Every time she took on a project, she treated it as her own face; no matter how much the price was, she would do her utmost, because only in this way could quality be guaranteed. Only with a guarantee of quality would it bring the company more clients. Many of their current business relationships came from old clients introducing new clients, accumulated little by little.

Building Wooden Cabins and Developing Rural Tourism

In 2014, through the introduction of an old client, Luo Li and Xu Ming came to Caojia Road Village at the foot of Wuling Mountain in Xinchengzi Town, Miyun, to help a new client build 3 small wooden cabins. During the construction process, they discovered that in peak season the daily visitor flow here could reach more than 4,000 people. "If we build a wooden cabin here to do rural tourism, business should also be quite good." At that time, Luo Li took a fancy to a patch of "barren land" near the scenic area and revealed the idea to Xu Ming. But Xu Ming got a headache just looking at the mountain land the locals called "shilazi" - how could small wooden cabins be built in a place like this?

In fact, Luo Li, who had many years of design experience, had already drawn up the plans in his mind, and his idea was one step further than Xu Ming's. "After all, our in-company display space is limited. If there were a real-life small wooden cabin for clients to visit and experience, it might be more persuasive," Luo Li said. Having built so many small wooden cabins for others over the years, even if he felt his design plans were perfect, in the end everything still had to follow the client's needs, and each time there would be a small regret left behind. If he could build a small wooden cabin of his own this time, it would also count as fulfilling a long-cherished wish. It could both support rural tourism and serve as a showroom for clients, achieving two goals at once.

They acted as soon as they decided. The two began hiring large machinery to clear mountain rocks and dig foundations. From May to August of last year, they spent 3 months building a two-story small wooden cabin. "From the outside it looks like two stories, but inside it actually has 4 levels." In the process of building the small wooden cabin, Luo Li gave full play to his design talent, giving guests who stayed there an experience of discovering a hidden world. Behind the small wooden cabin, Luo Li used the natural geographical conditions to create a man-made lake surface, and named the resort "Naxi Tribe." The interior decoration was also mainly in a fresh and romantic pastoral style. Facing the mountains, close to the water, and with small wooden cabins, the unique scenery made Naxi Tribe attract the attention of many tourists. From opening in August last year until the mountain was closed in October, guest rooms were almost fully booked every weekend.

Daring to Innovate and Lead the Direction

In fact, compared with building small wooden cabins, running rural tourism was not Luo Li and Xu Ming's strong suit, but they were good at seeking "outside help." It was peak tourism season right now, and the Luo Li couple brought in Xu Ming's eldest sister, who had store sales experience, to take charge of resort management. In addition, they hired a young university student responsible for the overall promotion and online marketing of the small wooden cabins. "At present, the accommodation side is already fairly complete, and we have also hired a special chef for menu development, but if we want to give tourists a better experience, we still need to rack our brains further." Although she was not good at running rural tourism, Xu Ming's life attitude of "if you do something, do it well" still made her strive for perfection in every aspect.

"This small wooden cabin not only brought us tourism revenue, but also brought us several big deals." Luo Li's original dream has now come true. This year, this entrepreneurial couple took on an order for 200 small wooden cabins in Zhangshanying Town, Yanqing, to be fully built over 3 years. In the process of building small wooden cabins, Luo Li was also pondering innovation. "Now competition in this industry is extremely fierce. Although wooden cabin construction has certain industry standards, these standards are also very easy to replicate. So the core technology in the future will be reflected in the materials," Luo Li said. After all, the time for timber to mature is relatively long, so their company built a base in Fujian and is studying the feasibility of using heavy bamboo instead of solid wood to build entire small wooden cabins. Heavy bamboo has now been applied by him in the staircase construction of the Naxi Tribe small wooden cabins, and currently the only enterprise in all of Beijing that can provide heavy bamboo materials is theirs. In the future, he hopes his company can become a comprehensive company integrating material supply, wooden cabin construction and tourism vacation, leading the overall development of the wooden cabin industry.