林川谷子店 (Linchuan's Guzi Shop)

Key numbers

The product

The shops sell 'guzi' - anime and game IP merchandise such as badges (baji), cards, acrylic standees and laser tickets - sourced through official releases and the second-hand market on Xianyu and Pinduoduo. The products solve a simple problem: superfans in lower-tier cities have few local channels to buy or trade scarce merch for hot IPs. Prices range from under RMB 50 for common items to several hundred RMB for rare pieces. Unlike big trading-card chains, Linchuan curates inventory around trending IPs (domestic IP guzi outsold Japanese guzi on Xianyu in Q1 2025) and trades on knowledge of scarcity and fandom cycles. His edge is timing: buying early into rising IPs and selling into demand spikes.

How they did it

Linchuan grew up in a Hunan county town where anime merch was unaffordable - a cheapest badge cost two days of his breakfast budget. In 2022, after high school, he worked two months as a security guard in Shenzhen and spent a third of his RMB 6,000 salary on anime merch. When a card he bought for RMB 400 resold for RMB 600, he discovered the flipping game. In late 2023, with about RMB 150,000 backed by his parents, he opened two guzi shops on Xianyu and Pinduoduo, mainly selling figures and merch. For over a year the shops grew steadily on the back of the guzi boom - Xianyu's guzi transaction volume grew 105% in 2024. The key turning point came at Chinese New Year 2025, when sales hit roughly RMB 100,000 in a single month and he netted RMB 12,000. He has since grown his invested capital to RMB 350,000 and is converting the side business into his main job, while navigating the volatility of a market where hype-driven prices can crash 70%.

Why it worked

• Rode a structural boom: China's guzi economy hit RMB 168.9 billion in 2024, up 40.6% year over year, with Xianyu transactions up 105%
• Founder is the customer: his deep fandom knowledge of which IPs and scarcity tiers will appreciate gives him a real edge over generic resellers
• Asset-light start: two online shops on existing platforms needed no physical store and started with family-backed savings of about RMB 150,000
• Timing of breakout coincided with domestic IP surge, when Chinese-made IP guzi out-traded Japanese guzi on Xianyu in Q1 2025