Li Auto L9 Fridge Cup Holder

Key numbers

The product

The product is a beverage holder designed specifically for the factory-installed fridge in Li Auto's L9 SUV. The stock fridge holds bottles loosely, so every hard brake sends cans and bottles clattering — a minor but daily annoyance for a family car. The official accessory store only offered a pre-sale product that held four bottles and could not be operated one-handed, and it was out of stock for months. Qi Yue's version fixed bottles individually, worked with one hand, and was molded in food-grade material for about 32 yuan a unit and sold at 168 yuan. It was distributed through Li Auto owner communities on Xianyu, WeChat and Taobao, where demand was already proven by search volume.

How they did it

Qi Yue ran a profitable sublet business renting out factory space, and bought an L9 in 2022 partly out of boredom. When he could not find a fridge cup holder anywhere, he checked search data and found the same problem was being searched over 400 times a day. He hired a modeler on Xianyu for a two-day turnaround, posted renders in owner group chats, and collected pre-orders before committing to a mold. The 8,000-yuan mold paid for itself almost immediately: the first batch of 500 sold out in under two days, and he netted roughly 1.3 million yuan in six months, becoming a viral 'textbook ordinary-person startup' story. Then it unraveled: with only a weak design patent, copycats appeared in month five and undercut him by 20-30 yuan; his sales fell to 20% of peak. He rolled profits into nearly ten new products — glowing trekking poles, a pet air-conditioned house — signed a ten-year lease on a 50,000-square-meter plant, and by September 2026 publicly declared bankruptcy with over 12 million yuan in debt. He now runs an arch-support sock business, earning 40,000-50,000 yuan a month to pay it back.

Why it worked

• Started from a real, daily personal pain point — and validated it with data: 400+ searches a day meant thousands of owners shared the problem
• Pre-sold renders in owner group chats before spending a single yuan on tooling, so the mold was financed by confirmed demand
• The official accessory was on pre-sale, held only four bottles and needed two hands — a clear opportunity window for a third-party part
• The cautionary tale is part of the lesson: a design patent could not stop copycats, and betting the windfall on unrelated heavy-asset projects erased everything — a single hit product is not a repeatable capability