Xiang Bingwei’s legend: from being a bricklayer from Hanzhong, Shaanxi Province, to founding the Weizhi Group

One night in the first month of 1956, a baby cried in a simple hut in the southern suburbs of Hanzhong, Shaanxi Province, and a little life was born. He was Xiang Bingwei.

Who is Xiang Bingwei?

Xiang Bingwei was born in Hanzhong, Shaanxi Province in 1956. In 1987, he founded Hanzhong Weizhi Suit Factory with a loan of 5,000 yuan. In 1992, he founded Weizhi Clothing Co., Ltd., which was restructured into Shaanxi Weizhi Group Co., Ltd. in 1998. In 2001, the group achieved production and sales of more than 6.5 million units, with sales revenue of 320 million, becoming the largest clothing manufacturer in the northwest and southwest regions.

It was difficult for people to start a business in that era, but Xiang Bingwei, a private entrepreneur who came out of a poor mountain ravine in southern Shaanxi, was a bricklayer in his early years, which many people would never have imagined. He is a capable person known to many local older generations in Hanzhong, and he has experienced too many legends in his life.

The purpose of this article is to talk about this local entrepreneur who was once all-powerful in Hanzhong and even Shaanxi, whom everyone has almost forgotten.

When Xiang Bingwei was born, his family was extremely poor, and his mother was bedridden all year round. In order to survive, he had to learn to pick up manure, feed pigs, and farm from an early age. In that era, the children of the poor were already in charge of the family. In order to treat his mother, he had to go to the city to collect swill in exchange for a mere five cents.

Like most children, he also longed to study. He was talented and liked to think since he was a child, and he was diligent and studious. However, in 1968, when he was in the fourth grade of elementary school, he left forever due to a disaster. On campus. It was a crazy era, and fighting everywhere made it impossible for them to go to school.

This is not the most helpless thing, the most helpless thing is his father. For some unknown reason, his father was naturally at odds with him. He had looked down on him since he was a child. He would often use sticks and sticks whenever he disagreed. His father thought he was a weirdo. Fortunately, the smart Xiang Bingwei has always felt that he is a person who can accomplish great things.

He finally broke up with his father in 1972, and decided to leave the family and work as a part-time worker in the city's construction engineering team. What is a small worker? In fact, he only did some work of mixing dust and moving bricks. Today, he would be a brick-moving man.

However, he is definitely not willing to be just a small worker due to his stubborn nature. He was kind and honest since he was a child, with a relatively introverted personality. He worked hard and was gradually recognized by the masters. However, in the first three years, he only did some physical work. When he had time, he learned how others laid bricks and plastering. Come on, save some living expenses.

It wasn't until 1975 that he decided to study the clay brick technology systematically. He felt that there was a future in building clay stoves for family kitchens. So he painstakingly studied the structure and craftsmanship of earth stoves. He learned to build them with mud alone at home. After building them, he dismantled them, dismantled them and built them again. Finally, he developed his own style of earth stoves by himself - Horse Shoe Hui. Wind stove. In fact, the principle of his "invention" is very simple, but he dared to try it. It is said that the stove he designed does not require a bellows and is very powerful. Soon, he became famous, and people around him came to him to build stoves, and he also earned the "first pot of gold" in his life.

But as the saying goes, "People are afraid of being famous, and pigs are afraid of being strong." In the following years, in order to make money, he took jobs everywhere and was very busy every day. He made some money, but due to long-term bending work, his waist began to suffer severe pain. Later, he went to the hospital in Hanzhong He was diagnosed with lumbar muscle strain, and the doctor told him not to do that job anymore, otherwise he would be paralyzed for life. The year was 1980.

This news really came as a bolt from the blue. This meant that he had to permanently give up the masonry technology that he had worked hard on for five years. He finally made his "invention" go to waste. He was very unwilling to do so, but he had no choice but to give up in the end in order to survive. .

Perhaps everyone has his or her own destiny. As the saying goes, "Man makes plans, wealth and honor depend on heaven."

At the age of 24, when he had just found the direction of his life, he had to give up due to fate and start over again. That era was really difficult.

During that time, he thought a lot. Since he could no longer stand and work, he would find a job where he could sit and work.

So he thought about the tailoring industry. After his comprehensive consideration, and after the reform and opening up, people had a need to make beautiful clothes. He concluded that the tailoring industry has great potential, and he started to do it immediately after thinking about it.

He sold his valuable things, and with the money he had saved from working as a bricklayer for several years, he bought a sewing machine, and after inquiring about a master with good skills in Xiangshui Town, Hanzhong, he Go and learn from a teacher. Xiangshui Town is located in Nanzheng County, Hanzhong, dozens of kilometers away from home. It has deep mountains and deep ravines. He came all the way here with a small amount of money. He said all his good words and hoped that the master would take him in and learn some sewing skills. The master Finally, he accepted the money and agreed to his request.

He practiced needlework every day at his master's home and learned how to operate a sewing machine. The master only taught him how to sew trouser bags at first and only showed him one demonstration. From then on, he never cared about him again. He just followed the master's instructions and practiced with concentration. But as the saying goes, "Every line is like a mountain." The sewing technique is not as easy as he imagined. It is a job that requires care and patience, and is generally only suitable for women. He was used to holding a masonry knife and seemed very uncomfortable at first, and the master also thought he was stupid. He practiced sewing the same trouser bag every day, but he could never sew it well. For a while, he went to the back of the mountain alone and stayed there in a daze. He suspected that he was not a tailor. He faced the mountains several times and said to himself: "Does God really want to kill everyone? What should I do?"

Finally, he collected all his belongings to learn sewing skills. , he was very unwilling to give up now. Besides, he had a waist problem and couldn't work as a bricklayer. He couldn't go back, so what else could he do? He said to himself, this is the only way, if you don’t know how, you have to know how.

He continued to practice sewing trouser bags every day, practicing every stitch and thread repeatedly. He took the trouser bags sewn by the master and studied them carefully. During the day he worked, and at night he dreamed about how to sew. Finally, Huang Tian paid off his hard work. His trouser bags were getting better and better, and he became extremely proficient in operating the sewing machine. The master gradually recognized him and gradually taught him more complicated techniques.

Through his intensive study in the past five years, he has gradually mastered the production techniques of trousers, tops, shirts and even suits and tunic suits. You must know that he is just an ordinary person. He has used these technologies for several years and worked several times harder than ordinary people to get where he is today. How difficult it is. Later, after he succeeded, he couldn't help crying every time he thought about it. He said that he wanted to thank his master for taking him in. Those hard years were the most important wealth in his life.

The most commendable thing is that Xiang Bingwei is always learning things and loves to delve into his own things. He later summarized the "Xiang's tailoring formula" for making trousers and used this formula , can process any style of trousers from cutting to final shaping, and the efficiency and quality have been significantly improved. Thinking about it now, with only a primary school education, he was able to develop a set of cutting formulas, which shows that his brain is still very capable.

After learning sewing skills, he said a fond farewell to his master and decided to become a apprentice.

He chose to return to Hanzhong City. He found a simple storefront house, started his own shop opening career, and brought several apprentices. Because the suits he made were of good quality and reasonably priced, he gradually became famous. More and more people came to him to make clothes. Almost every day, people lined up to wait for him to sew clothes. Of course, in the first few years, he caught up with the spring breeze of reform and opening up, and made a lot of money into his pocket.

Start a business when you make money. In 1987, after discussing with his family and seven shop assistants, he decided to borrow 5,000 yuan from the bank to set up a clothing factory, and named it Hanzhong Weizhi Suit Factory. The factory was located on Jianguo Road in the south of Hanzhong, which has a large flow of people.

It was the late 1980s, and reform and opening up had just begun in Hanzhong. There was almost no private clothing factory in Hanzhong, and there were even very few private clothing factories in the entire western region of my country. He was in Hanzhong The first private factory opened, although it was not large in scale. This was the key to his success in life.

In the first five years of establishing the factory, he always insisted on quality and reputation first. All suits produced by his factory must go through more inspection procedures than other factories, and other buttons must be 3 to 3 times higher than those from other factories. Five strands of thread would be enough, but he wanted 16 strands of thread and had to do a 25kg load-bearing test. Such stringent quality requirements would inevitably drive up his production costs. However, Xiang Bingwei said that our factory has just started. If we want to occupy the market, the quality must be better than other factories. The high cost is worth it. His vision is still higher than that of ordinary people. At the beginning, he thought most about the market rather than profits.

In 1992, the business gradually got on the right track, but he found that the original business model was no longer suitable for the fierce market competition. He was determined to reform and chose to embrace the large domestic market. He restructured the company and established Hanzhong Weizhi Clothing Co., Ltd. In that year, he also went to Hong Kong, where the clothing industry was very developed at that time, and conducted an in-depth inspection of well-known clothing companies in Hong Kong. After returning to the company, he made a bold move - returning goods if he was not satisfied.

This move may be useless today, but in 1992 in mainland China, especially in a very poor and backward place like the west, it was already very bold. At that time, the company's management felt that doing so would lead to malicious returns and the losses would be very large. However, he believed that as long as the quality of the clothing was indeed good, only a few would actually return goods maliciously. He had to have confidence in the psychology of consumers. If you look at his decision-making back then from a current perspective, there is no doubt that his judgment was completely correct. Grasping human nature was the magic weapon for his success.

As expected, there were many malicious returns in the first half year after the policy was first implemented, because this promise did not have any conceptual limitations at the time. It includes both Weizhi's series of clothing products and the goods distributed by Weizhi; it includes "Hubao" leather jackets and Shanghai leather shoes; it includes returns due to product quality reasons and returns due to consumer interest transfer, and there is no provision for any return or exchange. The time is a bit similar to the current 7-day no-reason return policy. Therefore, some people just wear it for a few weeks and return it for enjoyment, wear it again and return it, return it again and buy it again. There were also those who wanted to refund their money for a suit they had worn for five years just to verify their promise and make a bet with their friends. In this turbulent autumn, the wishes of people with various mentality who asked for their money back were all fulfilled. A large number of returners with bad mentality also put Wei Zhi through a severe test of life and death. Facing the bad information fed back from various places and looking at the piles of returns, everyone except Xiang Bingwei could not hold back their anger. Everyone was sweating for Xiang Bingwei.

Xiang Bingwei is a stubborn person by nature. He always believes that big waves wash away the sand. He wants to use this measure to screen out customers who truly trust Wei Zhi. The temporary loss is just the cost of the experiment. He also continues to do ideological work for company people and must believe in normal consumer psychology. He also introduced regulations in the company, stipulating that anyone who does not implement the return policy if not satisfied will be fined or even fired.

Finally, after half a year of accumulation, there are fewer and fewer malicious returns. More people feel that Weizhi’s products are really good and there is no reason to return them. Moreover, the repurchase rate has also increased. In this half year He lost more than 300,000 yuan in profit, but Xiang Bingwei did not complain, thinking that he would make it back sooner or later.

His policy was very bold and avant-garde at the time, which boosted the confidence of the entire consumer market. From this moment on, Wei Zhi’s reputation started. Everyone in the market knew that there was a man named Wei Zhi. Clothing brand, sales increased rapidly.

Weizhi was also rated as a "National Enterprise with Good Public Reputation" by the China Social and Economic Research Center for its excellent reputation of being the first in the country to propose "refund if not satisfied". At the same time, it was the only clothing company in the country. Awarded the highest award - Consumer Protection Cup by China Consumer Protection Foundation.

He was not satisfied with these. He continued to focus on the quality of clothing, and in 1995 he proposed - you buy the clothes, I wash and iron them. This means that anyone who purchases a new suit from Weizhi can enjoy free washing and ironing at Weizhi store three times. These are all the experiences he learned from factories in the south. There was nothing he could do. At that time, the south was already at the forefront of the country in the apparel industry, while the inland areas, especially Shaanxi, were still lagging behind.

Xiang Bingwei is good at creating inventions, but at the same time he is a wise man who is good at learning and imitating the good experiences of others. This is an important quality for him to become an entrepreneur.

Because the quality of Weizhi's clothing was indeed excellent in the 1990s, such an unknown private small business became a star enterprise in the southwest and northwest markets of our country, and its products firmly established itself in the west. area.

It was not easy at that time for a sewing worker from a backward area like Hanzhong in southern Shaanxi to grow into the owner of a private enterprise. Moreover, his education was only at the elementary school level, which is not possible now. I dare to believe that this is the pride of Hanzhong people and the pride of Shaanxi.

In 1998, he restructured the company into Shaanxi Weizhi Garment Co., Ltd. to adapt to the stock market. He also moved the company's headquarters from Hanzhong to Xi'an High-tech Industrial Development Zone and started his second business. The Weizhi store once opened on the bustling East Street of Xi'an. This joint-stock reform not only solidified the foundation for the future development of Weizhi Group, but also withstood the huge impact of the Southeast Asian financial crisis on the garment industry. The company expanded more than 400 specialty stores in Shanxi, Henan and other provinces in one fell swoop. This year he is 42 years old, and he has finally become the chairman of the group company. He is thinking that he wants to pursue more spiritual things, including the regret that he has not been able to read many books.

He is well aware that his cultural level is low, so he pays special attention to the cultural quality of his employees. He wants his employees to be "kind, honest, intelligent and diligent". He knows that if an enterprise wants to become bigger and stronger, it cannot do without its own corporate culture, so culture must be operated by literate people.

Therefore, since he founded Weizhi Group, he has always emphasized the cultivation of talents. As long as he can retain talents, especially high-level talents, he is willing to pay no matter how high the price is. In the years when the company was growing, he repeatedly offered high salaries to attract talents at all levels.

In January 1996, at the beginning of the new year, he publicly issued a recruitment announcement in the society, recruiting the company's vice president with an annual salary of 100,000 yuan, and recruiting senior managers with an annual salary of 50,000 yuan, which is not very generous nowadays. The salary was high, but at that time it was higher than the high salary in the same industry, and it became explosive news in the newspapers for a while. Not long after the recruitment announcement came out, masters, doctors, even university professors, and directors of state-owned enterprises all rushed to call to apply. A total of more than 3,500 people were involved in the recruitment process.

It can be said that without favorable treatment, how can we attract high-level talents at all levels? That's what he said and what he did. As long as it is truly a talent, all benefits will be honored one by one. He is well aware that his cultural level is low, and the company cannot develop by himself alone. It needs a large number of like-minded people to work side by side with him. He regards talents as his brothers.

During the many years the company has been operating, the benefits he has provided to his employees have always been continuous. In October 1998, amid the majestic military music of the military band, a group of "filial sons" selected by Weizhi Group and their filial parents were taken to Xi'an for sightseeing by Weizhi Group. He successively sent off four groups of outstanding employees to study in Japan; he also sent off ten advanced employees, including a cook, to travel to Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

After nearly ten years of hard work, in 2001 his company's annual production and sales exceeded 6.5 million units, achieving annual sales of 320 million yuan, which was unthinkable for private companies in Shaanxi 20 years ago. Dare to think, but he did it. A bricklayer who walked out of the poor ravine of Hanzhong, Shaanxi Province completely shocked the land of Sanqin and caused an uproar in the western clothing industry.

For a time, the entire clothing industry in the western region was wondering, who is Xiang Bingwei? How could he, a bricklayer from a poor ravine, do this?

Many colleagues are wondering how an ordinary rural person with little education could transform from a bricklayer to a sewing worker, and finally become an entrepreneur with billions of wealth.

In fact, the reasons for his success are very simple. One is through wisdom, the other is through diligence beyond ordinary people, and the third is perhaps the opportunities given to him by God. He once summed up his success in four words - kindness, sincerity, wisdom and diligence

The so-called kindness, sincerity, wisdom and diligence, the first and most important thing is kindness, that is, no matter what you do, especially in business You must have a correct attitude and have kind thoughts towards the world. The second is honesty. Integrity is the most important thing in business. People cannot stand without trust. Especially clothes, something that people wear every day, they must be honest in work and dare not be false in the slightest. The second is wisdom, which means using wisdom and using your brain more when doing things. People without wisdom cannot do anything well. The last is diligence. He believes that no matter how smart a person is, he can't accomplish anything by being lazy. He must be diligent and better than those who are lazy. People who are better than you work harder. His theory pays attention to logical sequence and is interlocking.

What he is most proud of is that in 2009, he had a magical relationship with Kazuo Inamori, who is known as the sage of management in Japan.

It was the evening of November 1, 2009. At the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Wuzhou, he was preparing to welcome a guest from Japan with reverence. For this reason, he also picked up dozens of As a hobby of calligraphy many years ago, he wrote an inscription, "Cultivate your mind and enlighten yourself, enlighten yourself and others, and bless the world." Although his calligraphy is not the style of everyone, the wisdom between the lines is clearly reflected on the paper.

Mr. Kazuo Inamori is a famous Japanese entrepreneur who created two Fortune 500 companies. The husband said to him: You first became a bricklayer and then a sewing worker. You have become a well-known garment company in China. You are also so dedicated to understanding Buddhism. Such entrepreneurs are very rare in China.

53-year-old Xiang Bingwei and 77-year-old Kazuo Inamori had a natural and profound dialogue, and they had a consensus on many issues. They formed a unified understanding on the issue of "how to integrate Buddhist thoughts into the management philosophy of enterprises to help enterprises operate and develop."

Before leaving, Mr. Kazuo Inamori held Xiang Bingwei's hand and said sincerely: "We are soul-connected people, which is rare... We are soul friends!"

Xiang Bingwei, an entrepreneur from Hanzhong, has never forgotten the land that gave birth to him. In 2011, he resolutely decided to build an intelligent manufacturing clothing industrial park in Hanzhong Baohe Logistics Park as his Hanzhong branch, which also solved the employment problem of some people in Hanzhong. He thought it was too late for him to return to Hanzhong. He moved away from Hanzhong in 1996 and only gave back to his fellow Hanzhong residents 15 years later, but he also tried his best.

Now in 2021, Xiang Bingwei is 65 years old, and he has already completed the primitive accumulation of capital. Now Weizhi Group is a large-scale diversified joint-stock company ranging from clothing to real estate development, property and hotel management, with nearly 2,000 registered employees. His personal wealth has already reached billions, and he has been named an expert with outstanding contributions in Shaanxi Province and the president of the Shaanxi Garment Industry Association. He has earned enough face for the 3.7 million people in Hanzhong.

But who would have thought that he started out as a bricklayer and changed his career to become a tailor halfway through. His education level was only at the primary school level. Maybe successful people have their own legends!