By Yuan Yuan

When 21-year-old Yang Qian won the womens 10m air rifle competition， the first gold medal at the Olympic Summer Games Tokyo 2020， all eyes were on her. During the live-broadcast， close-ups of the event gave audiences detailed views of not only her performance， but also the accessories she donned， which included a yellow duck-shaped hairpin， an elastic hair band with a carrot-shaped bobble， and light pink nail polish dotted with small pearls.

“My 10-year-old daughter loved the hairpin right away，” Wu Shuting， a Beijing resident， told Beijing Review. “I scouted online shopping platforms and in the beginning found only a small number of sellers. But after half a day， many more sellers appeared selling both the hairpin and hair tie. Many sellers combined the two as a set and the price for one set was less than 4 yuan（$0.6）， including delivery.”

Making it possible

In just a few hours， these hair accessories that audiences saw on TV soon appeared on computer， phone and tablet screens as people started shopping for them online. The sudden shopping spree triggered by Yangs victory sent a large number of people who work in hair accessory production in Yiwu onto a hectic overdrive. The city in Zhejiang Province is home to the worlds largest consumer products wholesale market.

While watching the competition on TV， Yu Wenyong， a businessman in Yiwu， recognized the yellow duck hairpin as a product designed in Yiwu in 2018. He launched the pin that year in his online shop and has kept it in stock， selling an average of around 30 pins per day.

Sensing that demand for the hairpin and hair tie would increase following Yangs win， Yu immediately updated the online description of the pin with a picture of Yang wearing it during the competition， making it the stand-out product on his shops homepage along with the hair tie. He also assembled a team to mass produce these two products within hours.

“We have close connections with dozens of local factories. Even though there are only 20 employees in my company， when we have urgent orders， we can quickly assemble as many as 300 workers who can begin production pretty fast，” Yu said， comparing Yiwus factories and business people to real-life transformers because of their flexibility.

Yu is just one of the business people in Yiwu who managed to catch this wave. Data from Taobao， a leading online shopping platform in China， show that just one hour after Yang won the gold medal， at least 2，000 businesses， employing an estimated total of 150，000 hair accessory production workers， began working at full steam to meet the skyrocketing demand. The sales surged—every second there were six hairpins leaving Yiwu.