Meet zhang weinan

We recently connected with Zhang Weinan and have shared our conversation below.

Zhang, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

Thank you for the interview. My name is Karl, and my Chinese name is Zhang Weinan. Regarding where I get my resilience from, I’d like to share my story. At the age of 22, I was working as a headhunter in Shanghai, but I felt lost because I couldn’t find something I truly enjoyed. I had always dreamed of opening an online store and designing products to sell to customers. So, at 22, I quit my job, packed my suitcase, and moved to Yiwu, China, to start my entrepreneurial journey.

Looking back on my 9 years of entrepreneurship, I have experienced a lot. In the beginning, I worked in a basement, packaging goods for a boss, earning less than $300 per month. I did this for three months before I quit and started my own business. I rented a small room for $100 a month and began selling my products on Amazon. I vividly remember that my first product was a face mask. With no money, I had to pack and ship the products by myself in that small room for an entire year. It wasn’t until I turned 24 that my business started to improve.

Even after all these years, this experience remains very clear in my memory. It taught me a crucial lesson in life: to maintain a spirit of hard work and perseverance. This is why I have become so resilient and strong.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

Hey, my name is Zhang Weinan. To be honest, my English isn’t very good, so I hope this interview isn’t too bad. I’m from China, and I spent four years in Yiwu, where I founded the brand Analan. Before the pandemic in 2020, I was running a mask business, and you can still find reports about Analan on Facebook and other social media platforms. I designed beautiful masks and sold them to customers through Amazon. During the pandemic in 2020, I donated about 10,000 masks to the United States, and you can see the news about it on Facebook.

During the pandemic, due to fierce competition, I lost the opportunity to sell masks. So, I decided to get a cute dog. However, I found that my Border Collie shed a lot, so I started designing a dog brush. This product received nearly 50 million views on TikTok. In 2022, Nebula company acquired my Analan brand. I decided to sell it because I was physically exhausted.

After taking a year off, I founded the brand Krydrufi, focusing on designing products for artists. This is the project I am currently working on. You can see our successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter at this link （https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krydrufi/introducing-krydrufi-the-all-in-one-modular-art-box） and check out our products on our website at www.krydrufi.com.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I believe the three most important qualities are:

Resilience: You must be resilient because you will face new challenges every day. These challenges will put you under immense pressure and pain, but you still need to solve these problems.
Long-term Vision: Do not start a business blindly for short-term profits. Your entrepreneurial goal must be to create value for your customers, not to prioritize making money. Otherwise, you will quickly be overwhelmed by money and your project will fail.
Passion: You must find something you love and then start your business. Passion is the most important.

How would you spend the next decade if you somehow knew that it was your last?

The biggest challenge I am currently facing is overcoming my mental exhaustion. This is the most pressing issue right now because, in the past year of our new entrepreneurial journey, we have hardly taken any breaks. We work from 8 a.m. to midnight every day, with no holidays or rest time, and there is always an endless amount of work. This makes us very tired, and we are trying to find ways to relax and relieve stress. Under such long-term, high-intensity pressure, I often fall into mental exhaustion, which prevents me from making correct judgments.

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