Mihaibao is helping Western companies reach Chinese consumers

Western companies have always found it difficult to tap into China’s vast consumer base, but many of them keep trying because of how lucrative the Chinese market is. The problem isn’t that Chinese consumers don’t want Western products, because that couldn’t be farther from the truth, it’s that the market is so foreign to Western companies that they have no idea how to operate in it, and that’s where Mihaibao thinks it can be of assistance. The startup may be based in London, but CEO and co-founder Jacqueline Lam is a China-born entrepreneur who knows how to operate in the Chinese market. Basically, the startup acts as a middleman for Chinese consumers and Western companies, allowing the consumers to vote on which products should be sold, and allowing the companies to sell their products without having to operate in the country directly. 

China is a notoriously difficult market for foreign tech companies to break into on their own terms, but London-based Mihaibao has managed the feat. With the tagline ‘Shop the West,’ Mihaibao is a marketplace that allows Chinese customers to buy often hard-to-find fashion goods made outside the country. The company hand-picks retailers to work with, and founder Jacqueline Lam says that early demand from both customers and companies wanting to be involved has been huge. Like many good startup ideas, Mihaibao (which translates as ‘seek for overseas treasures’) was born so the China-born and Denmark-raised Lam could scratch her own itch. “Every time I go back to China, I always fill up my suitcases with cookies, handbags, baby care products, drinks and so forth for my family members there. I love my family back home, but it’s really inconvenient to me. I’m not the only Chinese person doing this; all the overseas students who come from there are doing this.” Lam says that some of her classmates on her masters degree at the London School of Economics were smuggling goods into China and selling them at a 100 percent markup. Clearly there was a business opportunity here – a legal alternative to the the ‘friends and family’ grey market. Mihaibao is a long way from Lam’s initial startup plans. She dropped TalentTap, a marketplace for venues to book performers and DJs, after deciding it simply wasn’t a ‘big enough’ idea. The key selling point for companies selling into China through Mihaibao is that they don’t need to set up any presence in the country themselves. The site pulls through live pricing and stock inventory details via APIs, so the whole process is automated as far as the sellers are concerned.