Editor’s Note: “Innovation and entrepreneurship” have become the buzzwords in China ever since Beijing decided to encourage people to set up their own businesses and invent new business models, against the backdrop of “the new normal” — slower and sustainable economic growth. Startups have mushroomed, at university campuses and elsewhere, setting up a variety of businesses and creating thousands of new jobs, revitalizing the economy, inspiring youth.FORMER stay-at-home mother Liu Nan, 32, clearly remembers the first day her baby-product business launched on Taobao.com in 2011: sales reached a stunning 60,000 yuan (US$9,174).

    This encouraged Liu to steal some time from her responsibilities as a wife and mother and continue her business. In the second year, Miya Baobei (Chinese for sweet bud baby), her online shop on Taobao.com, notched 13 million yuan in sales of products like diapers, baby formula, toys, and garments for babies and toddlers.

    That was enough to convince a venture capital firm to invest 8 million yuan in March 2014 in Liu’s mia.com, a Beijing-based cross-border e-commerce firm that has already received four rounds of funding and is now valued at more than US$1 billion.

    Mia.com sources overseas branded baby and mom products, including health supplements for women, and re-sells them online to mostly middle-class Chinese parents who care about the quality of the goods.

    “I’d say I was lucky enough to tap into the imported baby products sector before it became a big thing in China’s e-commerce world,” Liu said.

    Encouraged by this business model, an increasing number of companies are jumping onto the online bandwagon of foreign baby products in anticipation of a baby boom in the wake of the scrapping of China’s one-child policy late last year.

    This has led to cutthroat competition and price wars. But Liu’s mia.com has managed to secure its market leader position despite China’s e-commerce heavyweights, such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and JD.com Inc.

    “Unlike large e-commerce platforms, which see baby products as an important sector to boost their overall sales, we are dedicated to helping middle-class families access the best mom and baby products from abroad. That is the only thing we do,” Liu said.

    Being a mother of a 5-year-old girl not only helped Liu spot the business opportunity in the first place but made her understand products better than male competitors.

    She once teased a male executive of mia.com’s competitor: “Everybody is discussing diapers as if you (men) really understand diapers, as if you have touched one before.”

    However, she is aware understanding mothers’ needs for baby products alone cannot support sustainable development of a rapidly growing company.

    “We need to transform ourselves from a company that is based on the dreams of a group of moms into a masculine firm that is able to bleed, fight and invade,” she said.

    According to mia.com, its sales surged to 2.5 billion yuan in 2015, up seven-fold over 2014. Liu foresees this year’s sales at around 6 billion yuan.

    “The rapid development of the company raises the bar for management. When you get out of the startup box, you find that you need people with more experience and vision,” she said, adding one of the major tasks for her last year was finding the right people.

    Late last month, Liu announced mia.com’s partnerships with the AMCARE Corporation, a leading private women and children’s hospital chain in China, and Yuyuto Shanghai Entertainment Facilities Co., which runs more than 200 indoor theme parks for children.

    With these two partnerships, mia.com can reach more parents and would-be parents, to give them more opportunities to experience quality foreign products before buying them online. In early 2015, mia.com set up a joint venture with RYB Education Institution, which runs dozens of kindergartens in China.

    Liu Xiaolu, 33, is the soft-spoken founder and chief executive of Neiwai, a lingerie maker in China. She jokes that the firm’s products are meant for frigid women.

    The Neiwai brand of cotton lingerie have come to be known for their muted colors and near absence of accessories, plain, if not boring.

    But for Shanghai’s Liu, creating the polar opposite of “what the likes of Victoria’s Secret have been offering” is an exciting, sexy and profitable.

    She initially worked as a strategic analyst, helping multinational companies such as Coke Cola and Estee Lauder study the Chinese market for more than five years. The finance graduate said the birth of her first child in 2012, however, gave her “a sensibility about life.”

    “What I used to do, majoring in finance, working with some of the most famous companies in the world ... all that has been motivated by nothing but the fact that it is conventionally considered the best choice by others.”

    So she decided to start her own business. And enrolled a course.

    She eyed the lingerie industry not only because her grandmother and mother worked with Shanghai’s once most-coveted underwear manufacturer, Xinguang, for decades, but because most of the lingerie available in domestic stores was “like the old her,” meant for pleasing others.

    “It would be a little exaggerated to call it feminist. But I wanted to create a brand that doesn’t twist, suppress, or objectify women’s bodies. Instead, it makes them comfortable and happy, which I think is a higher form of sexiness,” she said.

    With her own savings and investment of tens of millions of yuan from China’s leading investment capital, Zhen Fund, Liu started Neiwai, which means internal and external in Chinese. Neiwai, she said, expresses as much about one’s inside as outside.

    Business was brisk since the beginning. Up to 80 percent of buyers are female, aged above 25, with a well-educated background and a well-paid job. The other 20 percent are “mostly husbands shopping for their wives, instead of bachelors for girlfriends or lovers.”

    There is not yet a brick-and-mortar Neiwai store, which is still financially and physically tough for Liu and her team of 15 women. Neiwai now sells on e-commerce websites, including Tmall.com and JD.com. Late in 2014, Liu expanded her sales channel by working with Journelle, a luxury lingerie store in New York.

    Xu Xiaoping, founder of Zhen Fund, said China is missing, and craving, brands that can please women. Neiwai could fill the gap, he said. According to RTG Consulting, China’s lingerie market is estimated at US$20 billion, and remains dominated by domestic brands. But, Liu said that the major brands’ market share are all less than 15 percent.

    So, Liu has her ambition set much higher, hoping to bring Neiwai to more cities in the United States and Europe, despite the strong trend for women there to celebrate their confidence and sexiness by taking off their bras.

    “Bras are taken off mainly because there is restraint. But I would like to dare them to try Neiwai.”

    Not just as online consumers, women, such as Liu, are driving e-commerce in China. “Women in the Era of Internet Plus,” a 2015 report by AliResearch, which is backed by the Alibaba Group, showed that women were running more than half of the shops on Taobao.com and Tmall.com, two of the leading e-commerce websites in China. Women-owned shops accounted for more than 46 percent of online transactions in 2014.

    “As China shifts from manufacturing to services, women who are blessed with a strong acumen to deal with the outside world will become increasingly important participants in China’s economy,” said Shi Dongwei, vice president of Alibaba.

    (China Daily)