SUN ZHIGUO is bracing for a busy month ahead. His online shop just received an order of 30,000 Santa Claus costumes from Thailand, for which his staff is working extra hours to guarantee delivery before Christmas.

“The quality of my products is second to none, and we are seeing an impressive growth of foreign orders,” the 33-year-old said proudly.

After spending seven years in Brazil selling petty commodities, Sun returned to his home village of Sunzhuang in Caoxian County of Heze City, East China’s Shandong Province in 2015, when e-commerce started to boom in China’s rural areas.

Inspired by relatives and neighbors, Sun initiated his garment business on Taobao.com, a major e-commerce site of internet giant Alibaba, committed to making quality goods and improving the livelihood of his family.

Things went unexpectedly well. In 2019, the turnover of Sun’s shop reached 5 million yuan (US$750,000). The business-savvy risk-taker now has his eye on Brazil’s costume market, where carnivals are often celebrated with hundreds of thousands of dressed-up paraders.

Just a few miles away, Sun Yan was working on a sewing machine in her courtyard trying to turn her latest design into reality, with colorful cloth and elaborate accessories piled up around her.

With a passion for hanfu, a type of traditional clothing of the Han ethnic group, the 27-year-old returned to Sunzhuang Village after graduating from college and established a Taobao shop in 2018 selling her own designs.

“I still remember how excited I was when I received the first order, which was from France,” she recalled. Since then, several thousand pieces of her works have been sold to hanfu-lovers around the world.

Loaded with successful e-commerce entrepreneurs, Sunzhuang village was designated a “Taobao Village” in 2014, a title granted to villages having total annual e-commerce transactions of over 10 million yuan.

Such villages should also have more than 100 businesses, or at least 10 percent of households involved in e-commerce, as required by the title’s creator Alibaba.

When the project was launched in 2009, only three villages in China met the aforementioned standards; 10 years later, the number has soared to more than 4,000, according to AliResearch, the research arm of Alibaba. Heze City alone is now home to 307 “Taobao Villages,” which in total have 180,000 online shops and over 570,000 employees. (Xinhua)