The encyclopedia · Finance & Accounting · Financial decision · 2024
A 5.5M-follower Taobao fashion store emptied its warehouse overnight, owing ¥35M
Guangzhou livestream fashion store 'Shaonv Kaila,' with 5.5M followers, vanished in May 2024 owing ~¥35M to 300+ suppliers, weeks after quietly deregistering.
Guangzhou Zengyi E-Commerce · 2024-05-14
What happened
Shaonv Kaila was a five-diamond Taobao livestream fashion store with 5.5 million followers, over a million repeat customers a year, and monthly sales above 900,000 items — a top-three seller in Taobao's women's fashion category. On May 12, 2024, it was still broadcasting live sales as usual.
By May 13 its warehouse had been emptied and its office closed; by the early hours of May 14 the store could no longer be found in Taobao search at all. Its registered operating company, Guangzhou Zengyi E-Commerce, had in fact been quietly deregistered on March 4, 2024 — over two months before the storefront disappeared, while it kept broadcasting and taking orders.
More than 300 suppliers, many small operators from Guangzhou's Shahe wholesale clothing market, were left owed roughly ¥35 million combined. Suppliers described having no contracts and no bargaining power: they were paid only after inventory sold, on settlement cycles that had already stretched from monthly to once every three or four months before the disappearance.
Why it happened
- A five-diamond store with over 5 million followers ran on a contract-free payment model where suppliers shipped first and got paid only after resale — leverage stayed with the storefront.
- Deregistering the company months before disappearing, while still broadcasting and taking supplier shipments, suggests the wind-down was planned rather than a sudden collapse.
- High return rates typical of livestream fashion, plus shipping-insurance costs, were already squeezing margins — slowing settlement cycles were the warning sign suppliers missed.
The lesson
A storefront's follower count says nothing about whether its suppliers are protected — a contract-free settlement model lets a company deregister and vanish while still taking shipments.
Aftermath
Suppliers filed a police report and pursued the case as a criminal matter; a company shareholder told reporters they had not fled and were working to resolve the debts. The case became a widely cited warning story about supplier risk in Chinese livestream e-commerce, covered by Southern Metropolis Daily (南方+) and Yangcheng Evening News.
Sources
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