Super-rich: Spending money is just a job!

Chapter 285 Investment 9

The booming crystal business at Mengzhixuan has encroached on the territory of established European crystal and jewelry companies.

In a private club in a major city, several veteran jewelers were meeting and discussing Mengzhixuan's dumping of crystal products into Europe. "That Mengzhixuan is utterly despicable! How dare a small general store sell such precious crystals?" a gray-haired jeweler said angrily. "They don't understand any rules."

A jeweler dressed in a red velvet smoking suit agreed, "Exactly, I heard it's a group of young Chinese businessmen causing trouble. These Chinese are getting more and more outrageous."

The third merchant tapped the silver ashtray on the table with his rosewood pipe and asked, "How come I've never heard of them before? Where did these people come from?"

Anyway, I've never seen this brand's store in my country or city, nor have I ever seen their advertisements in real life. What's its name? Meng Zixuan, is that it? It's so hard to pronounce, I've never heard of it before.

The man in the red velvet smoking suit asked him, "Haven't you noticed that none of the crystals in the shop are selling lately?"

While puffing on his rosewood pipe, he replied, "The market for natural crystal jewelry has been bad for a while now. Isn't it because the middle class has become poorer and no one can afford it anymore?"

The others fell silent for a moment; some were speechless, others simply couldn't be bothered with him. Fortunately, a kind old man, a gaunt old man in casual clothes, explained to him, "Ah, old friend, times have changed. The business logic of today is different from what it was back then. Young people these days have abandoned physical stores and chosen to buy jewelry online."

This "Mengzhixuan" is an online store for a private museum. Their sales are very strong; some have estimated that they sell thousands of four-inch natural crystal balls to the UK in just one month.

But their achievements go far beyond that, because their products are sold in all European countries.

Our research shows that many of our long-time customers aren't against buying crystal jewelry; they've simply switched to buying it online.

Previously, many of the crystal jewelry they bought online were fake, so they continue to buy genuine natural crystals from our store.

Now that Meng Zhixuan has appeared, the word-of-mouth is great. Everyone's shopping online from them now. They don't come to our physical stores at all.

The refined old man with gray hair stomped his cane on the floor in frustration. "What's most outrageous is that they dare to sell natural crystals at such low prices. This is blatant dumping! Is no one going to do anything about this? Where are our allies?"

How could our allies allow them to obtain raw ore at such low prices? Who gave them that?

These so-called allies are the owners of major European crystal mines. For profit, they have long controlled the quantity and pricing of crystal mining. Logically, it's impossible for Mengzhixuan to obtain low-priced raw crystal from these people.

The old man in casual clothes reminded them, "Of course they can't get goods from our mines, but don't forget, there are many mines in South America and Australia."

"Damn it, why can't we just buy all those raw ores?"

The woman in the red velvet smoking jacket said, “The wolf is coming! We have to do something to fight back. How about launching a media offensive? Just like before, create a stereotype that Chinese goods are all low-end and their crystals must be fake glass…”

The elderly man in casual clothes said, "Sure, we'll go with you."

The old man with the rosewood pipe shrugged. "Agreed."

As a result, for a period of time, many videos and posts appeared on the local internet that smeared Mengzhixuan.

The first wave involved online smear campaigns, with people claiming that Mengzhixuan was selling counterfeit goods, implying that the crystals were not natural and were so cheap.

Fortunately, natural crystals are not rare gemstones, and anyone with a basic understanding of jewelry can identify them. You can use a jewelry magnifying glass to examine the crystal growth patterns and inclusions in your crystal.

Many enthusiasts who purchased crystals from Mengzhixuan have refuted these claims by releasing their own authentication videos. Some have even had their crystals tested and presented their certificates to refute these claims.

That's how Dream Pavilion's crystal products are; they're definitely not perfect. Sometimes, opening a box will reveal beads with inclusions that aren't quite aesthetically pleasing. However, they are undeniably natural crystals. But everyone says it's just bad luck when they open the boxes. For only a dozen euros—less than the price of a meal—you can get a natural crystal pendant or a cute bracelet. What more could you ask for?

Xiaomeng's professional public relations team discovered the problem immediately and took action.

Unseen competitors hired bloggers to smear Mengzhixuan, while Mengzhixuan's PR team contacted the bloggers to clarify and clear their names. Basically, while they were creating hype, Mengzhixuan joined in. The more they hyped it up, the hotter the topic became. And with the hype building, the Mengzhixuan brand could gain wider recognition.

Xiaomeng, on the other hand, wasn't afraid. She was willing to invest any amount of advertising funds, her only concern was whether the other party would follow suit.

Riding the wave of popularity, Mengzhixuan launched its Chinese Imperial Court series of jewelry. For each piece of jewelry, they created comedic short films about the original owners—favored concubines, queens, and princesses—and included them in the product descriptions; none were left out.

One of the actresses who portrayed the Fragrant Concubine was the most popular. Because she was a Uyghur girl, her appearance was considered very attractive by Westerners. Many viewers of the short drama were captivated, repeatedly visiting the website to watch it, and some even researched that period of history themselves, creating their own videos, which went quite well.

Originally, those people wanted to smear Meng Zhixuan, but unexpectedly they made a young Chinese actor famous, which is a rather absurd situation. This infuriated the bigwigs behind the scenes.

Therefore, this offensive did not cause any damage to Mengzhixuan.

When one plan failed, the bigwigs behind the scenes came up with another.

They hired hackers to attack Mengzhixuan's website and servers.

Well, all I can say is that their attack was in vain.

When Mengzhixuan built its commercial website, it used one of the top technical teams in China—a young team from a science and technology university. The total annual development and maintenance costs for this team exceeded 100 million yuan. They also rented the best servers, with rental fees exceeding 100 million yuan as well.

In the early days, they hadn't encountered any significant attacks, and the graduate and doctoral students all felt that the money was being earned rather easily.

This time, European hackers are here. Isn't that a great opportunity? It's a perfect chance to show off my skills to the boss and prove that I didn't take the money for nothing.

As a result, the website server was down for only one hour before normal login was restored.

The tech team even went back and reinstalled the hacker's server and computer, installing their self-made mini-game software. This mini-game wasn't very useful; it couldn't be deleted, and it would occasionally flash by, performing a cleanup on the hacker's running software and randomly displaying a sarcastic or witty comment on the screen.

Thus, this second round of attacks on Mengzhixuan also ended in failure.

Of course, the attacks on Mengzhixuan will not end, but the Mengzhixuan team has a good mindset and always maintains high morale.

The main reason is that after each major victory, the boss rewards the key contributors with very expensive gifts. Everyone wishes the opposing team's attacks would be even more intense. This way, everyone gets extra bonuses every month.

This means Mengzhixuan doesn't need to consider any additional promotional work. The back-and-forth business battles on the internet are already hot enough and have gone viral enough.