FoodBud

Before the Castle, Part 10 — 2014–2015: Big Boasts, a New Headquarters, Matcha, and the National Push ### 2014–2015：第一次大吹牛、新办公室、抹茶广告与走向全国 **A FoodBud translated & annotated edition of Mixue co-founder Zhang Hongfu's first-person memoir**

*Series: "Before the Castle — How Mixue Was Really Built, 1997–2017" · Article 10 of 12 · FoodBud /insights*

1. FoodBud Editor's Note

Article 9 ended with anxiety and Buddhist self-reflection. Article 10 moves into the opposite emotional register: 2014 and early 2015, when growth, applause, new offices, big conferences, celebrity attention, and the decision to remove logistics fees pushed confidence toward overconfidence.

This installment is deliberately uncomfortable. Zhang Hongfu does not simply say Mixue grew; he admits the team began to float. They bought and rented a full-floor headquarters, spent heavily on design and furniture, held a grand entrepreneur annual meeting, talked about becoming a great Starbucks-like company, invited Aoi Sola for a matcha ice-cream ad, set a 500% growth target, pushed Mandarin internally, waived nationwide logistics fees, and began opening direct-operated stores in Wuhan, Suzhou, and Hangzhou at high speed. The tone is triumphant, but the next article will show why this triumph was fragile.

2. Why This Installment Matters

The national Mixue strategy does not begin only with product or store count. It also begins with headquarters theater: offices, conferences, supplier confidence, franchisee confidence, national pricing consistency, and logistics policy. The most strategically important decision here is nationwide free logistics, because it allows franchisees to open farther away without bearing extra shipping cost and helps create a unified customer perception: Mixue is cheap everywhere. But this same period also incubates the overexpansion and self-inflation that trigger the 2015 crisis.

—— FoodBud English Translation of the Source · Part 10 Begins ——

The First Big Boast

Gradually floating until he nearly flew.

In the end, Zhang Hongfu says, it was still nouveau-riche psychology, without pattern.

2014 was a contradictory year. On one hand, because the team had expanded sharply and was not adapting to all kinds of new topics, he needed to listen to Buddhist sutras to calm himself. He also enrolled in various courses everywhere and began going out at high frequency to listen and learn, dealing with his knowledge anxiety. It was a feeling of being flustered, uneasy at heart.

But on the other hand, 2014 was also a year of singing and marching forward in development. That year, their total store count officially exceeded 1,000. The office at Caizhi Mingzuo expanded from two rooms to seven or eight rooms. Under Lao Cheng's leadership, the number of direct-operated stores grew from three or four in previous years to more than thirty. Company performance had increased by several dozen times within a few years. This brought a sense of self-affirming satisfaction.

Also that year, after several years of accumulation, they had some silver. Once the wallet became full, they began thinking about adding an office.

The goal of buying an office had been fixed when they were still working inside a residential compound. At that time, customers were often blocked and questioned by security guards in all kinds of ways. After customers finally entered the compound, they had to circle around trying to find the door number.

When they went upstairs and saw Mixue squeezed into a private residence, it looked like a briefcase company. Customers saw it that way, and employees would see it that way too. So recruitment was very difficult. Unless someone was a bitter, deeply resentful grassroots struggler, he would not come work at their company.

That year, they bought half a floor of office space at Hanhai Beijin with a mortgage. But in the following months, after they went outside the province to inspect the industry, they reset the target. They felt they had to build a great enterprise like Starbucks. Half a floor would not be enough — the main reason, he admits, was that they had saved a little more money — so they planned to take the entire floor.

In the second half of 2014, they also held their first proper franchisee conference at a five-star hotel. About 800 partners attended. At the meeting, they reported recent achievements to customers, and the chairman personally announced a decision that would benefit them enormously for many years afterward: nationwide free logistics. Precisely because of this decision, their customers began opening stores nationwide, and Mixue began moving from a local brand toward the whole country.

Surrounded by stars, under bright light, walking a red carpet beneath the spotlight, Zhang Hongfu stood on stage and again made big boasts to everyone: in the coming years, how many partners would reach million-yuan net worth, how many would reach ten-million-yuan net worth; they would move into an international 5A Grade-A office building; and so on.

At that moment, the applause, flowers, and praise from customers, partners, and suppliers, plus the spotlight at center stage, began to intoxicate people. It felt as if all of it was not hard-won, but naturally deserved.

More ridiculous still: at the end of that year, the company whose courses he attended arranged an entrepreneur year-end forum in Beijing. At the forum he saw many entrepreneurs speaking on stage, including some young start-up founders. He felt his own company was not bad either, and that he too had some ability. After all, in a few years it had multiplied several dozen times and store count had passed one thousand. So he especially wanted to share on stage. He told the customer manager receiving him: could they let him go up next year?

There was something even more absurd. On the forum's final day, he passed a note to the forum organizer, the head of the conference-service organization. On the note were self-introductions for him personally and for the company — in truth, self-showing-off — and inside the note he wrote about his desire to participate in next year's forum and share on stage. Of course, they ignored him.

What kind of face was that? Full of self-satisfaction. Why self-satisfaction? Because he did not know there was a sky beyond the sky.

Clearly human vanity and self-inflation had gained the upper hand, yet he did not know it and was not ashamed. Clearly it was only a tiny profit at the corner of a snail's horn, yet he thought he controlled a large famous enterprise. In the end, it was narrow vision, nouveau-riche psychology, and no pattern at all.

Smooth wind and smooth water may be the foreshadowing of bad luck. This may be true for individuals, enterprises, society, and nations. In favorable circumstances, with a small achievement, it is easy to begin floating amid all kinds of praise. Pride begins. One lifts oneself into the air, stops learning humbly, then temper grows. One thinks oneself king, thinks oneself the leading elder brother.

But the performance had only just begun. Before the climax, he could not yet fall.

New Year, New Home

In short, everything was extremely high. Life felt as if it had reached climax.

The next half year was almost a continuous chain of wonderful, or rather show-off, moments.

First, at the end of 2014, they finally decided to use an entire floor to build the new office. They had only bought half a floor. For the remaining half, they paid a high price to rent it and had the other tenant move to another floor. The full floor was about 2,000 square meters. After all, they were building an international first-class enterprise. They also had to use the best teacher for design. In the end, their design supervisor Mengjie invited a Hong Kong designer. The pure design fee alone cost more than 800,000 yuan. Zhang Hongfu believes they were probably the only company in Henan that year, aside from real-estate enterprises, to pay a separate design fee for an office. At the time, they used a southern decoration company for construction, excluding local Henan firms. They used the best domestic office furniture, all from Shanghai Aurora, a purchase costing several million yuan.

In the design of leadership offices, they fully displayed their nouveau-riche character. Zhang Hongfu's own office alone was more than 100 square meters. At the time, this was gloriously called needing to frequently receive important Chinese and foreign partners and investors. The offices of several other department managers were also forty or fifty square meters each.

Since the new home had been decorated so well, they of course had to invite people with great fanfare to visit. So at the beginning of 2015, on January 1, they held that year's franchisee meeting, internally called the first Entrepreneur Annual Meeting, at the Yellow River Guest House — the Henan Provincial Party Committee's Third Guest House where Chairman Mao had stayed when visiting Henan.

They invited all suppliers and all franchisees. In their industry, who had seen such a formation? Most people clicked their tongues in praise. During the move, they also held a grand ceremony: after leader speeches, department heads received keys. Their old supplier Wu Ge even posted on WeChat Moments that growth had multiplied a hundredfold in several years, with heroes here, paired with Zhang Hongfu's photo.

By then, Zhang Hongfu had completely adapted to that kind of glory. He even wrote a *Langtaosha* lyric for Mixue Bingcheng:

*Taking the reins in the Central Plains,* *Beside the Yellow River,* *Chasing deer across the nine provinces, opening a grand chapter.* *Each leads the fashion, all are talented,* *Yet gather into one team.*

*More should cross the four seas,* *Not wasting youth,* *Working with one heart to pursue the sages before us.* *As commerce and as the Way, spreading China,* *Saving the world.*

In short, everything was very high. Life felt as if it had reached climax. Looking back today, he despises the person he was then, because today he can clearly replay the subtle changes in his mind at that time. But at the time, he did not notice them at all. If they were allowed to go back and choose again, they might still walk the same old road. Perhaps they had been suppressed at the bottom for too long and needed an outlet. Partners also needed an outlet to hold their heads high. They were young and reckless, completely unaware of themselves.

But there were benefits too. They let partners see a dream happening before their eyes. They also realized the stage boast they had once made to partners: giving everyone an office environment like on television, no longer squeezed in a residential compound and treated like a briefcase company. So all that ceremony and hardware equipment were necessary at the time. What Zhang Hongfu despises is the involuntary floating inside himself.

At the same time, Mixue Bingcheng Home-Style Restaurant, the main store that had operated from 2003 to 2015, was officially demolished and closed. They all believed that 2015, a new era, was about to arrive.

Teacher Aoi Arrives

At that time, nobody was promoting matcha ice cream. They wanted to carry forward matcha products. Zhang Hongfu feels a little ashamed to mention this matter, but many people learned about Mixue Bingcheng because of it and want to know the details, so he feels it necessary to write the origin and course. Otherwise people always tease him.

In spring 2015, after moving into the new office, they also hired an external R&D teacher. They had made no moves in ice cream for several years, so they decided to expand ice-cream categories and launched a matcha ice cream. At the time, no one was promoting matcha ice cream. They wanted to carry forward matcha products.

They wanted to shoot an advertising film for this product. As it happened, the landlord of their Huanghe Road store did film production. His company was called Yilan Film and Television. They chatted with landlord-director Mr. Lu about how to shoot a TVC ad. At the time their ambition was still high. They hoped to put the advertisement online, ideally controlling the length to within thirty seconds. They thought hard about how to tell the matcha story in thirty seconds.

While drinking tea and discussing the script, the two teams communicated for a long time but still could not find a clue. Thirty seconds was too short and the story was hard to unfold. Suddenly Zhang Hongfu wondered whether they could work from the ad's protagonist. At that time their understanding of matcha was not yet that it originated in China; they more often believed it came from Japan. So they felt perhaps finding a Japanese person as the protagonist would work better.

Somehow, they thought of Aoi Sola. At the time, her name was already famous, not because of her acting career, but because people often joked that the Diaoyu Islands belonged to China and Teacher Aoi belonged to the world. They thought: if it was matcha ice cream that Aoi Sola liked to eat, would it not feel quite authentic?

Because there was a borderline sexual joke, conflict, and comic drama, their eyes suddenly brightened and their blockage cleared. The deeper they talked, the more they felt the matter could be done. Director Lu happened to say that if they wanted to invite her, he really could mobilize people around him and see whether he could find her.

So the matter was decided. Several days later, Director Lu replied that one month later, on the 18th, she had one day's schedule available, and asked whether they wanted to confirm. Their early team was, after all, a group of male grassroots strugglers, full of fun and yearning. So the matter was happily decided.

Zhang Hongfu clarifies: they were not looking for her to be an endorser. They were shooting an advertising film, a matcha ice-cream advertising film. They felt using a Japanese person relatively familiar to Chinese people to recommend it should have good effect.

One month later, on the 18th, Aoi Sola came to Zhengzhou for the first time. That day they brought her to the office, and on Zhang Hongfu's desk she wrote a calligraphy piece: Love Mixue Bingcheng Matcha Ice Cream. Because writing the calligraphy was a temporary added item and not within the contract, they paid quite a lot more for it.

After she wrote at the office desk, they took her to several locations to participate in filming. Because she was not an ordinary actor, in the early stage they did not dare to publicize with great fanfare, and did no early public-opinion preparation. The reason the matter became noisy at the time was that while filming at the North University Town store entrance, some things caused delays. It happened to coincide with students leaving school. Students surrounded the set in layers, inside and outside. Then many people posted to Weibo and WeChat, and the matter instantly became a hot search.

The film was short, but Director Lu was, after all, working with a cross-border actor for the first time, so he arranged quite a few scenes. She herself was very professional and polite, even with a kind of sweet girl-next-door feeling.

After the matter hit hot search, male students paying attention basically did not dislike it. But female customers and fans disliked it strongly. Zhang Hongfu also felt very sorry about female customers' criticism on Weibo. So after the ad film was made, they did not really broadcast or promote it. They only treated it as internal entertainment.

There were still benefits. They had just moved into a new office and invited an actor everyone had heard of to come over. Partners were still quite excited. Perhaps this was one benefit of working at Mixue Bingcheng.

Looking back at this matter now, he still feels some fear. If it were today, even if beaten to death he would not invite her. Of course, this is not because he looks down on her. Rather, from a male perspective, he could not imagine the later disgust female customers on the internet would feel toward her. In any case, the matter has passed. He believes they actually helped her quite a lot. They should have been the first enterprise outside nightclubs and other ambiguous venues to invite her to appear. After that, Teacher Aoi's acting path became wider and wider.

Of course, the matcha ice cream she appeared for did not sell especially well later. It was not that their matcha ice cream tasted bad; the failure lay in the machine equipment. At the time, their ice-cream machines loaded two flavors of raw material each time. If customers kept ordering only one of the flavors, the machine would operate unevenly and easily be damaged. Later franchisees gradually stopped adding this product. Also, during R&D, they pursued so-called authenticity too much, and the taste came out slightly bitter. Many children and people eating matcha for the first time could not accept it. So Aoi Sola coming to Mixue Bingcheng was purely an episode. It did not render outstanding service for this product.

It was just entertainment, satisfying partners' curiosity — and his own curiosity. Occasionally inviting a celebrity or actor is also good. Work pressure was already high enough. After several years of hard work, occasionally having fun is also an important incentive method, he believes. Later, after his father learned they had invited a Japanese actor, he scolded him fiercely.

He does not like Aoi Sola because he does not listen to her songs or watch her films, although he has watched them. He likes Jay Chou. Hahaha.

Dui, Dui, Dui

In Henan dialect, dui means roughly "do it," "get it going," "make it happen." It is similar to the northeastern expression "zheng qilai," but even more satisfying.

After moving into a spacious, bright, stylish new office, with Teacher Aoi's publicity boost, plus three straight years of tripling growth, their confidence reached its peak. As the saying goes, ten thousand feet of red dust in three cups of wine, a thousand autumns of achievement in one pot of tea. At the tea table in Zhang Hongfu's office, he and several senior executives set an ambitious 2015 operating performance target: increase fivefold. Compared with 2014, they wanted 500% growth.

They began breaking down the tasks.

First, direct-operated stores: the number had to grow from 30 in 2014 to 150 by the end of 2015, with revenue targets several times higher. The battlefield would move south from Zhengzhou, fully developing Wuhan, Suzhou, and Hangzhou, with Shanghai as the ultimate target. Shen Meng, responsible for direct-store development, and Lao Cheng, responsible for direct-store operations, said the mission would be achieved and must be completed.

For franchise stores, they had just broken through 1,000. The new 2015 plan was to add another 1,500 stores and reach 2,500 retained stores by year-end. Goods-ordering volume also had targets several times higher. The focus was to move out of Henan and open nationwide. The plan was to start from the six central provinces around Henan and gradually radiate outward. They wanted to turn from a Henan brand into a national brand. For these goals, Zexu in franchise recruitment and Dapeng in operations also patted their heads and said it was a piece of cake; they would wait to receive awards at year-end.

As for the decision to open nationwide, it was not made by patting heads. Preparations had begun several years earlier.

First, from 2012, the company began fully promoting Mandarin, because they felt speaking dialect would make people think in small-circle terms, treating themselves as employees of a local small company, leading to insufficient pattern and affecting development. To ensure promotion effect, saying one sentence of Henan dialect brought a 100-yuan fine, and it could accumulate. At the time, one manager was fined more than 1,000 yuan in one month. Actually, the fine had not originally been set so high. It had been ten yuan per sentence. But one manager kept speaking Henan dialect and later jokingly asked Zhang Hongfu whether he could buy a monthly pass. They then raised it to a price not easy to buy monthly.

Second, from 2014, the chairman decided that nationwide delivery of materials would be free of logistics fees. When this policy was introduced, they bore enormous pressure, but the final result proved he was right. Franchisees began daring to open stores outside the province, because logistics cost was borne by the company. In theory, the farther a store opened, the more advantage it took from the company. In the early stage, for convenient unified management, they also required all franchise stores nationwide to use unified terminal retail prices. Because out-of-province and in-province goods costs were exactly the same, this saved a lot of energy otherwise spent discussing or handling inconsistent terminal prices. At the customer level, they also formed a unified customer recognition: Mixue Bingcheng is cheap everywhere.

Then execution began.

The new office environment made recruitment easier too. In half a year, employee count grew from three or four hundred to more than one thousand. Very quickly, they felt the 2,000 square meters of office area was not enough. The new office environment also better shocked franchisees. After prospective signers visited the company and felt headquarters was strong, Mixue completely held the upper hand in later signing negotiations. In Zexu's words, when he saw someone who was not handsome-looking, he did not even want to sign a contract with them.

On the external battlefield, Shen Meng and Lao Cheng went to Wuhan and Suzhou. With absolute confidence from the previous 30 successful direct-operated stores, heavy support from sufficient funds, and an operations team that was still green but absolutely shared hatred of the enemy, they took stores and opened stores especially fast. In just a few months, they opened more than fifty new stores in Wuhan and Suzhou. Immediately afterward, another small team went to Hangzhou and opened fourteen stores two months later.

When everyone is united and wants the same thing, work efficiency is astonishingly high. Zhang Hongfu remembers that the Wuhan and Suzhou development and operations teams almost did not sleep all night. Whole truckloads of goods arrived, and they unloaded them item by item into nearby rented homes or warehouses. After receiving goods, they stocked the store, tested equipment, trial-operated, and opened on time the next day. Not only did they basically not need to catch up on sleep, partners could still hold microphones and stand on ladders, bouncing up and down.

On the franchise side, beyond the office recruitment team signing contracts until their hands softened, store renovation and opening also entered a harvest mode like scorched wheat and fried beans. Opening more than one hundred new stores in a month became normal. Because their suppliers had served them for three years and had enough confidence that Mixue could reach its goals, they prepared five times the goods. So although the first half of 2015 was tense and high-speed, there was no large-scale shortage.

However, overtime high-speed production made suppliers "pull radishes too fast to wash off the mud." Equipment and material problems appeared at especially high frequency, harming many stores and franchisees. Their partners' phone calls were mostly solving after-sales problems, and when traveling, their bags were stuffed full of all kinds of spare parts.

As for the greenness of newly hired partners, it was completely covered by the sight of high-speed development. Being green and unskilled was not important at all. Even whether someone could make ice cream or milk tea was not important. As long as he could stand on a ladder or speaker, wave flags, shout through a microphone, and attract customers, he was a person with Mixue flavor.

They were excited to the extreme. Sitting together, smoking, drinking tea, and boasting, they calculated that not long from now, they could transform from grassroots strugglers into rich, handsome successes, lead brothers to promotions and raises, marry beautiful rich women, and move toward life's peak.

—— FoodBud English Translation of the Source · Part 10 Ends ——

3. FoodBud Notes

1. National free logistics is the strategic hinge. It reduces franchisee fear of opening far away, supports unified terminal pricing, and helps create the national customer perception that Mixue is cheap everywhere.

2. Headquarters theater becomes an expansion tool. The office, conference, furniture, design, and ceremony are not just vanity. They also strengthen recruitment, supplier confidence, and franchisee trust. The risk is that the theater feeds founder overconfidence.

3. Aoi Sola is treated by the memoir as a cautionary publicity episode. The ad created attention and internal excitement, but Zhang Hongfu later recognizes the mismatch with female customer sentiment and the product's own operational weakness.

4. 500% growth is a self-inflation signal. The plan to grow direct stores from 30 to 150 and franchise stores to 2,500 is presented as a heady goal born from several years of tripling.

5. "Mixue flavor" temporarily means hustle more than capability. In the high-growth moment, the ability to shout, promote, open, and move goods covers weak training, weak product consistency, and green teams.

4. Timeline (this installment)

  • 2014 — Mixue store count exceeds 1,000; direct-operated stores grow to more than 30; the office expands.
  • 2014 — Mixue buys half a floor at Hanhai Beijin, then decides to take the full floor for a 2,000-square-meter headquarters.
  • Second half 2014 — First major franchisee conference at a five-star hotel; nationwide free logistics is announced.
  • 2015-01-01 — First Entrepreneur Annual Meeting is held at Yellow River Guest House; the new office move is celebrated.
  • 2015 — Mixue Bingcheng Home-Style Restaurant, the original main restaurant store, is demolished and closed.
  • Spring 2015 — Matcha ice cream launches; Aoi Sola comes to Zhengzhou to film a matcha ad.
  • 2015 — The team sets a 500% growth target: 150 direct-operated stores and 2,500 retained franchise stores by year-end.
  • 2015 first half — Wuhan, Suzhou, and Hangzhou direct-operated expansion accelerates; monthly franchise openings exceed 100.

5. Pull Quotes (web-ready)

1. *"At that moment, applause, flowers, praise, and the spotlight made people feel everything was naturally deserved."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text) 2. *"Nationwide free logistics."* — Zhang Hongchao's 2014 decision, as recalled by Zhang Hongfu 3. *"Mixue Bingcheng is cheap everywhere."* — FoodBud rendering of the unified-pricing logic from the source 4. *"If there are no conditions, create conditions."* — a recurring Zhang Hongchao operating style, echoed in this installment 5. *"As long as he could stand on a ladder or speaker, wave flags, shout through a microphone, and attract customers, he was a person with Mixue flavor."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text)

Series navigation

*Before the Castle: How Mixue Was Really Built, 1997-2017 · Part 10 of 12 · FoodBud /insights*

*This is a translated and annotated edition, not an original FoodBud interview. Authorized translation: translated with permission from Zhang Hongfu's memoir (经授权翻译自张红甫回忆录). Original author/source: Zhang Hongfu (张红甫). The translated source is kept separate from FoodBud's Editor's Note, FoodBud Notes, timeline, and pull quotes.*

*Publication note: corporate data is primary-source-locked to HKEX filings where stated. Market capitalization and any FY2025 GMV / systemwide-sales figure are intentionally not stated. “Scale” means systemwide sales / GMV and store count, never company revenue. FoodBud is information only, not investment advice.*