Chapter 95: The search begins
Translated by me, edited by drpetro.
In this world there doesn’t exist love for something for no particular reason, and at the same time, hating something for no reason doesn’t exist either.
The mechanical engineered chairs had already sold more than 600 units. Up to now there hasn’t been a single client calling customer service to complain about product quality issues.
Rather, they were all calling to praise the superb quality of the mechanical engineered chairs, saying how the chair was equivalent to a buy brand new domestically made car, but getting a foreign made one instead.
Payments were all paid straight up, and good reviews came in like endless tidal waves.
Yet now, a vlogger who had 2 million plus fans on Weibo, and a senior mechanical engineer at that, posted on Weibo, a complete lie in a professional’s eye, to deliberately attack the mechanical engineered chair.
Without profits, then how could that even be possible?
The mechanical engineered chair was super complex. Wanting to disassemble the chair meant spending massive amount of time to understand what each little part did and where they were placed, otherwise when they reassembled the chair there would definitely be problems.
This famous vlogger actually used the quickest, yet most destructive approach: the brute force method. Which meant ripping apart the foam and leather, then cutting it up into more manageable pieces.
Although this could attract more audience members, but that 88K product, just like that, was gone.
Ye Qing flipped through some of his older Weibo posts.
And found that for many expensive mechanical products, he always took the soft and gentle approach, as he clearly wanted to reassemble them after.
Only when it was those cheap disposable products, did he use the brute force method.
The price tag of a mechanical engineered chair was right there, his unordinary approach did attract viewers, but without a clear goal, then how would this be even possible?
Before most of the reviews were all on point, but this time he completely threw professionalism into the wind. If this wasn’t him being biased, then what could it be?
Since it was like this, then Ye Qing was quite relieved.
Wood grows in the forest, but wind will destroy it. This was an unbroken truth passed down through the ages. [TL: Ancient proverb from the three kingdom era, basically meaning: the more distinguished you are, the more attacks you will receive from all sides.]
The mechanical engineered chair that Ye Qing created wasn’t even close to being a forest, rather it was like a flying forest.
Profit driven craziness was actually very normal. Him acting like this definitely meant he took some kind of profit. This also wasn’t as simple as just a single attack, rather there would definitely be more attacks coming.
He was currently breaking open the chair with brute force, so there were no live updates coming in.
The customer service girls currently also didn’t have anything new to reports, but without a doubt when this Mechanical Pioneer was finished his dismantling and after another round of attacks, the customer service would definitely receive calls from doubting clients.
Ye Qing opened up Baidu search engines and searched the name Mechanical Pioneer, to see if he could get a clue of him from anywhere on the internet.
A vlogger with 2 million plus fans definitely has news articles.
The first few pages were all links to his previous Weibo contents. Ye Qing very confidently went through the searches, and finally found a piece of news on the 7th page.
[Clean power Inc. sues famous vlogger Mechanical Pioneer, on publicly humiliating its vacuum cleaner product on the internet.]
Opening up the link brought Ye Qing to a news articles from last year. This was all caused by the Mechanical Pioneer posting pictures of himself disassembling and fiercely attacking a cell phone controlled vacuum cleaner, which caused it sales to plummet massively as a result.
The manufacturer took him to court on charge of defamation, requiring him to not only publicly apologize for his previous comments, but also pay up a million yuan in compensations.
Ye Qing carefully searched for the result of the lawsuit, but it was a complete disappointment.
The case dragged on for more than half a year, ended on the grounds of possessing not enough evidence, and because the suede was a public figure, thus on the grounds of inflammatory comments, was ordered to delete his account and publicly apologize.
Lawsuits require evidence, and this Mechanical Pioneer took a very tactful approach, which was grounded on the fact that the maker had many shortfalls, thus most of the provided evidence was declared as inadmissible.
He was very resourceful, his words always centered on those obvious flaws, or purposefully ignoring the product’s advantages and focusing on the faults.
The case had a completely opposite effect. Although Mechanical Pioneer publicly apologized and deleted his Weibo account, many followers who didn’t know what was going on took it as the manufacturer getting mad, and using unhand tricks to force Mechanical Pioneer to submit.
What Mechanical Pioneer said wasn’t wrong, did that mean he was guilty for pointing out the obvious? A faulty product, plus a maker who only knows underhand tricks. If its sales didn’t plummet then there was something definitely wrong with the world.
There already existed a bunch of video channels that specifically target those just released domestic movies, yet when have you ever seen anyone target them?
After apologizing, Mechanical Pioneer’s fan numbers straight up skyrocketed.
If Ye Qing really chose to take him to court, then he first needed to gather sufficient evidence, then face him in court to prove that the product in question didn’t have said problems.
This option was clearly out of the question. Just the memory foam alone was problematic enough, a single sentence from him and Ye Qing would have to run off in search of better evidence.
Clean power Inc. wasn’t small, at least bigger than what Ye Qing was right now. Yet they took him to court for almost a year, and only got him to apologise and delete a Weibo account.
Ye Qing naturally wouldn’t make the same mistake and take him to court just out of pure rage.
Ye Qing wanted to use the more straightforward approach, to let this guy understand what it truly meant to anger the monsters.
He was called Lou Tianjun, no registered address, no real job.
Having told Xu Xiaohu to bring him the transaction record for every single purchase so far, Ye Qing went through each individual name to see if there was someone called Lou Tianjun.
The mechanical engineered chair he had, naturally was bought from Ye Qing.
If there wasn’t a client with his name then that’s whatever, but if there was, then Ye Qing could guarantee that he, with the Monster, would immediately find him, and teach him a deep, deep lesson.
The checking result was very disappointing. There wasn’t such a person within the records, looks like he was a very careful, and very stealthy person.
Right at that time, Ye Qing got a call from Illusion Corporation’s CEO Yan Zhaoge.
“We’ve already set up the website for you. It’s set up in the commonly used forums format. Its servers are rented from Ali Data Centers due to their great hardware. I’ll send you the domain name after in an email.”
Ye Qing, not feeling too well, can only force a thanks.
“I’ve seen the incident on Weibo.” Yan Zhaoge comforted: “We’ve also encountered him before when he attacked our products.”
“Of course, the attack wasn’t as painful as this.”
“Those words are only for the average laymen. We’ve all personally witnessed the quality of the mechanical engineered chair, and I can guarantee that it’s one of the best piece of mechanical engineering I’ve ever seen. This time he definitely took money from another chair maker that wants to fan the flames.”
“I know, I’m just waiting to see who is really fanning the flames.” Ye Qing didn’t put down any promises in front of Yan Zhaoge, but he definitely wasn’t going to sit there and do nothing.
“Right now is the age of the internet. Whoever holds the publicity rights, then they have a say.” Yan Zhaoge very awkwardly gave Ye Qing a backup plan. Saying if he really couldn’t hold it, then he could take the hit, and pay him off.
“With these kind of people, they take money to speak, so naturally they can take money to shut up.”
Ye Qing said he would think about it, but no matter which method, he would sort this out immediately.
Not long after hanging up the call, Mechanical Pioneer made another post on Weibo.
This time it was a set of 40 plus pictures that clearly displayed every nook and cranny of the inner workings of the mechanical engineered chair.
The mechanical engineered chair was the flawless mechanical product of the peons and master artisan’s meticulous hard work, and an incomparable existence.
The Mechanical Pioneer was clearer than anyone else on how advanced it truly was.
However his big fat white lies, paired with lengthy paragraphs, were just like before, taking failing examples from other industries and comparing them to the Monster Factory, to deliberately attack the mechanical engineered chair.
In his words, the mechanical engineered chair apart, from being expensive, had nothing else going for it.
Furthermore, every single part used inside was domestically made. That also became one of his focal points.
In summary by him, real high end products should inevitably all be foreign made products.
Right at that moment, customer service had already begun to receive doubting calls from their clients.
Most of the callers weren’t even potential buyers, but were only calling to curse at them. Saying ‘you guys are money crazy’, ‘you’re only using cheap products to fool people’s money’, and so on.
The only thing that made Ye Qing happy was that, apart from the few who paid but hadn’t received the product yet asked for refunds, no one else who had already received the chairs asked for refunds.
There were even some existing clients who actually called to comfort the customer service girls, saying how divine the chairs were, and how they loved using it.
Just when Ye Qing was hesitating, whether or not to post a statement on the store about the precision level of the parts, and the importing price of the memory foam to clear away the doubts.
He was attracted to a particular enlarged image within the set posted by the Mechanical Pioneer.
There was a picture of a 24V 60W brushless servo motor, where the high definition picture clearly showed the logo of the brand of the motors.
And it was because of the logo that Ye Qing became nervous.
The motor’s brand was called Precision Planet. A very well known brand in the country.
But the problem with the motor was that Ye Qing just received them yesterday.
This brand of motors was what Ye Qing has always used. Due to having a good reputation, and a reliable product, many merchants tried to imitate them by making knock offs.
Thus, Precision Planet, to prevent being washed out by counterfeits, employed many different types of imitation prevention techniques on their product tags.
Furthermore, those product tags would change every so often, the batch from yesterday, just so happened to have switched to the new tags.
And this guy’s mechanical engineered chair just so happened to be using this new tagged servo motors.
Ye Qing recalled that there were only 6 chairs that were built with the newly arrived servo motors.
Courier at their quickest still needed a day. So having sent off everything last night, it was currently 1 pm, so most delivery drivers hadn’t even started yet, thus the Mechanical Pioneer could only have recieved it this morning.
Now everything had become much clearer.
Ye Qing quickly entered the back end of the store, and opened up the database based on when products were shipped off.
Wanting to isolate the 6 or 7 chairs that included the new servos from all 200 plus chairs was quite easy. Because every chair had its own serial number, filtering by the serial numbers, the remaining 6 were naturally all the chairs that used the new servo motors and had been shipped.
The delivery slips for these 6 chairs were quickly found by Ye Qing.
Different distances meant different delivery times, 3 out of the 6 chairs were for clients 3000 plus kilometers away, so naturally they couldn’t have received it this morning.
Ye Qing pulled up the delivery conditions for these 6 chairs, and sure enough, only one of them was signed and delivered.
Yunhe, Shanghai!
The recipient, Ma Lidong; clearly a fake name.
The municipality of Shanghai was a cosmopolitan city. It had a very very large delivery system, at the same time it was only 200 some kilometers away from Zhongyun, completely suitable for being able to receive the delivery this morning.
Ye Qing jotted down the delivery address, and immediately jumped behind the wheel of the Lagonda.