Crafters guarantee you a good night’s sleep
Small business owners are the backbone of local communities in Shanghai. They take pride in the businesses they have built through hard work and attention to customers. This series talks to some of these cornerstones at the grassroots.
Neither too soft nor too hard, the mattress has proper elasticity. Since coir ropes are rough and might cause discomfort, zongbeng mattresses are always covered with cotton-filled sheets and quilts.
It is not difficult to find Hu’s shop. There is an old zongbeng mattress in front of the door, used to attract public attention.
When I arrived there one afternoon, Hu was lying on a deck chair while his wife was taking a nap on a semifinished zongbeng mattress. A short respite in their 15-hour workday.
“We work every day except for Chinese New Year, when we go back to our hometown and visit our parents and son,” Hu tells me.
“We have given our lives to zongbeng mattresses and have experienced all sorts of joys and sorrows along the way.”
Hu and his wife Wu Guomei came to Shanghai in 2000 and found work in a zongbeng mattress company. Learning from masters, Hu found he could easily master the trade.
“Maybe my father passed on his gene for ingenuity to me,” says Hu.
Apart from deft fingers, Hu also has nimble business mind. He tells me that he observed the carpentry of the wooden frame and paid attention to the sources of materials while working at the factory. That laid the foundation for his own business.
“I invested tens of thousands of yuan,” says Hu. “I was courageous because I believed we were young and still had nothing to lose. Looking back, I think I made the right choice.”
Without interior decor or air conditioning, the couple’s store is also their workshop. Hu says that there was no need to decorate the shop because it would quickly become filled with sawdust. Indeed, the white walls turned red within a year.
The store moved from No. 302 to No. 49 on Xizang Road N. last year because of an urban renewal project. Hu and Wu, who hung the old address plaque on a wall, say business has dropped to about 10 orders a month from around 30 since the move.
But even 10 keeps them busy. According to Hu, customers need to wait at least one month to get a zongbeng mattress because there are so many people on the waiting list.
“A zongbeng mattress takes around three days to make,” Hu explains. “One day to make the wooden frame and two days for weaving nylon and coir ropes.”
Previously, mattresses consisted of only two layers of coir ropes, but now Hu has added nylon net as a base in order to strengthen the mattress.
“It will last 30 years at least,” Hu says confidently. “W zongbeng mattress than 10 years, and condition.”
According to Hu tomers are old — t 90s. At the same tim made mattresses f parents who order daughter’s dowry.
It’s a laborious ta to choose materials frame, drill about it, water about 2,00 weaving, pass the r holes, secure them wooden chips, and Small wonder that thick calluses.
“In winter, the dr ily,” says Wu. “Ho much better than few years in Shang