[imagesource: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg]

I’m giving away my age here, but as a kid, I watched a fair amount of Verimark in the morning during school holidays, while I was waiting for the kids’ shows to start at around midday.

These were the days before DStv and Cartoon Network.

If you liked what you saw (usually some sort of vacuum cleaner or other household product), you could phone in and place an order.

Things have migrated online now, but you catch the drift.

In China, the livestream shopping industry is huge, and Huang Wei, also known as Viya, reigns over it.

Bloomberg with more:

In April, Huang—known professionally as Viya—sold a rocket launch for around 40 million yuan ($5,6 million). The live, online shopping extravaganza the 34-year-old hosts most nights for her fans across China is part variety show, part infomercial, part group chat.

Last month, she hit a record-high audience of more than 37 million—more than the “Game of Thrones” finale, the Oscars or “Sunday Night Football.”

She sold a rocket launch? Well, you can’t just go ahead and launch a rocket, so Viya sold the entire service from start to finish – more on that here.

Also in April, she hosted a fundraising show to raise money for businesses struggling in Wuhan in the wake of the pandemic:

Described as a “combination of Kim Kardashian and Martha Stewart”, Viya is also known as the ‘Livestream Queen’.

Each night, Viya’s audience places orders worth millions of dollars—typically for cosmetics, appliances, prepared foods or clothing, but she’s also moved houses and cars.

On Singles Day, China’s biggest shopping event of the year, she did more than 3 billion yuan in sales.

The spread of coronavirus, which put most Chinese people under stay-at-home orders, doubled her viewership.

Here’s Viya in action. While there aren’t English subtitles, you can still get a sense of how impressive she is:

The appeal of Viya’s show is that it combines an interpersonal interaction with online shopping. You engage with a real person, albeit on a screen, while placing your order for home delivery.

“I position myself as someone who helps the customer make a decision—I need to think about their needs,” said Viya, late one May night. She wore casual black pants and a white T-shirt with a Yankees baseball cap and long silver earrings, all items which had been for sale during that night’s show. She dresses casually on purpose, she says, to create intimacy with viewers who are most likely home winding down.

“Specifically, my ambition is to offer everything my fans might need,” she said. “Doorbells, carpets, toothbrushes, furniture, mattresses, everything.”

She has fans across age demographics, many of whom describe their evenings as incomplete without a few hours of Viya.

Most nights, Viya streams from a small studio in her headquarters, a 10-story warehouse in the Chinese tech hub of Hangzhou. The show is only a sliver of a 500-person enterprise called Qianxun Group; it includes talent management for dozens of livestreamers, volume retail and supply chain management.

Future plans include consulting and ad agency-type work for brands that want access to their audience, plus multimedia.

Viya has accumulated enough influencer energy to demand whatever she wants from companies eager to be featured on her show.

You can read more about Viya, and that time she fronted a pop group, here.

Analysts predict that livestream shopping is the online shopping of the future.

Viya is a millionaire at 34, so it’s something to look into if you’re tired of your desk job.

[source:bloomberg]