---
title: "Character Determines the Fate of Three Squirrels"
description: "Three Squirrels, the 'national snack' brand, has entered a period of adversity. In recent months, the brand has been hit by quality issues, a hamster found in a mail package, and advertising mishaps, affecting nearly all aspects of its operations. As growth stalls and reputation declines, the company seems to lack effective responses. This article revisits the company's internal books and the experiences of founder Zhang Liaoyuan to explore the root causes of these problems."
author: "范建"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2022-01-14"
language: "en"
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---

# Character Determines the Fate of Three Squirrels

> Three Squirrels, the 'national snack' brand, has entered a period of adversity. In recent months, the brand has been hit by quality issues, a hamster found in a mail package, and advertising mishaps, affecting nearly all aspects of its operations. As growth stalls and reputation declines, the company seems to lack effective responses. This article revisits the company's internal books and the experiences of founder Zhang Liaoyuan to explore the root causes of these problems.

Source: Zebra Consumption (ID: banmaxiaofei)

The "national snack" Three Squirrels has entered a period of adversity.

In recent months, **the brand has been continuously exposed to quality issues, a hamster found in a mail package, advertising mishaps, and other incidents**, involving almost all aspects of products, logistics, and marketing. In the face of these problems, the company seems to have no better solutions.

In 2012, with five people and a single residential room, Three Squirrels was born in Wuhu, Anhui. Leveraging the founding team's exceptional marketing skills and the early e-commerce traffic dividend, it became the dominant player in the leisure snack e-commerce sector.

During its entrepreneurial journey, Three Squirrels has faced crises before, but never as concentrated as now.

Growth is hitting a bottleneck, reputation is declining... **Ten years after the brand's founding, why have problems come one after another?**

During this short holiday, we revisited two books created internally by Three Squirrels, "Why the Squirrel" and "Squirrel Dad and Three Squirrels," to study the company and the experiences of founder Zhang Liaoyuan, attempting to find answers from the source.

**The Child King**

Zhang Liaoyuan is short, thin, and wears glasses. He is articulate and eloquent, exuding confidence in his speech. Within Three Squirrels (300783.SZ), his nickname is "Squirrel Dad."

His confidence is innate. In the 1970s, in Jixia Village, Jixi County, Anhui Province, the impoverished rural area favored boys over girls. The Zhang family's first three children were girls, until April 5, 1976, when a boy was finally born—Zhang Liaoyuan.

At home, he was the cherished male heir, doted on by family, self-centered and dominant.

While villagers toiled in the fields, Zhang's father worked as an accountant in the coal department in Ningguo, one of the few in the village with a government job. Therefore, during his school years, **Zhang Liaoyuan enjoyed a sense of superiority and pride that other children lacked.**

In childhood, like other kids, he did mischievous things like skipping class, stealing fruit, and fishing.

He formed a small team at school, challenged the child king, and even fought with a teacher amid classmates' jeers, eventually becoming the new child king.

Despite being mischievous, Zhang was smart and ranked among the top in class.

He was small and often bullied. Thus, in every new environment, he would "plan" a fight. This was to gain a sense of presence.

To this day, his left eye bears an indelible scar, a mark from his youth.

In the eyes of former playmates, Zhang Liaoyuan was a "rogue hero." Zhang even attributes his later success to "a sense of justice," even though this trait seems not directly related to entrepreneurship.

After entering society, Zhang sold VCDs, drove a motorcycle taxi, ran a cold drink shop... but none succeeded, leading to deep frustration. Yet once he found his niche, the spark of confidence would reignite.

**The Eccentric Talent**

During middle school, Zhang moved from the countryside to the city. Because he couldn't understand the teacher's Mandarin, he rarely attended classes but excelled at self-study, often ranking first in math exams.

A teacher once gave him a verdict: **"You will either be a genius or an eccentric talent."**

During the critical period before the high school entrance exam, while other students were cramming, Zhang applied to study at home but instead spent his time in arcades. The teacher again gave a verdict: "You can't be a genius, but if you wake up in time, you can still be an eccentric talent."

After early entrepreneurial failures, he used his eccentric talent and accurate understanding of recruiter needs—this technical secondary school graduate defeated a group of university students to win a job requiring a college diploma or above, and first encountered e-commerce.

During his time at Zhan's, while helping the company expand offline markets, he saw the market potential of selling agricultural products online.

He was almost crazy to embrace e-commerce. After failing to build his own platform, he founded the Keke Guo brand, selling the company's pecans nationwide.

If Zhan's had agreed to heavily invest online and follow Zhang's ideas for financing... perhaps Three Squirrels would not exist today.

Fate is always full of twists and turns.

Due to differing development philosophies, Zhang did not want to miss the e-commerce era, left Zhan's, and prepared to start his own business.

**The Marketer**

Undoubtedly, Zhang Liaoyuan is an excellent marketer and skilled at marketing himself.

When he had almost nothing and was still a "hooligan," he successfully marketed himself and found his current wife.

His life is almost constantly marketing. When the company needed financing, he didn't actively seek it but talked about his understanding of industry and e-commerce on the internet to attract attention.

At the founding of Three Squirrels, he was willing to spend hundreds of thousands of yuan to attend industry conferences despite limited funds, to build industry influence.

Even the establishment of the Three Squirrels brand itself was from a marketer's perspective, because the "tongue-twisting" name itself could attract attention, appear unconventional, and leverage more traffic with less cost.

After founding Three Squirrels, he had his own unique theory: "In the internet era, excellent product quality is the foundation, but not the core competitiveness; creating services that make users scream is."

In the squirrel world, **if the product scores 100, marketing must score 150.**

Indeed, Three Squirrels has created many surprising services, such as customer service calling customers "master," and giving away box openers, tissues, sealing clips, and other small items when customers purchase snacks. In Zhang's view, users will share these surprises with those around them, spontaneously posting on WeChat Moments and Weibo, and only then pay attention to product quality. This is "mind marketing."

**The Gambler**

Zhang Liaoyuan loves gambling. In his youth, he liked gambling. He summarized that without enough gambling capital, he would lose several games in a row; with ample capital, he could be a winning streak general.

In 2012, leaving Zhan's, where he was thriving, was itself a huge gamble, pushing himself onto a path of no return.

In the rise of Three Squirrels, "gambling" is almost everywhere.

To quickly establish industry status, Zhang discovered that on the Taobao platform, merchants had not yet formed the habit of spending on advertising and paid particular attention to return on investment. Three Squirrels thus launched an advertising war.

In direct traffic ads, Three Squirrels not only advertised in its own industry but also across industries, using aggressive promotion to gain search rankings.

In the diamond booth battle, Three Squirrels highlighted core information like squirrels, nuts, and low prices, **recklessly spending on ads without regard for the initially very low ROI.**

Finally, on Tmall's Double 11 in the founding year, Three Squirrels became the top food e-commerce seller across the entire network. The relentless pursuit of industry-first sales led to the first shipping crisis.

Even at such a moment, Zhang did not forget to turn the suspension of the Tmall store into an event marketing opportunity, letting the outside world feel Three Squirrels' popularity, thoughtful service, and focus on user experience.

On June 19, 2016, at the fourth anniversary celebration of Three Squirrels, Zhang boasted a ten-year plan with six goals:

A market value of 100 billion, a thousand people becoming millionaires (1000 employees becoming millionaires, 100 becoming ten-millionaires), a hundred enterprises reaching 100 million, ten enterprises reaching 1 billion (suppliers), everyone happy (excellent employees get free meals, medical care, education, marriage, housing, etc.), and masters happy...

Half the time has passed, but the goals remain far off.

**Are you "watching" me?**


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