In 2020, Genki Forest was not a company but a phenomenon. That year, its revenue surged 309% year-on-year[1], like a sports car with both pedals as accelerators. The consumer goods industry had not witnessed such a resounding victory for a long time, and the industry-wide discussion was how to build consumer products the internet way, like Genki Forest. In an interview, Tang Binsen bluntly stated: "We've been too smooth for the past four years[3]." Tang Binsen presents the image of a typical post-80s new elite: a graduate of a prestigious university, successful entrepreneur, courted by venture capitalists, financially free at a young age, as smooth as a 1960s Italian-made Western—no matter how tense the background music, the audience instinctively believes that Clint Eastwood's cowboy will triumph in the end. From a certain perspective, Genki Forest is a mirror image of Tang Binsen's life; it got the most boring script: a handsome cowboy arrives in a dusty Western town, and in a saloon filled with Mexican accents, defeats an enemy dozens of times his size with like-minded partners. The process is so smooth that you forget to wonder why his revolver never runs out of bullets. Tang Binsen has repeatedly expressed admiration for Huawei, but not for its tech heroes, struggle culture, or the Huawei-style simplicity of "How Long Can Genki Forest's Red Flag Fly?" Rather, it's reflected in Genki Forest's flamboyant character. At a public event, Tang Binsen said: "There can't be only one Coca-Cola in the world[2]." If we set aside grand dimensions like industry and scale, Genki Forest can be deconstructed as a company that spends 1 billion yuan on factories, making decisions with the impulsiveness of a madman; it develops new products boundlessly, investing like a fool without regard for returns; and at other times, it's just a chef who ignores the outside world and focuses on cooking a good dish. The market has always wanted to know: Why can't old brands, dozens of times larger, crush a small Genki Forest? But from another angle, Genki Forest has dabbled in every beverage category, yet so far has few super hits like sparkling water. Internally, the rapidly expanding organization is diluting efficiency. Once self-proclaimed as internet-style, Genki Forest no longer pursues 2-3x annual growth, but is moving closer to a traditional consumer goods company. Everyone knows reforms must be done during high growth, but the problem is that high growth恰恰 masks various issues. After recording a disappointing 7 billion yuan revenue in 2021[1], Tang Binsen put the brakes on this sports car. After four years of rapid growth, Genki Forest discovered that the revolver doesn't solve all problems. This is also a question almost all Westerns fail to answer: Can a cowboy gallop across the wilderness forever? Of course, a cowboy can be invincible in the wild. But when railway tracks extend, steam locomotives shuttle through valleys, and coal, steel, and oil drive urban expansion, the cowboy suddenly realizes—his enemies are not sheriffs, bandits, or gang gunmen, but police stations, joint-stock companies, and the rigid urban order. Genki Forest in 2022 is that cowboy who has an epiphany: factories roar, oil wells scream, civilization and order close in, and the wilderness story nears its end. And all he holds is a revolver.
01
It's Not About Money
A Shandong man matures when he prepares for the civil service exam; a company matures when it begins to accept the rules of the business. What are the rules? Xiaomi's official biography, One Way Forward, recounts this: Lei Jun discovered that his company's screw costs were five times the industry average. The supplier's reason was that the screws had higher torque than Apple's standard and each screw bore a small Xiaomi logo. Lei Jun asked if Apple used such screws; the supplier replied, "Apple can't afford our products[4]." Afterward, Xiaomi replaced everything from screws, SIM ejector pins, to paper manuals, cutting costs by 50%. Lei Jun was shaken: it was incredible that Xiaomi reached the world's forefront with such a fragile supply chain. Supply chain is also the deep-water zone of Genki Forest's reform. At the end of 2019, Tang Binsen announced at an internal meeting that Genki Forest would build its own factories to avoid being "choked" by suppliers. At that time, Genki Forest was squeezed in the supply chain. The first quarter was the most severe: under pressure from competitors, contract manufacturers found excuses to delay production. Raw materials, packaging, caps, preforms—almost every link had issues. In Chuzhou, Anhui, thousands of miles away, the first factory had been under construction for months. It cost 1 billion yuan, more than the company's total annual revenue at the time. A senior executive recalled that management was initially resistant: "If we're not careful, the company will be gone next year." Tang Binsen once said in an interview that supply chain construction is just a matter of spending money[5]. However, past success and his outsider status clearly made him underestimate the difficulty. Gu Sheng, head of engineering at Genki Forest's production center, was also responsible for the Chuzhou factory's construction. Tang Binsen demanded the factory be topped out within six months, but for every one-third reduction in工期, construction difficulty increases ninefold, not to mention administrative procedures. Throughout the process, Gu Sheng was unaware of the 1 billion yuan investment debate at Beijing headquarters; he said: "This is not about money." On New Year's Eve 2020, as COVID-19 began to spread, the factory was topped out on schedule. On the fourth day of the Lunar New Year, Gu Sheng drove back to the site from his hometown in a neighboring province; whenever roads were blocked, he had to detour, taking seven hours for a 200-kilometer journey. The site notice read: "Construction suspended, quarantine on site." Harder than the epidemic was reclaiming lost time after the lockdown. Summer is the peak sales season for beverages, so the production line ideally started in May. To save time, Gu Sheng directed 14 engineering teams, totaling over 400 people, to install equipment while constructing, day and night. They also faced challenges from cross-construction on safety supervision and process management. In June 2020, the Chuzhou factory officially went into production, a month later than planned, but still set a new record for construction speed of a similar-scale factory. Tang Binsen was visibly excited when he visited. Distributors were already calling: "When will there be stock?" Stepping into the deep water, Genki Forest began to learn to accept a century-old industry rule: product supremacy means solving the entire process from raw materials, production, canning, channels, to retail. It's not just about a bottle of drink. But Genki Forest's temperament is more like an internet company, advocating aggressive moves and fast iteration. At a media briefing in April this year, Genki Forest left this message: "We are starting to learn from traditional enterprises." The 1968 film Once Upon a Time in the West precisely depicts this scenario: in the dusty wilderness, cowboy Cheyenne and the harmonica player glimpse the bustling cities of the East Coast along the winding railway tracks—a new world of towering buildings and steam.
02
Super Factory
Regarding China's beverage industry, there are three facts: Fact 1: The main channel for Chinese consumers to buy beverages is not Tmall, FamilyMart, or 7-Eleven, but various family-run small supermarkets, grocery stores, and even lottery shops. Fact 2: What determines whether a product sells well may be packaging design and ingredient list, but more importantly, it's channel coverage, the sales team responsible for these tasks, and the profit margins the brand can offer to channels. Fact 3: If you believe good products naturally gain consumer recognition, then Coca-Cola wouldn't need to advertise, but it恰恰 has the largest marketing budget. These facts make Genki Forest's overnight success seem like luck. Tang Binsen answered this in his journal: Our view on product teams is that making one hit is luck; making three is your strength. Genki Forest wants to turn this luck into strength by building itself into a super factory capable of rapidly iterating products. Starting with the Chuzhou factory, Genki Forest established five self-owned factories within three years, with a total investment exceeding 5.5 billion yuan. Besides avoiding being "choked," another reason is that to keep pace with product development and iteration, it must have its own factories. To constantly create freshness for consumers, Genki Forest launched several seasonal limited-edition products, but this meant each product's production cycle was only three months, a huge challenge for contract manufacturers' production line planning and approval processes—even TSMC couldn't withstand such demands from Apple. Take the milk tea as an example: because it uses real milk, its milk protein content is higher than similar products, making it prone to clogging pipes during production. A normal line runs 24 hours before cleaning, but the milk tea needs to stop every 4 hours for cleaning and unclogging, incurring higher labor and electricity costs. Therefore, the milk tea was switched from contract manufacturing to in-house production. Sometimes, the factory must contend with physical laws. For instance, any beverage containing fruit juice and carbon dioxide tends to foam during filling; Genki Forest's line solved this in just one production run (about 2 days). They also considered acquiring existing factories but quickly rejected the idea. For sparkling water, to ensure all products are free of preservatives, an aseptic carbonated line is needed. There are only a few aseptic carbonated lines nationwide; even if you bought an existing factory, you'd need to rebuild the line from scratch. The cost of an aseptic carbonated line is 3-4 times that of a normal one, but Tang Binsen insisted. It's like choosing TSMC over Honghui Technology—only on a better line can you make better products. Currently, only three companies in China have aseptic carbonated production lines, all domestic brands, and Genki Forest is one. In October 2021, Genki Forest announced that all its sparkling water products no longer contain chemical preservatives like sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate.
03
Basic Line
Tang Binsen and his admired Huawei share a common trait: they pursue simplicity and plainness in language. However, Huawei has more red elements, related to Ren Zhengfei's experiences, such as "attacking the mountain," "going to the countryside," and "letting those who hear the gunfire call for fire." In the 1990s, Huawei had several office buildings in Nanshan, Shenzhen, where a stream of young people came for interviews and onboarding, dragging simple luggage, with youthful immaturity, clutching border passes, passing by a political propaganda mural that read: The basic line will not change for a hundred years. Tang Binsen set Genki Forest's basic line as: Love the world with good products. This principle has many extensions, such as new product R&D regardless of cost and profit margins. Lujiao is a founding team member and co-founder of Genki Forest. When she first ran the production line, she proposed using Anxi Tieguanyin tea as a raw material. The biggest drawback of this tea is its high price; R&D and procurement objected because low profit margins would make it hard to withstand raw material price fluctuations. Later, Tang Binsen waved his hand: "If the taste is good, just use it." In daily work, Tang Binsen rarely exercises such decision-making power, instead letting consumers and the market determine the direction of product development. He sometimes participates in internal tests, but his opinions aren't necessarily adopted. The real voices that influence product iteration come from outside. For example, during the testing phase of the alien drink, they posted ads on WeChat Moments to recruit users and set up stalls at internet company buildings and convenience store entrances. When developing "Youkuang," the product team deliberately placed it next to Nongfu Spring, C'estbon, and Ganten to monitor sales data differences. Every Genki Forest product undergoes at least four to five rounds of taste tests before launch. When developing the cola-flavored new product, the R&D team tried nearly a thousand ingredient combinations and even considered making transparent cola. But heavy cola drinkers who participated in the tests gave feedback: It doesn't taste like cola, it's not good, and I wouldn't buy it. Before that, the product team researched dozens of colas globally, wanting to make herbal and traditional Chinese medicine formulas, differentiating with "health preservation." But in post-mortem reviews, product manager Xiaoqian couldn't help asking herself repeatedly: "When consumers drink cola, do they really consider health?" These insights were distilled into a principle for evaluating products: whether it can beat competitors in user preference—not tie, but beat. Another product where Tang Binsen exercised decision-making was Xiancha, formerly known as "Jianmeiqing," a product based on the folk remedy of "corn silk to reduce edema." After launch, its performance left the product team in a dilemma: a small but extremely loyal consumer base, because no substitutes existed. At a mid-2020 senior meeting, most suggested cutting this lukewarm new product, but Tang Binsen rarely stood up to oppose: continue, fix whatever problems arise. Tang Binsen's logic is that today's niche won't stay niche forever. As long as it's good for users and healthier, it's worth doing—this aligns with the "basic line." In the first half of 2021, Jianmeiqing was renamed "Xiancha," clarifying its positioning as herbal plant tea, and it won the No.1 in the sugar-free tea category on Tmall's Double 11. In March this year, Xiancha became the only new brand among all 2021 products to pass the testing period, allowing nationwide distribution. That was four years after Jianmeiqing's birth. Lujiao once said: "In our principles, there is no boss." This means that at Genki Forest, the principles are user feedback and market validation, letting users vote with their feet, not the boss's opinion. The "basic line" is simple; the hard part is "not changing for a hundred years." Genki Forest's success lies in that, as the organization expands, each product team still adheres to this principle without being diluted by the large organization. Consumers are Genki Forest's biggest product managers; they are not in offices, but in high-rise buildings and in the fields.
04
Don't Become Mediocre
Lujiao's basic line for hiring has two points: 1. Willingness: Completing a task is simple, but doing it well is hard; passion makes one think about how to do better and helps overcome difficulties; 2. Love of life: Loving life and capturing hidden needs in human nature leads to creating loving products and surprising brands. Beyond that, skills and experience come last. "Passion" is an important part of Genki Forest. The PMO for sparkling water is Xiaoqian, born in 1999, an English major. She wanted to enter the FMCG industry in college and interned at four consumer goods companies, commuting four hours round-trip for internships. "What makes you different from other students?" "I'm the only one in my class who wanted to switch industries and actually did it," she said. During the interview, Lujiao was moved by her persistence and gave this young newcomer a chance to try. Genki Forest has hundreds of young employees born around 2000; if they all commuted four hours like Xiaoqian and woke up at six, nine out of ten would consider resigning when the alarm rings. Therefore, Genki Forest placed its Shanghai R&D center in the prime location of Xintiandi, in the city center, so employees don't waste time on three-hour subway commutes. More importantly, it's close to Xintiandi Fashion Center, Xiaohongshu, and Taiping Lake, where Shanghai Fashion Week is held every April, popular among young people. Tang Binsen believes it's necessary to let employees work in a comfortable environment. Unlike other big companies, Genki Forest's offices are in convenient city locations, near subway stations, and not far from high-speed rail and airports for easy travel. The factory office environment is the same as headquarters. Production Business Director Gu Yalei had an OKR one year to build the most beautiful factory, "to respect the value of people." Young people are enthusiastic and energetic but not good at obedience. Genki Forest's management experience is to be open and honest, listen to everyone's ideas, "like bees collecting nectar, absorbing only the essence." This is also written into Genki Forest's values, including principles like trusting partners, facing problems directly, communicating sincerely, and being unreserved. Except during meetings, Tang Binsen's office door is never closed; anyone with ideas or new creativity can talk to him anytime. The "Genki Universe Conference" is an important carrier of these values. Held on the second Thursday of each month, lasting five to six hours, all employees, including non-product roles like finance, HR, and interns, can present their product ideas, with Tang Binsen and department heads as judges. Correspondingly, Genki Forest still maintains an independent innovation budget to support nearly a hundred new products in reserve. Tang Binsen listens to product ideas at the Genki Universe Conference. Image source: Yuanchuan Research Institute. The premise of this innovation is: you're not afraid of Tang Binsen scolding you, or you can scold him too. At one meeting, an intern had a heated 20-minute discussion with Tang Binsen, and ultimately Tang Binsen admitted the intern was right. The conservative tendency of large companies stems from the dilemma of "a big ship is hard to turn" and the fear of failure consequences. Genki Forest's Xiancha almost got shelved because of a "who's responsible if it fails" comment. Genki Forest tries to persuade each team not to become conservative and mediocre. Here, failure is tolerated; rather than not making mistakes (which is nearly impossible), Genki Forest values the growth after paying tuition. Last November, a Genki Forest Tmall store operational accident resulted in losses of tens of millions. Lujiao bore the fines for the operations and department heads, saying, "The lesson is big enough." Soon after, Genki Forest's e-commerce and other departments initiated a round of middle-platform reform to consolidate these lessons for future reuse.
05
Learning to Be a Big Company
Genki Forest has nearly 10,000 employees, including industry veterans and newcomers. In Tang Binsen's words, it's "androgynous, new and old, Chinese and Western, local and foreign." But what are the characteristics of a consumer goods company? Large-scale, standardized, interlocking, uniform. Tang Binsen has always wanted to make Genki Forest a cool company—flat organization, young team, obsession with products, unique even eccentric atmosphere. Many snippets support this: Snippet 1: Lujiao came from primary market investment with zero beverage industry experience; Xiaoqian, the PMO for sparkling water, was born in 1999 with zero experience; Mao Kaidi, product manager for the alien drink and Youkuang, studied finance in college with zero experience. Tang Binsen believes industry experience is important, but more important is daring to think and try. Snippet 2: Tang Binsen is hands-on with many things, like aesthetics. He personally wrote a "Genki Forest Aesthetics Principles," down to font and size choices. At the same time, Tang Binsen's internal communication is simple and direct; he wrote in the book: Why is it that when we do foreign minimalist designs, they turn out stupid? Snippet 3: Genki Forest once strongly believed in the Amoeba model, with each product department having its own R&D, design, and marketing teams. Lujiao said, "As long as you want to do it, Lao Tang will let you try, and give you money, time, and people." Genki Forest's success恰恰 lies in this "big brother leading brothers to charge" primitive combat approach, achieving rapid response, rapid iteration, and rapid correction. This kind of company has only one enemy: team expansion. Except for peasant rebel armies, there has never been an Amoeba organization of over 10,000 people in history. In the early years, Genki Forest had no PMO—a role responsible for controlling the entire process from development to launch—but at Genki Forest, product managers had full command. In the absence of R&D processes and decision-making mechanisms, it relied heavily on the leader's ability. But Tang Binsen once discovered that his favorite product performed mediocrely in the market[1]. Another time, Mao Kaidi, while working on the alien drink, skipped a step to save time, causing tens of thousands of yuan worth of outer packaging to be scrapped. Such incidents of packaging waste prompted Tang Binsen to start the company's largest organizational restructuring in December last year. The core of this reform is middle-platformization: functions like branding and marketing, previously scattered across teams, were extracted and reorganized, with resources integrated by the middle platform, and the PMO role was born. Thus, process management is handled by PMOs under the middle platform, and lessons from each project can be reused. Every seemingly arbitrary rule on a commercial airliner is paid for by hundreds of lives that never reached their destination. Every seemingly dispensable position and step in a consumer goods company is also paid for by expensive mistakes. Amid the restructuring and lowered growth expectations, Genki Forest celebrated its sixth anniversary and its first anniversary celebration. In the previous five years, Tang Binsen had also looked forward to an anniversary celebration but thought the company "didn't deserve it," fearing that if they held it this year, they might go bankrupt next year. So it wasn't until the sixth anniversary that Tang Binsen agreed to hold one. This has two meanings: first, Genki Forest is now a big company and must gradually regain respect for the industry; second, after becoming a big company, it can still maintain pure values.
Tang Binsen speaks at Genki Forest's sixth anniversary celebration. Image source: Genki Forest. Any company's success is inseparable from "a wave of the hand" and "at all costs," but the cost of doing so increases over time. Some companies swim through the deep water but become mediocre; some drown in the deep water. Tang Binsen hopes Genki Forest can retain its characteristics, meaning not only swimming across but also performing technical moves to Olympic standards.
06
10,000-Meter Race
Tang Binsen used to be impatient; in Lujiao's words, "His mind is ten meters ahead, but his mouth is still in place." People around him feel that Lao Tang's cognitive iteration is getting faster, making it harder to keep up, so meetings with him sometimes feel like arguments. In the past two years, Tang Binsen has become more patient. This is mainly reflected in two aspects: giving teams more time, and in some businesses, realizing that "some businesses need slow layout." The business needing slow layout is Youkuang, a bottled water launched in July last year, with the project initiated at the end of 2020, with Mao Kaidi as product manager, who believes the bottled water track and opportunity are large enough. When Mao Kaidi worked on the alien drink, he once broke through the functional drink category with "electrolyte water," and Youkuang also hoped to use the differentiated attribute of "soft mineral water" to quickly open the market. But water and beverages are almost two different worlds. Mineral water is a mineral resource; mining requires mining qualifications, and water sources are in remote mountains. Genki Forest not only had to find water sources and obtain qualifications but also build a whole new logistics and production system. After launch, the team hit a wall in market education. The name Youkuang comes from the trivia that "mineral water is not water, it's mineral," but the consumer market didn't buy it. This year is designated as Youkuang's exploration year; Mao Kaidi and his team need to find the most effective way to communicate with consumers. Youkuang's experience also made Genki Forest realize that some businesses need to be nurtured slowly, "and we still need to have respect for this industry." For Genki Forest, slowing down is an inevitable result. When a new player enters a traditional industry, races at 2-3x annual growth, and approaches a valuation of nearly 100 billion, it must adjust its pace to participate in the next 10,000-meter race. As early as 2019, the cola-flavored sparkling water was already internally initiated, taking four years, with several team changes and multiple rounds of iteration to clarify the final product direction—cola has perfectly solved the human need for happiness, but the zero/diet cola track still has room for product upgrades. This new product, called "Genki Cola" by the media, balances Pepsi's caramel flavor and Coke's citrus flavor, with a hint of plum, because some consumers in blind tests said cola tastes like sour plum soup. The "first sip of cola" burst comes from phosphoric acid and potassium sorbate, but Genki Forest removed these two additives for health reasons, making cola lovers feel it lost its soul. Tang Binsen is not optimistic about "Genki Cola." An employee told us that Lao Tang's exact words were "it will likely fail," but he still supported the attempt. He told Lujiao and the product team: "If consumers think it doesn't taste good, then adjust it again. We'll try a thousand times; we can always make it." This reminded Lujiao of 2016. At that time, she was still an investment assistant managing projects for Lao Tang; two startup teams had failed consecutively, and the beverage project had burned over 40 million yuan. Lujiao felt sorry for the money and wanted to persuade Tang Binsen to give up on beverages, but instead, she was persuaded by Lao Tang, which led to Rancha, sparkling water, and today's Genki Forest. At the end of the conversation, Tang Binsen told her: "Money is just a number, isn't it? If it's gone, earn it back. As long as this thing is worth doing."
07
Allowing Failure
East Asian culture has almost harsh moral requirements for entrepreneurs: they must achieve success, write books, be charitable, and cultivate themselves and govern the world. At the same time, this culture has very low tolerance for failure—even if a company scores 99 points, people prefer to focus on where the 1 point was lost. Genki Forest's mission is "Love the world with good products," because not all companies need to achieve nobility. Tang Binsen said in an internal speech: "A company will eventually fail, including Genki Forest. What we need to do and can do is cherish and light up those original intentions." They have indeed made some successful products. In August this year, Genki Forest's sparkling water market share hit a record high; in September, the alien electrolyte water sales exceeded 1 billion yuan. According to Nielsen data, in the first half of the year, Genki Forest's sales of carbonated drinks, ready-to-drink tea, and functional drinks across all products in the national offline retail market increased 25% year-on-year. Of course, there are also some lukewarm products. Few know that last year they destroyed test new products worth tens of millions, including the recently launched cola-flavored sparkling water. After bidding farewell to 2-3x annual growth, Tang Binsen no longer mentions "benchmarking Coca-Cola" much, but the team still invests a lot of energy and resources in the cola-flavored sparkling water, believing that "regardless of market performance, at least we should try once." No beverage company would deny its obsession with cola, but most stay silent, a few say it out loud, and very few actually dare to try. In many employees' eyes, Genki Forest's preciousness is that it still allows employees to make very bold attempts, even without regard for returns, without focusing too much on results. In the film Unforgiven, Eastwood raises this question: a cowboy who, in his youth, was not assassinated by enemies, did not die in duels or gunfights, and was not hanged by the sheriff at the saloon door. When he survives to his fifties or sixties, how does he settle his remaining years? Will he open a grocery store in the city, run a farm in the countryside, or spend his old age in a nursing home? In the end, Eastwood chooses to retire and become an honest man on a pig farm. One day, young bandits cause trouble in a bar, and people raise $1,000 to find Eastwood. The aging cowboy decides to saddle up and return to the fray. Some are immortal, some die without issue, but a cowboy is always a cowboy.
References: [1] "Tang Binsen Reorganizes Genki Forest," Huxiu [2] "Genki Forest Founder Tang Binsen's Latest Speech: Making Products Without Considering Cost," Sohu [3] "Genki Forest, Growing Up in a Year," LatePost [4] One Way Forward, Fan Haitao [5] "Dialogue with Genki Forest's Tang Binsen: Tycoon, Pirate, and Product Manager," LatePost [6] "The Uncopyable Genki Forest," Shijie
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