Editor's Note: In recent years, the FMCG distribution industry has been undergoing a profound structural reshaping. Discount retail is rising strongly, instant retail is rewriting terminal rules, and consumer demand is diverging rapidly—the traditional playbook that distributors relied on is systematically failing. Goods sell, but money is increasingly hard to keep, which has become the industry's most real dilemma.

This industry needs "next-generation distributors." Some focus on brands, becoming their regional operation partners; others focus on categories, making their product assortment indispensable to stores; others specialize in certain channels, understanding channel rules better than anyone; and still others root themselves in a region, providing one-stop supply to small and medium stores. The paths differ, but they all accomplish the same thing: shifting from moving goods to truly operating goods.

Since its founding in 2023, "Tameng" has gathered over 580 FMCG distributor members, deeply engaged in industry research and practical exchange. We have seen anxiety and breakthroughs; we have seen the cost of following trends blindly and the certainty that comes after thinking things through.

Offline foot traffic is declining, store business is getting harder, and distributors are squeezed between brands and terminals, suffering from both sides, with profit margins thinning year after year.

In the current FMCG distribution market, declining terminal traffic is a consensus.

Faced with ever-thinner profits, most distributors instinctively respond by either "holding on" to survive day by day, or "hard-core rolling," expanding SKUs, investing heavily in large warehouses, and maintaining delivery fleets of dozens or even hundreds of people, trying to buy a sense of security with asset-heavy "scale."

But in "Tameng," there is a distributor who has taken a different path—the protagonist of this article: Chang Tianxiao, General Manager of Tangshan Jinwang Supply Chain.

With a team of fewer than 10 people, he covers 800+ high-quality local outlets, leverages 100,000+ local private domain users, and has successfully run the S2b2C model. He gives away traffic to customers, shares the bulk of profits with employees, and still charges higher prices than competitors.

It looks like he is doing everything for others, yet he survives more steadily than anyone in this most competitive industry. How does he calculate this account?

All first moves stem from a wariness of "smoothness"

In 2014, Chang Tianxiao started with a truck, doing secondary wholesale and selling bulk commodities. At the best of times, he could ship two truckloads a day, earning two to five yuan per box.

But at that time, looking at the flow of people in the wholesale market, he suddenly felt this business was meaningless: "The products I sell are available elsewhere; either you cut prices or trade physical effort for money, and in the end, that's all there is."

So in 2015, he dumped all his bulk goods and turned to imported foods and differentiated internet-famous products. This bold decision directly influenced the direction of his subsequent business.

Imported foods and differentiated products faced a natural cognitive barrier in Tangshan, a third- and fourth-tier city—Eastern Leaf hadn't opened up here, and there were even fewer consumers for Ito En and Suntory. Unable to push volume, he had to pick the best, screening out stores that could absorb these products, negotiating one by one, slowly building up the scale.

In 2016, while doing supply chain, he opened his first fresh supermarket, "Xianpin Hui," with fresh produce and groceries each taking half. Going down to run a store himself made him understand "stores" better in addition to "goods"—what consumers want and what store owners think, which you can never see clearly from the supply chain side.

This dual perspective laid the groundwork for his later empowerment of small terminal stores.

In 2021, as offline channels began to feel a stronger chill, Chang turned his attention online. But he didn't touch traditional search e-commerce. In his view, Taobao and JD are price comparison systems—search, ranking, price comparison, and in the end, it's still about price; Douyin is a content system, where algorithms push traffic based on content quality, with no price comparison logic.

What he wanted wasn't a bigger traffic pool, but a battlefield where he didn't have to compete on price.

By 2022, when Douyin e-commerce exploded, Chang didn't stop: "Platform traffic is rented; the algorithm can give it to you today and take it away tomorrow."

He took advantage of the trend to build private domain and carry traffic, guiding online users offline. He divided Tangshan into grids based on population heat maps, creating a community group every 3 kilometers, all uniformly operated. Today, Jinwang Supply Chain's private domain users in Tangshan exceed 100,000.

Looking at the whole experience, some might think these moves were like a carefully laid chess game, but in communication with Chang, it's not like that at all.

Chang has a habit of not staying in a comfortable state for too long, not because he can foresee the future, but because he has an insecurity about things being "too smooth."

Smoothness often means you haven't yet encountered real problems.

"I'm more anxious than you to sell your goods"

This insecurity quickly turned into a real crisis.

As a distributor, selling goods directly to consumers online, the closed loop from public domain e-commerce to local private domain bypassed offline stores, causing many customers to complain or even stop cooperating.

Faced with channel resistance, he didn't retreat but thought of another direction: since going it alone invites criticism, why not find a way to bring small b-end customers into the game? Thus, the prototype of the S2b2C model was born.

Jinwang, as the S-end, coordinates the product assortment and online operations. C-end consumers place orders in live streams, the system identifies location, and automatically assigns orders to nearby stores (b-end) for fulfillment—public domain traffic, private domain accumulation, and offline stores are strung into a closed loop, and everyone profits.

The ideal was beautiful, but at that point in 2022, there was no LBS positioning, inventory systems weren't connected, and orders couldn't be automatically assigned. He searched far and wide for tools, patching together various small solutions, but it never ran smoothly.

It wasn't until 2023, when Douyin launched its hourly delivery service, that the supporting tools finally arrived, and the door he had been waiting for opened.

He held a recruitment meeting, inviting 15 supermarket owners to discuss cooperation, explaining the logic clearly: he would handle all online platform operations, charge no fees, and stores only needed to accept orders and prepare goods. But stores had to agree to three conditions—unified collective procurement, unified storefront signage, and unified inventory management system.

Seven came, and in the end, only three stayed to push forward.

"Many owners turned away as soon as they heard about connecting systems, thinking 'why should I?' But every one of these conditions came from me taking big losses and running several stores into the ground," Chang explained.

First is the unified system, which meets the most resistance.

Previously, a store sold two bottles of drinks offline without syncing to the system, but online showed stock available, so the platform continued to generate orders. By the time the 19th consumer ordered, it was discovered the store was out of stock.

This is fatal under instant retail platform rules. Traffic has already been given, and stockouts are a serious breach, directly tanking the store's rating and wiping out all accumulated weight in one go.

Only by unifying the system to connect inventory management, with real-time deduction across multiple platforms, does this problem truly disappear.

Second is unified storefront signage.

Douyin requires unified branding, but what Chang cares more about is traffic utilization.

If one team operates a small store covering 10,000 people within 3 kilometers, at a 5% e-commerce conversion rate, the sales generated can't cover the fixed costs of three operators—this business is bound to lose money.

But if storefronts are unified, ten stores are linked into an overall grid. With the same three operators, exposure increases tenfold, costs remain almost unchanged, and scale effects emerge.

Once scale is up, collective procurement makes sense.

Jinwang is limited by Tangshan's region and category; purely doing logistics has a low ceiling. To thrive, it must simultaneously capture increment and reduce costs. If stores uniformly purchase from him, with volume, he can negotiate lower prices upstream and reduce procurement costs.

For stores, offline traffic declines day by day, and owners can only sit and wait. But Jinwang has operational capability and a traffic pool. The orders brought by agency operations are free increment for stores.

"My price might be one yuan more per box, but you have to choose me because only I can help you sell it."

In terms of tactics, he runs two lines.

Small stores are linked to form a matrix. Consumers order in live streams, and the system automatically assigns orders to the nearest store based on location. Stores don't do any operational work; they just accept orders. The results are significant. For example, in an outdoor live stream for Samyang Fire Noodles, Chang didn't charge stores a cent, didn't invest a cent in traffic, and still managed to get 30,000 people online that day.

Large stores can have dedicated sessions, with online live streaming and offline displays synchronized, provided the store's volume can cover the day's labor costs.

Make operations "heavy," but assets and management "light"

With so much done at the front end—e-commerce, private domain, hourly delivery, store operations—how does the back end hold up?

Chang's answer: cut everything that can be cut from the back end.

"Today the warehouse keeper asks for leave, tomorrow unloading, the day after the driver gets into an accident—it takes too much energy." In his view, for distributors with revenue below 50 million, building their own warehouse and hiring staff is often a high hidden liability.

Chang completely stripped out the back end, connecting to JD's central warehouse and firmly implementing "unified warehousing and shared distribution." It's not just about peace of mind; more importantly, it brings a flexible supply chain.

"If you hire your own people, shipping 10,000 boxes today with three warehouse keepers and three trucks is impossible; if you overstaff, you can't afford the salaries on normal days. With a third-party warehouse, if you need 100 workers today, they provide 100; if you need just one truck, they send one." When the quagmire of logistics and infrastructure is completely stripped away, the boss and team can focus all energy on sales and operations.

Supporting this system is an extremely small team with extremely high efficiency.

Apart from a separate e-commerce squad, Jinwang's internal team is only five or six people at most. With so few people, it runs smoothly, and the secret lies in his management logic, which outsiders might even find counterintuitive.

He doesn't set sales targets or assess results, only process behaviors—store visit frequency, customer satisfaction, display completion. "If the process is good, the result won't be bad. If you set a rigid result from the start, employees often deform their actions to complete tasks."

More crucial is profit sharing.

65% of net profit is directly distributed to the team (business takes 40%), and he keeps 35% for himself. The authority to adjust prices is also given to salespeople; they decide whether to lower prices because it affects their own profits.

Previously, with fixed commissions, when competitors cut prices, salespeople would immediately ask the boss to follow suit. After all, it was the boss's profit being eroded; salespeople just wanted to boost sales.

Under this compensation design, salespeople are even more "stingy" than the boss. When competitors cut prices again, they calculate in their minds that lowering prices means losing real money from their own pockets.

"Don't test human nature; explain the rules and profit distribution clearly, and use mechanisms to solve problems." This sentence is also the underlying logic of his entire model.

Fighting human nature requires endless management costs; following human nature requires only one profit distribution. Design the profit structure well, and let each participant figure out why they should cooperate.

With the back-end warehousing and distribution taken over by third parties, and the front-end team self-driven through mechanisms, Chang turned his attention to a more profitable moat—private label.

"BC integration is the trend, and building private label is a particularly good path." Currently, Jinwang's own brand, "Wangtingshan" Kedong natural soda water, has been rolled out across offline channels. Next, he plans to extend to higher-barrier health and low-temperature products like pasteurized milk and NFC juice.

Final Thoughts

There is a common anxiety in the industry: the anxiety of being big. Volume must be large, SKUs complete, coverage wide, as if scale is the only moat.

But Chang's exploration shows us another direction: not blindly expanding, not making the plate heavy, not relying on piling up people and warehouses for growth, but positioning oneself between traffic, supply chain, and stores as the most critical connection point.

This may seem small, but it's harder than simply getting bigger. Because it requires the boss to let go of the most familiar thing—the sense of control.

Whether you're willing to share profits, share systems, or let others participate in your business—these are not tests of ability but of cognition.

What's truly worth learning isn't what he specifically did, but his way of thinking: besides getting bigger, getting stronger is another path.