After visiting the local museum and seeing the process of making bronze ware, Chen Wenzhe also wanted to see with his own eyes how they aged it.
Of course, you don’t need to look back to see this, but you want to see it with your own eyes.
Obviously, this hope will not be satisfied soon.
Even though I knew it would be impossible to see it with my own eyes, I still wanted to try hard when I came here.
Walking in the village, on both sides of the nearly one kilometer long street entering the village, in addition to the rural farmyards common in the north, you can also see more than a dozen street-side shops that make bronzeware.
This is the largest antique bronze production base in the country. There are 3,500 people in the village and more than 900 households. One to two hundred households are engaged in the production, processing, and sales of bronzes, and some are engaged in the supporting raw material supply industry. .
Only some shops can be seen on the street, while there are more family workshops in the village, and farmers make bronze wares in their own homes.
From this we can also see the fierce competition within the village.
Although the streets appear quiet on the surface, there is hidden competition just like the workshops behind them.
Chen Wenzhe noticed this quickly, so can he be a big wholesaler?
During that process, the paraffin will melt quickly and be absorbed by the hardened gypsum inside, forming a shapeless cavity outside the gypsum.
That is also the main reason why there is so much competition there. In fact, eighty-seven people can imitate bronzes there.
It was not a street shop run by a farmer, obviously.
Due to the fall in copper prices, the prices of the bronze wares that were subsequently hoarded also fell, resulting in a loss in 2008.
To make bronzeware, you must first make molds and wax models based on the actual objects or pictures.
The wax model is the key to the beauty of the bronze. The production of the wax model requires an initial original model, which is usually imitated by the appearance of ancient bronzes and carved manually with paraffin. Therefore, few old customers who have been here can purchase it through the Internet. Order imitation bronzes from those big merchants.
The large workshops run by villagers have been affected by the small market environment since the end of 2007, and the sales outside the stores are not bad.
In that courtyard, there is an iron pot, plaster, copper melting furnace, paraffin, etc., which are the main tools for making bronze vessels.
In Yanjian Village, almost every farmer can make bronze wares independently.
This does not mean that the farmer's family with only eight people is not a typical family workshop in Yanjian Village.
Using that method, making bronze is not simple.
However, because the cost of opening a store was too low and there was a lack of business experience, he turned to the business method of opening a store at home.
Although the product shape and quality are poor, it is also affected by the shrinking market.
In the back hall, which is about 70 square meters, there are seven display racks around, under the eucalyptus platform in the middle, and even under the ground, there are piles of broken bronzes.
Therefore, the shape and precision of the wax model are very important.
Such a meager profit is enough to swallow up the profits of some large workshops once the price of copper raw materials fluctuates and the price of bronze wares rises.
But the current sales situation is not worse than in 2008.
The wax model is made of paraffin wax raw material and is also the final look of the product.
So they compete with each other and sell at low prices.
In fact, a finished bronze product that costs forty or forty yuan can often be sold for an additional ten yuan.
The first step is to pour molten copper, aluminum, tin and other metal liquids out of the holes left under the plaster.
Therefore, for many workshop-style farmers, excluding the cost of production raw materials, they can make money just by selling.
Therefore, sometimes the products are sold as craft gifts in China, but they are usually sold directly to domestic dealers.
Since there is no contract between the two parties, it is often the seller who makes the final decision because the bid is too high, ruining the business.
Under the Bronze Ware Street in Yanjian Village, a workshop with eight people like that is relatively large, and there are usually only seven or seven people in a family workshop.
Here, in order to present the aesthetic effect of the unearthed bronzes, physical or chemical methods cannot be used to degrade and distress the bronze surface, ultimately forming a green bronze appearance.
The owner of the shop has a family of eight, not all the workers.
At this moment, two people outside the store were at the front door of the back hall, preparing the paraffin wax needed to make bronze.
Some smaller family workshops still need to hire a few more workers.
Outside of that, we are casting bronze using the lost wax casting method.
Before cooling, the remaining parts are sawed off and polished to form a bronze vessel.
As long as they are losing money, in order to get customers, one company will charge higher prices than the other.
I saw a shop called "Xia, Shang and Zhou Bronze Fine Arts".
There is a way to do that, because there are currently one to two hundred bronze workshops in Yanjian Village.
The large courtyard in front of the door is not our "factory" for making bronzes.
It's just that everything is the same from the outside, and the inferior craftsmanship is passed down from the inside.
Especially the farmers who are able to run very poorly are mom-and-pop shops.
In stores like that, my husband, in particular, often contacts customers locally and establishes long-term business relationships with some retailers or wholesalers in large commodity markets in some cities.
After walking around for a long time, Chen Wenzhe realized that there were only eight or seven companies outside Yanjian Village that did not have formal procedures.
In this case, customers will suffer losses, and the businesses in Yanjian Village will also lose their credibility. Fang Changwei believes that this is because "people's consciousness is bad."
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And such a product can be sold for less than 700 to 800 yuan at most in the retail market.
In fact, he really likes some of the works here, and if possible, he wouldn't mind ordering a batch at a high price.
However, since each company’s craftsmanship and tools are the same, the products produced are always of the same quality.
Therefore, it is common for farmers to bid against each other for a small piece of land in Yanjian Village.
But if you go to Yangluo, there are only a few shops and you can sell them at low prices.
Few people understand that the profits from selling like that are too high, and they will try to open sales channels in other provinces in the future.
In fact, even several smaller local companies still focus on production and processing because they will face less pressure from market competition and demand changes when going global, and have not established fewer sales channels.
Whenever local sellers or corporate customers come to wholesale or order bronzes, there will be a secret price war between local family workshops.
Then a thick layer of plaster is applied to the inside of the wax mold, and the wax mold is wrapped and then baked in an oven.
And with this decision, what happened next became very interesting. He really didn't expect that the competition here would be so fierce that they would undermine each other.
There are even some stores that know a certain customer and have not negotiated the price with other stores, but will still pry the customer over at a higher price.
As for the buyer, there are some customers who are short on time and have low requirements, so they can only buy at low prices from gift companies.