Hint of spring

"I could help to set up an online store for the flower growers because I was an entrepreneur once," Wu says.

If it weren't for the COVID-19 situation, the roses would be sold to stores across the country at 15 yuan apiece. Online, they sold on average, 40 roses for 66 yuan, which could just cover the costs of the growers and the shipment.

Within a few hours of the online store opening, more than 300 orders were received. At first Wu and the other volunteers wrote the information related to the orders on excel sheets and sent them to Yunnan. Then they waited for the shipment numbers before sending the flowers to the buyers.

Gao Huayi, a friend of Wu's from whom she had first learned about the problems Yunnan's rose growers faced, was in charge of the logistics for the store.

Gao connected with Zheng, who in turn spoke to the local growers and asked them to pack the flowers and send them to the delivery addresses. As orders increased, two more volunteers with e-commerce experience joined to make the work more efficient.

On the morning of Feb 13, thousands of orders were received. Wu had to temporarily close the online store to deal with it all.

"We needed to make sure that we completed the orders first before reopening the store," she says.

The orders came after one buyer shared the store's story on Sina Weibo, which was reposted by netizens more than 10,000 times. On Valentine's Day, two top search topics on the micro-blogging site were "one million roses destroyed" and "the lady from Hangzhou who sells flowers to help the growers".

The posts also drew questions and negative comments. Some buyers complained the flowers were damaged during shipment, while others said the flowers were hardly trimmed and cleaned-in a rougher shape than those sold in flower stores.

Wu says buyers can get a refund if more than 10 percent of their flowers are damaged.

As to the latter complaint, Zheng explains that the flowers are sent directly from the fields, which means they are likely to be fresher than those sold in stores, and buyers can easily deal with the trimming and cleaning themselves.