He is the founder of Meizu, so what kind of experience did he have on the road of starting a business? The following is the legendary story of Huang Zhang, founder of Meizu, who made a mobile phone with a carpenter. Welcome everyone to have a look!

He is not good at words and never accepts media interviews, but he is familiar with the forum ID of "J.Wong". He stayed up all night in Meizu forum, sometimes chattered and sometimes flew into a rage; He lives in seclusion, fiddling with tens of thousands of yuan of music equipment, and only goes out for a haircut once a month, so that the office on the fifth floor of the company is empty. He once shouted the lofty sentiments of "Don't be the apple of China, be the Meizu of the world" in the forum, and was once regarded as the standard by "kerosene".

Some people teased him for putting on airs, while others said it was because of his personality. Focus, paranoia, nitpicking and even madness. Although I may not agree with him, the name of China Jobs has been deeply branded on him.

From Cantonese cuisine to material selection

Huang Zhang, who was born in Meizhou, Guangdong Province, has a special affection for Cantonese cuisine. As one of the eight major cuisines in China, Cantonese cuisine is famous for its extensive, miscellaneous and refined materials and exquisite selection.

Before starting a business, Huang Zhang used to study how to make the best Cantonese food with pots and pans in his hand. According to people who know Huang Zhang, there are five Cantonese chefs in Zhang Huang's family, but the details such as ingredients are still under his personal control. The standard is so strict that he can only choose to grow his own vegetables in the end.

If a finished dish is regarded as a product, then the ingredients are the same as before. In 2004, when focusing on the MP3 player market, Meizu was always the biggest customer of American audio chip Sigmatel. It is said that Sigmatel America even sent people to Zhuhai to present Meizu with the world's first 654.38 million Sigmatel3520 chips. However, a year later, Meizu suddenly changed its course, giving up Sigmatel chips and switching to Philips chips. Huang Zhang's reason is simple-why not use something better?

Meizu's first mobile phone M8 used the same chip as the iPhone3GS at that time-Samsung S3C64 10 chip, which is nothing now, but in the crazy smart phone environment in China in 2009, the so-called "cottage" manufacturers in China usually directly sold MTK chips+shells, and even mixed a lot of preset deduction software into their mobile phones. Meizu, a southern factory, drew a clear line with the field of "cottage machine" from the beginning, although M8 still smelled of apples.

Meizu company is circulating such a "small matter". When Meizu Zhuhai office building was built in 2005, the canteen floor was smashed three times, only because Huang Zhang was not satisfied.

Vera: Tear it down and start over.

Huang Zhang once bought a villa, tore it down and rebuilt it according to his own ideas.

In the company's strategic decision, Huang Zhang did have the courage and boldness to tear down this "villa". In about 2006, Huang Zhang saw the decline of MP3 player industry, so it gave up the leading position in the domestic MP3 market and entered the smart phone market instead. At the end of 2007, the last few MP3 manufacturers jointly held a Nirvana Conference, but Meizu, the industry leader, was unexpectedly absent.

"We stood at the top of the mountain, only to find that there was no way out." Hua, the marketing director of Meizu, said this.

A word became a prophecy. According to Bai Yongxiang, CEO of Meizu, iRiver, a Korean manufacturer that once surpassed iPod, once occupied an important position in the MP3 player market. However, due to the untimely transformation, it has almost disappeared in recent years. He said that iRiver also wanted to change his mobile phone at first, but the calculation showed that it might cost $65.438+0.7 billion, so he gave up.

It took Meizu two years to build M8, which is the only way out for Meizu. Although there are different opinions in the market, considering that WindowsCE is not suitable for embedded systems of mobile phones, the final result is quite good. It is said that earlier due to the unstable quality of M8, Meizu gave up maintenance and allowed users to directly add money for new ones.

When the concept of Android was in the ascendant, Meizu pressed the reset button again.

Back in March of 20 1 1, the market performance of Meizu's second mobile phone M9 exceeded expectations, and a project similar to Nokia's "PC Suite" was about to be completed. Through this service, users can back up address book, SMS and calendar information. Hardware and services form a complete supporting service.

However, a decision made by Huang Zhang made this service "stillborn" and replaced it with the cloud service Flyme.

Carpenter and "Wang Zhijie Design"

An unknown secret about Huang Zhang is that he has the skills of a carpenter. It is said that many of the furniture in Huang Zhang's house was built by himself. For example, he once bought wood and designed and planed a TV cabinet himself. To outsiders who don't know him, it sounds as crazy as the story of Zhu Youxiao, the son of Ming Xi.

The manufacturing experience of this kind of furniture naturally continues to the design of mobile phones. In fact, Huang Zhang has been playing the role of the company's chief designer. At yesterday's press conference, "J.Wong Design" even became a signboard. When designing the shape of the mobile phone, he will use his own furniture to plane and polish many molds, choose the one with the most suitable size and the best feel, and then the engineer will build a steel mold based on this wooden model. This is how the chamfer on the back of Meizu MX fuselage was born. If you look closely, you will find that chamfering is very similar to the effect of polishing wooden chairs by hand.

Both M9 and MX have a small seal Logo with the words "Meizu" in the upper right corner. This Logo was personally operated by Huang Zhang. It is said that the release of M9 was delayed because of the temporary addition of this design.

Huang Zhang and consumers.

Some people think that Huang Zhang often interacts with consumers in the forum, which is the reason why Meizu Forum can flourish and unite kerosene. Huang Zhang's active participation in the forum is only a manifestation, and the deeper reason is that Huang Zhang attaches great importance to the interests of consumers.

He can't accept that consumers feel pain because of the defects of the products. In the era when Meizu was still producing MP3 players, if consumers found that their products were defective and could not be used, Huang Zhang's first reaction was often "return" or "replace" instead of trying to deny or avoid them, and there was no other word.

Meizu launched E5 in 2005. When using FM to receive radio, there was a "poof-poof" sound, which was complained by consumers. Huang Zhang personally said that he would immediately replace his mobile phone for free, and presented a sports armband to the first batch of consumers who bought E5.

Also in 2005, Meizu launched E3, and the products crashed frequently at the initial stage of listing. At that time, Huang Zhang called engineers to personally find the root of the problem, and revised the vulnerabilities overnight and released new firmware. In the next week or two, Meizu will continue to update its firmware.

In 2009, M8 suffered a touch screen failure accident. Huang Zhang admitted that the cause of the accident was that the yield of touch screen supplier TPK was not high enough, but recalling all M8s was tantamount to Meizu's bankruptcy. At that time, he introduced the policy of free replacement of screen failures.

If you ask "Kerosene" why he likes Meizu so much, if he comes into contact with Meizu's products from the beginning, he will naturally have this kind of affection-Huang Zhang, who has endless pursuit of products, actually attaches great importance to the interests of consumers.

Control desire and management

Huang Zhang seems to be born with a strong desire for control. Whether it is product design, production or company management, this paranoia even affects the development direction of the whole company.

What most people don't understand is that Huang Zhang has no affection for tablets. He has publicly stated in the forum that Meizu will not set foot in tablets. On the one hand, he thinks the tablet is a product of compromise, and on the other hand, it has a "poor hand feeling"-Huang Zhang likes devices that can be manipulated with one hand, but the tablet computer obviously cannot satisfy his "manipulation desire". It is said that Huang Zhang's life and office depend entirely on his mobile phone. He never uses a PC or tablet. Five years ago, there was only one Dell desktop at home.

Driven by this strong desire for control, Huang Zhang has almost absolute right to speak about products, but it is also the case that the design scheme with too many personal likes and dislikes often makes the company's engineers in a dilemma.

Once the Meizu seal Logo mentioned above was made public, the external evaluation was mixed, which once caused a heated discussion among forum users. Many netizens urged Huang Zhang, but he went his own way and even threatened users on the forum:

"Accept to stay, do not accept to leave. End "

However, the paranoia and control limited to personal consciousness may not bring ultimate perfection. Huang Zhangjian believes that the screen of a mobile phone should be wider to accommodate more words and make it easier to read. As a result, M9 and MX have become unprecedented Android phones, with a screen resolution of 960X640, which has caused many applications to force horizontal stretching, and ultimately affected the user experience. And 1280X800 of MX2 continues to go its own way.

The thinking of "control" even extends to the production process of products. No matter at home or abroad, few mobile phone manufacturers will design, produce and sell the whole chain like Meizu. This is obviously not in line with business logic. It is reported that the manufacturing cost of Meizu is 20% higher than that of other mobile phone OEM.

"Because its cost is not low, its efficiency is not as high as Foxconn's, but from the understanding of the whole design and manufacturing, we are more like a building. We can't cross, we need to have this experience, we can't skip this step in the middle-you can't give something you haven't produced to others. " Bai Yongxiang attributed this almost paranoid driving force to his obsession with ideals.

"This is not an advantage, but a style."

Bai Yongxiang bluntly said that Meizu wanted to "control everything". In fact, Meizu company is still a private enterprise with a strong personal color. According to informed sources, at present, Huang Zhang 100% holds the company, and the company has always refused foreign investment.

Personality, an out-and-out perfectionist and paranoid, technology, an out-and-out product manager, style, and an arbitrary manipulator. Low-key, forbearance, paranoia, madness ... It is the conflict and collision of multiple personalities that makes his Meizu seem extremely mysterious in the impetuous mobile phone market in China. However, in China's flexible and competitive marketing environment, the truth that "only paranoia can survive" remains to be tested.

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