53-year-old Lv Xiuqin is a native of Qingshan Village, Nanshu Town, Laixi County, Qingdao. She set up her own local specialties store in 2009 with 200,000 yuan borrowed from her relatives and friends.

Her store specializes in selling almost all authentic local specialties of Laixi and business is brisk.

Lv repaid all her debt the year after the store opened. A branch store was then opened.

She also set up a professional cooperative among fellow villagers and would give a helping hand to any member of the cooperative whose quality products failed to find a market.

For instance, when learning that her villager Li Chenghao had difficulties in selling his delectable roasted sweet potatoes for lack of marketing, she helped him promote the product among urban residents though her Wechat account. As a result, all the 20,000 kilograms of sweet potatoes, which have been kept long in stock, were sold out in merely one month to queuing buyers.

Lv views herself as a linkage between her fellow villages and urban residents and therefore feels a strong sense of responsibility.

In Laixi, there is a secret ancient recipe for making extremely delicious ginger foods. However, the recipe had remained unnoticed for years until business-savvy Lv hired food experts to improve the technique of the recipe and brought the new products to Qingdao, Jinan, Beijing and even the United States and Japan via Internet commercial platforms.

“In order to take Laixi’s specialties farther through the Internet, I started to learn how to use a computer at 50. Now I’m quite good at doing business through Taobao and WeChat,” Lv told the reporter with a smile.

She has put on offer over 200 kinds of local specialties since her first store opened and is expanding her business with the use of the Internet.