Chao Wan Zu (潮玩族) Completes Series B Funding Round, Building a Community for Young Collectors
China's largest secondhand designer toy trading platform and community.
QianDao · Chaowanzu (hereafter referred to as "Chaowanzu") recently announced the completion of its Series B financing round, with Gaorong Ventures participating as a co-lead investor. The new capital will be used for user growth, team building, and industry expansion.
Founded in 2019, Chaowanzu positions itself as a trading platform and community for trend culture, integrating content discovery, community news, e-commerce retail, and secondhand trading services. Within less than two years of launch, Chaowanzu has amassed millions of users and achieved monthly transaction volumes in the hundreds of millions of RMB, making it China's largest secondhand trading platform and community for designer toys. The CTS Toy Show hosted by Chaowanzu once attracted over 20,000 toy enthusiasts and more than 300 trend brands and studios.
According to a Frost & Sullivan report, China's designer toy retail market has experienced rapid growth in recent years, with market size expanding from 6.3 billion RMB in 2015 to 20.7 billion RMB in 2019, and is expected to exceed 75 billion RMB by 2024. In the near future, China will become the core global consumer market for designer toys, with these collectibles becoming the most coveted social currency for the new generation of young people.
Shen Zhenyu, founder and CEO of Chaowanzu, previously founded Tuchong and Duoshuo, which were acquired by ByteDance in 2014. He subsequently held various roles at ByteDance, including head of the Time Album business, product manager at Douyin (responsible for content distribution and social features), and head of the women's community business.
Chaowanzu focuses on hobby-related products and content that informs purchasing decisions for hobby enthusiasts. In the company's early days, the Chaowanzu team conducted in-depth research on more than 100 hobby categories, and based on population size, growth rate, and purchase frequency, chose to enter the designer toy category first with a tool-based approach. They compiled a comprehensive database of all toys ever released in the industry, accumulating over 1 million entries. On August 26, 2019, the MVP version of Chaowanzu — developed in just one week — officially launched and quickly went viral within the designer toy community.
Shen Zhenyu noted that the explosive growth in vertical interest categories is fundamentally driven by the rise of a new generation of post-95s young people, who have a fundamentally different consumption philosophy from the previous generation. Shen distilled this generational shift in young people's spending habits into what he calls the "10,000 RMB Rule" — every young person spends at least 10,000 RMB per year on their hobbies.
Shen Zhenyu stated, "In the designer toy industry, we play an infrastructure role as a platform. We hope to provide fertile ground for upstream trend brands and IP, allowing them to acquire seed users here and gradually grow."
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