Hint of spring

Medical workers in Wuhan, Hubei province, receive forget-me-not flowers from the volunteer group.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Wu, a resident in Hangzhou, has been following the coronavirus news since Spring Festival. She heard about Yunnan's rose situation on WeChat.
"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.