Singles Day

Singles’ Day (November 11^th)

The traditional festival, Winter Clothing Festival (寒衣节), is in November. The Chinese honour their departed loved ones by ‘sending winter clothes’ (paper or cloth offerings that are burned) to them to show care for their warmth in the coming winter. It is one of three Chinese festivals for departed souls, alongside Qingming and Zhongyuan festivals. There are also traditional festivals of ethnic minorities in November. However, the single most important day is ‘Singles Day’ on November 11th, which is a modern invention!

Jack Ma and his team of 17 co-founders launched Alibaba in March 1999 from Ma's apartment in Hangzhou, China. The goal was to create a business-to-business (B2B) online platform to help small and medium-sized enterprises easily "do business anywhere". In May 2003, Alibaba created Taobao to directly challenge eBay Eachnet’s dominance in the Chinese consumer-to-consumer (C2C) online auction space. It utilized several strategic moves to gain a foothold, most notably an early policy of free listings, which is in stark contrast to eBay's fee-based model. It helped Taobao quickly attract sellers and buyers, allowing it to surpass eBay in market share!

In April 2008, Alibaba created a dedicated B2C channel within Taobao, Taobao Mall (淘宝商城), to attract brand owners and authorized distributors, differentiating it from the main C2C marketplace. This pivot in strategy was to address some key challenges. The open nature of the C2C model made it difficult to control product quality and led to widespread counterfeits. This B2C channel allowed Alibaba to partner directly with brands, promising "Genuine Guarantee" and better customer service. It also offered a more sustainable path to revenue growth through fees and commissions from corporate sellers. Rivals like 360buy (JD.com) were already gaining ground with the B2C model. Hence, the creation of Tmall was a direct response to this competitive threat. The transition from a channel (Taobao Mall) within Taobao to an independent entity (Tmall) occurred between 2010 and 2012. It became Alibaba's primary engine for e-commerce.

Consumers at that time were not familiar with Taobao Mall. Daniel Zhang (Taobao’s previous CFO and Alibaba’s current CEO) came up with the idea of creating “an event to let consumers remember Taobao Mall”. They chose November as it falls between China's National Day Golden Week in October and Christmas in December, the month without a major shopping event. Similar to sending clothes to the departed during the Winter Clothing Festival in November, the Chinese also have to buy clothes and accessories for themselves for the forthcoming winter season. Besides, Singles Day on November 11th (双十一) was already popular among young adults, the target consumers, making it easy for them to remember.

The name ‘Singles Day’ predates Alibaba's event. The widely accepted origin of Singles Day goes back to Nanjing University in 1993. The notion is said to have started in a male dormitory called "Famous Grass Without an Owner" (名草无主), a playful term for bachelors at Nanjing University. The date November 11th (11/11) resembles four bare sticks, which in Chinese slang refers to a bachelor. Hence, the date itself is visually symbolic of being single. It began as a light-hearted, unofficial holiday for single students at Nanjing University campus. The notion soon spread from Nanjing University to other campuses in Nanjing and across China. As graduates entered society, they carried this tradition with them, and, with the growth of social media, the holiday eventually became a nationwide cultural event for young people. Alibaba cleverly co-opted this cultural phenomenon and transformed it into a retail juggernaut.

More importantly, Mona and I were married on 11 November 1993. I met Mona for the first time in 1985 at the Asian Baha’i Youth Conference in New Delhi, India. It was love at first sight on my part! I immediately proposed. When I met her the second time on 11 November 1993, we were married. You could say I was a bare stick for 8 years!

The first event, which was conceived as a 24-hour promotional event, took place on 11 November 2009 with a simple theme: "half-price, free shipping" discounts. Twenty-seven brands, like Li-Ning and Lenovo, participated, and the sales figures that day reached 52 million yuan or US $7 million, about 10 times the platform's normal daily sales. It was a strategic success for several reasons. The sales figures, though modest, were significant for China's then-nascent e-commerce market and validated the concept of a massive, single-day online promotion. Its success meant there was a huge consumer appetite for such an event, which led to a rapid scale-up. It also created another holiday, albeit a ‘shopping holiday’ for consumers, during the quiet month of November. By 2013, Alibaba's Singles' Day sales had skyrocketed to US $8.5 billion, far surpassing the combined totals of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States. The 2025 event, which had been stretched over a longer period, generated a record US $238.3 billion in total sales.

Mona and I spent 6 years in Beijing from 2008 to 2014. Although vaguely aware of the Singles Day phenomenon from conversations with our university friends in Beijing, we do not remember buying anything on Singles Day during our stay in Beijing. In fact, I could not even remember paying with WeChat. We carried cash! Today, more than ten years later, we still have not bought a single item during Singles Day. However, Mona is an avid online shopper. She shops online practically every day! We buy just about everything online, from hamburger bread to self-assembled furniture! She thinks it was the greatest invention since the dishwashing machine!