Museums cash in on the past

In 2018, when the museum opened its official online store on Tmall, the number of annual visits quickly surpassed those to the museum itself.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, their annual sales figure dropped from 32 million yuan ($5 million) in 2019 to 25 million yuan last year.

In 2019, their online sales accounted for a third of the total, but in 2020, the ratio was about half.

"The pandemic has affected our physical stores, with a series of chain reactions. Our current development of new products is more focused on online platforms," she says.

As for the prices of these creative products, she says, those over 200 yuan are more popular in online stores than in traditional physical shops, while those at about 50 yuan are equally popular in both.

"It's probably because when someone wants to buy a decent gift online for others, they choose us," she adds.

Jiang attributes several things to their success. "It's good timing that the market needed such creative cultural products. Additionally, the museum has a good reputation and Suzhou city combines many distinctive features of the regions south of the Yangtze River," she says. "Our team is also adept at exploring these characteristics and presenting them as modern creative products."