GuShiio.com Wen| Outside the Five Rings Outside OUTSIDE, author| Ma Yixin,edit | Che Maomao
What does a sideline business mean?& zwj;
Spring is a rare opportunity to relax throughout the year, but the holidays are fleeting and the lives of migrant workers are about to return. Are existing jobs stable after the New Year? Will there be new interview opportunities? Can I change jobs, get promoted and raise wages? It has become something that many people are thinking about.
According to statistics, nearly half of young people in the country are in a state of anxiety. Groups of young people have shared on social media their experiences in finding jobs and lying down and saving themselves, using crazy literature and abstract hot words to laugh at themselves, following the motto of Generation Z’s life that rejects insinuations and misdeeds, waiting for them to truly be saved from stress and emotions. A miracle cure to save them.
As a result, tracks such as B tours, pets, and chasing stars that can express personal emotions are booming. Raising a pet as a child, pampering it while pinching it, and then talking to electronic lovers seems to have become a common lifestyle for today’s young people.
The niche sideline businesses that serve the derived needs of young people have also adapted: finding pets, selling exquisite life photos in friends ‘circles, cos commissions, and customized pinching…
Although they may seem diverse, young people with similar qualities are increasingly willing to spend money on emotional consumption. Whoever can embody their ideal life can make money.
In 2025, emotions and pet tracks will still develop rapidly. According to social media feedback, we have taken stock of 6 related niche sideline businesses to see if there are any tracks where you can make money.
Find a partner for your pet
“A otaku dog, an uncle dog who doesn’t love sports but is very reliable, looking for a beautiful and intelligent mother Keji.& rdquo;
“Eight months old, my brother in the West Highlands fell into heat and found a girlfriend. This dog is versatile, has a high IQ, and can understand human language.& rdquo;
“A soft, glutinous, big milk dog, loves life, likes to go to the park, looking for the city’s ENFP little female dog, hope that she is lively, cute, healthy and progressive.&& rdquo;
In a corner of a park in Chengdu, a long string of A4 papers with different colors flying in the wind was pulled up. Walking in and seeing that the A4 paper strictly listed the conditions of the male and female guests participating in the blind date, as if traveling to the famous blind date 5A-level scenic spot People’s Park.
Tuyuan @ Dog der
Nowadays, young people do not envy other people who have children, but they envy others who have both cats and dogs. Finding a partner for school-age children is enough to make these young parents scratch their ears and cheeks, search hard, but enjoy it. According to statistics from idle fish, 3 million people go on blind dates for their pets on the platform every year.
There are also parents who find soul mates for neutered pets online: Are there any pairs of food?& rdquo;
If there is demand, there is a market, so if you are the one, you will be the one, and matchmakers who provide matchmakers for pets to achieve a happy marriage are born.
Offline, Pupurazzi, a well-known pet shop in Chengdu, has set up a pet dating corner and a puppy civil affairs bureau. The names, ages, genders, and characteristics of the puppies are written on pink monthly cards by parents, waiting for the arrival of destined dogs.
Photo Source @ Tiaotiao_
This kind of pet dating corner, with the main purpose of pet socializing, has also appeared in shopping malls and squares in Changsha, Guangzhou, Dalian, Shanghai and other places. It not only divides men and women into special areas, but also sets up Mini games that pets can play together.
Some parents prefer to match each other. Yaming, who lives in Shanghai and has two cats, has been rejected. Some people felt that Yaming lived in a community too far away from home and it was inconvenient to bring cats to their homes, so they declined. Some people preferred purebred cats, but Yaming’s cats were a small bunch, so they declined again.
Many parents who wanted to find partners for their Mao children were like Yaming, who were rejected many times, and people who provided professional advice to parents who wanted to breed appeared.
For example, the cat house owner in Guangzhou mainly breeds gradual series. He not only has extensive cat connections, but also relies on his rich pet experience to introduce each other to parents who want to breed. Therefore, he also launched a customized version of the dating plan for cats in Xianyu, priced at 800 yuan.
Friends circle pictures for sale
“Daily live pictures, high-quality photos of celebrities, showing or not showing their faces, all kinds of life photos are available, and you can buy them out. Children are welcome to buy them.& rdquo;
Under the light of the luxury brand’s brightness of around 3300K, the long-haired girl was carrying a dior handbag and wearing a slim-fitting dress. The evening wind blew her long hair, as if she was just walking in front of Jimmy Choo’s near her home after dinner. The back photo shows a sense of relaxation and socialite style.
Ryan also took many daily photos of celebrities, such as unpacking photos after purchasing LV and Chanel, vacating in a luxury hotel, and visiting an art exhibition… In order to reflect the characteristics of a socialite, she also specially marked the hotel’s one-night room rate on the hotel’s vacation photos.
The vacation night of a luxury hotel that originally cost 3000 yuan a night was sold at Xiaohongshu for 9 yuan; while Ryan’s post selling photos from his circle of friends received twice the number of likes.
Some photos are not priced. Buyers ask for prices in the comment area, and Ryan asks for private communication so that both parties can learn more about each other about the details of the photos, such as when they were taken, whether they were sold, whether they were shown, etc.
Many buyers almost ask for a buyout, never sell it to anyone else, and are not allowed to resell it again after selling it.& rdquo; In order to reduce the risk of being exposed in the same life.
Some people scoff at refined fake photos, and others yearn for these pictures with high-quality colors, rich elements, and inadvertent display of the high quality of their lives. For less than 10 yuan, they can buy an exquisite life that is envied by people in their circle of friends. For those who aspire to a high-quality life, it is a very good deal.
There are also people who like the lifestyle Ryan shows and ask her for long-term pictures, and each picture must live live.
On the one hand, the live picture can display the lens information during shooting, and it can also reflect the authenticity of the person recording at will through positioning. On the other hand, now the circle of friends can post live pictures, and people who like trends themselves will also catch up with this trend.& rdquo;
Online game face customization
Meng Xuan is a heavily antique mmorpg game player. Such games usually have an open world. Players can use the game’s face-pinching system to adjust the initial modeling of the face, facial features, height and even the fullness of their body, and then create a name for themselves. The character becomes a knight. While walking through the game plot, he shuttles back and forth on various maps.
Meng Xuan has always had a heroic and heroic image of a female knight in her heart. She has a pair of wild green eyes like Princess Fengling, is also as strange as Huang Rong, and is as elegant as Zhou Zhiruo.
On the day the game was launched, she excitedly kept the time with her good friends and entered the character creation interface on time. She spent the whole day trying to create the ideal female hero role, but it was still unsatisfactory.
While wandering around the game on Weibo, the face of a female warrior in a dream appeared on the screen. In the seller’s screenshot, the female warrior who made various actions directly targeted Meng Xuan’s aesthetic.
She immediately sent a private letter to the seller: My wife asked for her face code!& rdquo;
The seller quickly recovered: 10 yuan, go to Taobao idle fish.& rdquo;
Following the guidance, Meng Xuan jumped to the seller’s Taobao store. There are many face-pinching games of the same type. Face-pinching games of Loli Zhengtai, adult men and women, and even other cos game characters are on sale, priced at 10-30 yuan.
Screenshot of Meng Xuan’s game character
Meng Xuan’s friend also found a facial people-maker. In order to customize an exclusive facial people-maker, she paid nearly 400 yuan.
Meng Xuan felt unbelievable, but her friend thought it was worth it, because not only could this face-pinching artist modify specific facial details according to requirements and restore the friend’s face-pinching requirements one-on-one, but also because of the buyout, the face-pinching artist could no longer sell the character to the public, eliminating the possibility of face-bumping in the game world.
After buying the face, Meng Xuan and her friends used it for a long time, almost raising the character as a daughter. Her friends dressed up every piece of the new fashion mount for her daughter.
Meng Xuan once met a character who had a similar face to her in the game. The two players did not feel embarrassed about matching costumes, but instead opened the topic because of the same aesthetic approach.
“Everyone will pick up their favorite image and travel on their own behalf, so even if they bump into each other, they will feel that the things we like are the same and we have found the same thing.” rdquo;
cos entrusted
The second-dimensional husband comes into reality, and it is a group of girls who are realizing each other’s dreams.
The entrusted teachers who play the male protagonists are usually girls, and they only accept entrusted orders placed by girls.
Usually, a commission lasts for about 6-8 hours, and the price ranges from 200-800 yuan. The male master played by the teachers spends the day with the player, and the extra expenses incurred during the day for meals, transportation, play and other expenses will be paid by the player.
Before the commission starts, some players will receive a questionnaire from the entrusting teacher to facilitate in-depth understanding of the other party’s habits, likes and dislikes. A questionnaire will ask players what they expect from dating status, favorite nicknames, favorite foods, etc. What teachers need to do is to interpret the perfect male protagonist in the game.
The male protagonist, who can only appear and interact on the screen, has come from the Cyberworld to reality, walking arm in arm with players at subway entrances, downstairs, cinemas, parks, and even recreating romantic scenes and confession lines in the game into reality.
No one should be able to refuse such a scene
After the commission is over, many people will have withdrawal reactions, but at the same time, they know very clearly that the person in front of them is not the real male protagonist.
This is a complex emotion interspersed between virtual and reality.
It is true to be happy, love and moved, and it is true to feel valued during the dating process. Under the post of exchanging cos commission withdrawal, some players believe that cos commission is a girl’s wishing well; some players share: It’s not just a commissioned teacher who performs cos on the day of commission, but am I not just a happy self?” rdquo;
Star Card Identification
Small card is a kind of periphery made of celebrity photos into cards. The size is similar to an ID card. There are many types: self-printed cards printed by fans themselves, small cards attached to albums, and exclusive small cards obtained by fans after spending on different platforms…
At the same time, due to the unstable popularity of idols, Xiaoka is also a financial product in a sense. For example, a small card purchased for 200 yuan may soar to several thousand yuan due to the popularity of the idol. On the contrary, the market for a small card purchased at a high price may also fall like a cliff.
Therefore, fans are extremely cautious about the small cards they buy. They are worried that buying fakes will not only be psychologically discouraged, but it will be difficult to resell them in the future.
On idle fish, various small card identification experts have emerged. Most of them are young people who have rich experience in chasing stars and have countless purchases around them. They can tell at a glance whether the small card is real or fake. Because they buy too many, they have developed a sense of authenticity over time. The ability to identify the real thing.
Pants has opened a business on idle fish to identify small cards of men’s groups, and is more good at identifying small cards of artists under South Korea SM Entertainment Co., Ltd., and clicks on the homepage. Teacher Pants is a fan of a certain men’s group under SM.
The identification price of the small card is 1 yuan. 1717 people have expressed their desire, and 2000+ people have placed orders. Pants, like other people who identify the small card, look at the front and back of the small card sent by the buyer. Clear pictures, photos under light, and physical pixels.
The shapes of pixels on fake and fake small cards are different, but due to the depth of the card ring, no one dares to pat their chest to ensure that their eyes are ruler and can directly distinguish the real and fake cards.
Compared with consumers who want to make a fortune by looking for anchors to identify treasures with sky-high antiques in the live broadcast room, star-chasing people spend one yuan or two yuan to identify small cards, and what they buy is more affirmation and peace of mind from their fellow friends.
Pinch Handmade
Pinch is a kind of decompression toy made of silicone material. The silicone pinch is placed in a transparent PVC bag. When pinching, it will deform, and after letting go, it will slowly rebound back to its original shape.
Many enthusiasts will carry it with them, taking classes, eating, walking, drinking coffee… You can take it out and make a plate anytime, anywhere.
Middle-aged people plate walnuts and young people pinch them. Nowadays, the same style of pinching can be made by sellers to make three different touches: water feeling that rebounds quickly, cement feeling that is more sticky to the bag than water feeling, and mud feeling similar to plasticine feel. Each style also has a variety of more subdivided hand feels, such as creamy puree feeling, mud feeling, and super burst pulp feeling… There are endless streams of everything.
Haruko spent 45 yuan to buy a custom pinching with her idol’s name. The construction period was about 7 days. The seller made it purely by hand and made it of food grade silicone.
Similar to a customized squeeze of a star’s initials
In the world of pinching, everything can be customized. Haruko also saw that some people have made Hogwarts, Christmas trees, popular IPs such as Chiikawa, etc. into pinching that can be kneaded in the palm of their hands. The price ranges from 20 yuan to thousands of yuan.
There are also many colleagues wishing on the styles they like in the comment area of Xiaohongshu. Some people ask about the weight of the pinch, some want the color to be darker, and some miss the first issue of spot sales and wait for the next batch of pre-sales to open the group.
She has a favorite pinch-pinching blogger. She can not only reproduce the Hogwarts castle on the pinch-pinching, but also create a variety of brightly colored hand-painted pinch-pinching with a maximum of 500 people. The fan base has reached the 12th, and the number of likes per note is usually hundreds or even thousands.
Hogwarts style pinching (Source: Creation Cocoon)
A process of finding a new owner does not have so many marketing routines. People who make pinches make money with their skills, and people who buy pinches pay for their favorite image, exciting IP and invincible stress-relieving feel.
Many times, when 996 migrant workers dragged their tired bodies past the boutiques in the mall, they were attracted by the various realistic sushi, toast, and bread pendants hanging on the shelves and couldn’t help but touch them. It was soft and elastic.
When all the resentment towards the boss and colleagues disappeared in that instant, pinching had occupied the young people’s pressure-filled souls.
conclusion
A few years ago, it was limited to a necessary sideline for the student party and Bao Ma, but now it has become the second career growth curve that migrant workers must master after work in order to maintain their annual income at the age of 35.
The Pet and Emotional Track already has a certain market size, and will develop a number of replicable success cases in 2024. It will continue to flourish in 2025, giving rise to more and more niche derivative opportunities.
More and more young people regard pleasing themselves and demonstrating their individuality as their main consumption motivations. In Xiaohongshu alone, there are as many as 8.59 million healing-related notes. If you spend money to buy excellent emotional value and a happy mood, then those who want to buy and those who sell will be happy in the new year.
