The Woman Who Can Sell Anything

Is Chinese live-streamer Viya, who sold about $425 million of goods in a day, retailing’s future?

- By Jinshan Hong, Chunying Zhang, Allen Wan, and Janet Paskin

Forget Willy Loman or The Music Man’s Professor Harold Hill. Huang Wei, China’s Livestream shopping queen, really can sell anything. In April, for instance, Huang, known professionally as Viya, sold a rocket launch for around 40 million yuan ($5.6 million). That’s nothing compared with her 2019 performance on Singles Day, China’s biggest shopping event of the year, when she logged more than 3 billion yuan in sales. That’s more than the annual gross domestic product of some nations, including Palau and São Tomé and Príncipe.

The live, online shopping extravaganza the 34-year-old hosts every night for her fans across China is part variety show, part infomercial, part group chat. Each evening, Viya’s audience places orders worth millions of dollars—typically for cosmetics, appliances, prepared foods, or clothing, but she’s also moved houses, cars, and that rocket launch. Last month her audience hit a record 37 million viewers—more than the Game of Thrones finale, the Oscars, or Sunday Night Football—after the spread of the coronavirus put most Chinese people under stay-at-home orders.