"Lifetime Oralcare"-Interview

Wearing a dust-free hat and dust-proof clothing, Lucy adjusted the electronic magnifying glass and stared at the image on the computer.

In the picture, the blue-green filaments are neat and round. "If the bristles are too long, they will not be clean; if they are too short, they will be hard and easily pierce the gums." Lucy talked about the complexity behind the small toothbrush.

Lucy, head of foreign trade at YANGZHOU LIFE TIME HOUSEHOLD COMMODITY CO., LTD (hereinafter referred to as "lifetime"). She has been engaged in foreign trade for many years. At the beginning of taking over, Tian Lili, who was unable to meet the requirements of a series of questions raised by German customers, such as production materials and workshop cleanliness, was taught a lesson.

"It is said that 'change leads to success', and if you don't change with the trend, you will die." Since then, Lucy has strictly transformed the production workshop in accordance with international standards. In his words, it is "close to the dust-free workshop for chip production." Lifetime was able to own the earliest batch of workshops with higher cleanliness in Yangzhou.

Yangzhou is known as the "Toothbrush Capital of China". This 40-square-kilometer town gathers thousands of toothbrush manufacturers. On average, nearly 20 million toothbrushes are produced here every day, with an annual output value of more than 13 billion yuan, accounting for more than 80% of the national and more than 35% of the global market share.

As the market share approaches the ceiling of the industry, the local government has implemented four major transformation projects of "technology, energy saving, green, and intelligence" to encourage toothbrush companies to accelerate industrial transformation and upgrading through technological innovation and digital transformation.

In the production workshop, the reporter saw that more than a dozen injection molding machines were lined up, with automatic injection from the top, and the hot-melted plastic particles were pressed into brush handles; the green robotic arm rotated, grabbed the semi-finished brush handles and stuffed them into the injection mold, and when they were taken out, they became lifelike dolphin shapes.

In the past, four or five people were in charge of an injection molding machine; now, the entire injection molding workshop only needs three workers. Lucy introduced that through the in-depth application of parametric programming technology, intelligent equipment and digital systems have taken on the main beam of the toothbrush production line.

From a small workshop to a high-tech small and medium-sized enterprise in Jiangsu Province, this foreign trade girl who changed her job halfway has witnessed the transformation of the toothbrush industry in Yangzhou and is full of confidence in future industrial innovation.

In the product exhibition room, more than 30 patent certificates are neatly arranged. Lucy picked up a toothbrush that was recently launched and said, "This brush handle is made of starch and can be automatically degraded within two years." In his opinion, in line with the concept of green environmental protection and special cleaning needs, special toothbrushes such as sterilizable, replaceable brush heads, dentures, and tongue coating cleaners have become the key to the next "breakthrough".

"Wherever there are human beings, there are toothbrushes produced in Yangzhou." In the China Toothbrush Museum in Yangzhou City, this eye-catching slogan carries the dreams of generations of "toothbrush people". (Lv Qian, Li Kuo, Li Nanhua, Wang Renhong, Xie Di, Xu Zheng, Zhang Yufeng, Yu Le, Zhang Hantian, Gao Chao)