These Young Taiwanese Want to Change What Gets Sold on the Street — and the Lives of the People Selling It

The first product that might bring change is a redesigned pack of local Taiwanese gum.

If you think of the street as a space, who comes to it?

In Taipei, old people like to gather in the streets and parks to play chess and talk. Rather than sit in an empty home, they would rather go out and find a group of people much like themselves. Every so often you also see someone sleeping rough, or selling goods out of a basket to passersby. Those goods are usually the Feilei gum you can find anywhere, household sundries, or magnolia blossoms; the vendors are mostly people with disabilities and the elderly.

The street welcomes almost anyone, and yet some people want to remake how it looks, to give it more life.

The well-known Taiwanese designer Aaron Nieh recently joined a project called "Taipei Street Corners Meet Design." With Tongyi Zhiguo, the company that makes Feilei gum, he has put out a cross-industry product: Street Vending Bubblegum.

The project comes from the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs. It started in 2012 as a neighborhood scheme and has now run five years. Past editions included the "Small Signboard Workshop," which redesigned shop signs on the street — Nieh took part in that one too — and an invitation to Taiwanese designers to give a storefront a creative makeover for NT$999. But a product made specifically for street vending is a first.

What makes this bubblegum interesting is that you can only buy it on the streets of Taiwan, from a "street vendor." For Nieh, 14 years into his career, designing gum sold only by street vendors is also a first.

The person who set this in motion is 26-year-old Wu Yande, along with his two friends Zhu Guanzhen and Zhang Shuhuai. Two years ago the three of them founded a group called Rensheng Baiwei — "a hundred flavors of life." When the Taipei design firm Zhudian Design took over this year's "Taipei Street Corners Meet Design" from the Department of Cultural Affairs, Rensheng Baiwei was who came to mind.

The group was already known in Taiwan for its "Stone Soup Project," which collects ingredients people cannot finish, cooks them into meals, and hands them out to people sleeping rough. Not everyone on the team believed such a "charity" project could work, but member Zhu Guanzhen insisted, and the Stone Soup Project started in July 2015. Its official Facebook page has more than 6,000 followers.

Zhudian Design believed these young people would have ideas about how design could change the street. Between April and December 2015 they had already designed 13 street-vending products of their own, developed together with Taiwanese farmers or manufacturers and sent out to the street market as co-branded goods. To push this "Street Vending Project" along, they registered a limited company in 2015.

Of the suggestions Wu Yande and his colleagues gave Zhudian, the most important was to bring in a better-known designer like Nieh. Together with Zhudian, they also explained to Nieh what street vending is, and what design could mean for it.

"Cities now are squeezing out this kind of space. They want the streets spotless — no peddlers, no 'street friends'" — the Taiwanese term for people sleeping rough. Wu Yande, speaking to QDaily, went on to say that the relationship between city life and the street does not have to be this way.

There are reasons street peddlers aren't welcome, though. In the past, what they sold was mostly the tissues and gum you could find in any shop, and buying on the street cost a little more besides. Rensheng Baiwei ran a survey of 2,000 consumers on what they thought of street-vended goods. Nearly 80 percent said: "I want to buy something, but I can't find anything in the basket I want."

"The key is that the product be distinctive," Wu Yande says. Add design and the product looks fresher, and is likelier to stir the urge to buy. The Street Vending Bubblegum goes on sale in May at NT$30 a pack, more than NT$10 above ordinary gum. Feilei gum's old packaging aimed at children, with cartoon illustrations as its main visual.

The promotional images Nieh posted on Facebook look more like the plain style young people like. Soon after the post went up it had drawn more than 3,000 likes, with commenters discussing how the typeface and the imagery were matched. Nieh described the gum this way: "6 grams per serving, five servings per pack, 16.8 calories a serving. Some places have it, some places don't."

"This had to be something cool. We wanted to do something cool from the start. But 'cool' doesn't feel quite right as a word either. Anyway, it's interesting," Wu Yande said. "I hope that by changing the product, buying something from a street vendor no longer has to feel like an act of pity."

Wu Yande, Zhu Guanzhen, and Zhang Shuhuai were colleagues at the Fair Trade Taiwan Association, which follows the international fair-trade movement and helps disadvantaged producers win a chance at economic independence.

One night they found an old woman who scavenged recyclables pushing her cart 5 or 6 kilometers to make a living, and the idea of founding Rensheng Baiwei took hold. Zhu Guanzhen, who later started the Stone Soup Project, made the first proposal: use the internet to build a "recycling map" so that scavengers could collect material more easily.

The map was finished by crowdsourcing in the end. The three combined what each did best — Zhu Guanzhen on visuals and copy, Wu Yande on operations, Zhang Shuhuai the engineer — and built a site called "Give Your Recycling to Grandpa and Grandma." People could upload information on where scavengers could be found, which made it easy for residents to hand their recyclables over directly.

For the first month, nothing happened. Then a news story about paper prices in Taiwan being pushed down sent the site shooting up, and people began to ask how much money these old paper collectors actually got for their labor. More than 200 reports of scavengers' locations poured in. Not a big number, but Taiwan had never had scavengers' information collected like this, let alone with the public doing the collecting. Rensheng Baiwei's Facebook page gained more than 10,000 followers.

"That was the first time we felt the power of public participation," Wu Yande said. None of the three had expected it to make that much difference. Yet the map site lasted less than a year before Wu Yande, Zhu Guanzhen, and Zhang Shuhuai shut it down themselves. In the interview Wu Yande looked back on what the project had been worth: "It didn't point at the core of the problem. Making a map doesn't improve their lives. That was just something we imagined."

The core of the problem is that the profit from recycling still sits with the recycling yards or the firms further upstream; the scavengers get very little of it. Drawing a map was an interesting thing to do, but changing how recycling profits are divided was not something a few young people could do in the short term.

Wu Yande talked the team into trying a new "Street Vending Project," and they have spent the past year on it.

They added people. Zhu Guanzhen is chief executive and handles visuals and copy, Wu Yande handles operations and vendor support, Zhang Shuhuai is the engineer; Li Boyi handles marketing, Xue Xide is the photographer, and Yu Sixian does field research on the street vendors.

Giving street vendors distinctive goods to sell is not, in fact, a new idea. In Taiwan at least, The Big Issue has run on this business model for six years, since it formally launched there in 2010. The Big Issue began in London in 1991; it covers current affairs, society, and the arts, and now appears in different editions in ten countries. Its sellers are usually small vendors on the street.

A copy of The Big Issue sells for NT$100, of which the vendor keeps NT$50. Li Quzhong, the magazine's editor-in-chief, told QDaily that the first Taiwan issue sold more than 2,000 copies and that monthly sales now average more than 10,000. The vendors working with it have grown from a dozen or so to more than 150, at 125 selling points across nine counties and cities in Taiwan.

Wu Yande had seen The Big Issue back at his old job, and thought: "Letting street friends sell magazines on the street — that's a great model." It gave him the idea. But at first he wasn't aiming at "street friends" as a group. He was more interested in seeing what form street selling itself could take.

That, of course, is harder. The Big Issue can keep going on magazine distribution and cost control. The Street Vending Project's products and its ways of marketing them are all different from one another.

Getting the project moving was not as smooth as they imagined. At the start, since street vendors usually have no real startup money, Wu Yande's team felt they were "pushing people out to die" — nobody knew whether these ideas could bring the street back to life and give vendors more dignity. Past that psychological block, there was still the preparatory work, above all finding more street vendors and building relationships with the ones already out there.

From April 2015 they recruited vendors every way they could, and in eight full months Rensheng Baiwei found only six willing to try selling. "Vendors were on their guard with us. People thought we were a scam ring."

The Big Issue's recruitment went a little more smoothly than the Street Vending Project's. Li Quzhong thinks the two cases differ: The Big Issue first went after the unemployed, or the hourly workers holding real-estate signs at the roadside, and when Li and his colleagues pitched them an entirely new kind of work, they took an interest more readily. The Street Vending Project had to persuade people already selling on the street — they had to change what they were selling and carry the risk of the change.

Wu Yande wants to help street vendors rethink their products and how they sell, so the whole thing becomes more equal and more dignified. "There's this notion that I — the vendor — am the boss, I pick for myself, and I stock what I think customers will like." But there may not be that many people who fit that description in the first place.

Before the Street Vending Project amounted to much, money was another problem the company had to face. Wu Yande admits that with the Street Vending Bubblegum, because the margin is thin, Rensheng Baiwei will take no cut of the profit, to keep things running. Part of the company's operating budget comes from the NT$780,000 it first raised on the crowdfunding site flyingV; beyond that, it has applied for money from Oxfam Hong Kong.

Wu Yande believes the company can make money from advertising later, but at its present small scale it still looks short on commercial substance.

Having a designer like Nieh join in may help street-vending revenue a little. Li Quzhong of The Big Issue agrees with the approach: "Choosing themes and marketing them really does help." The Big Issue has worked with Taiwanese designers for years, and Li says it does help sell the magazine.

Designers may see this as a good opportunity. The Taiwanese designer Xiao Qingyang told QDaily in an earlier interview that Taiwan has more design talent than it can use, and that designers are now working with traditional industries: "A lot of small things in the back alleys are starting to have some beauty to them."

For consumers, though, the old impression of "street vending" has to change first. The Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs and Zhudian Design will hold a launch event for the Street Vending Bubblegum in early May — the first press launch Taiwan has held for a street-vended product.

To make the product more appealing, Wu Yande set up a site before the official release — "Aaron Nieh x Street Corners Meet Design x Rensheng Ganzaidian" — taking pre-orders. Consumers first get a voucher online, then go out to the street and trade it with a vendor for gum they can't buy anywhere else.

How cumbersome that is goes without saying. But Wu Yande thinks it is worth trying. He wants consumers to learn online first that street-vended goods are about to look different, which may well interest them. Ordering online also makes the production volume easier to control, even though Tongyi Zhiguo will help with production. The company is also covering the packaging costs for the new product.

The street will not change overnight. Still, with the release of Nieh's Street Vending Bubblegum, nearly 50 new street vendors have joined the project. Rensheng Baiwei has also given its street-vending goods a brand name: Rensheng Ganzaidian — a ganzaidian being an old-fashioned corner shop.

But because the goods are sold on the street, they must face whatever the weather does, and experienced vendors all know to pick things that keep well and don't spoil. The current lineup includes tea, soda crackers, dried fruit, peanut candy, and bamboo toothbrushes.