(By LIN Lan) In the bizarre and multifaceted landscape of modern commerce, luxury goods are often regarded as symbols of wealth and taste, lying silently under the spotlight and reflecting a dazzling luster. However, behind this vast market full of desires, a difficult-to-cross shadow has long lurked—counterfeits that are hard to distinguish from the genuine ones act like a persistent ailment, eroding consumer trust and obstructing the healthy circulation of the industry. It is precisely within this turbulent current where the good and bad are intermingled that ZHANG Qin, with her rigor and acuity, like a traveler holding a candle, has carved out a bright path of normalization and standardization in the chaotic second-hand luxury market.

(Photo of asset appraiser ZHANG Qin)

ZHANG Qin's professional career did not start directly with these expensive leather goods and jewelry, but was founded upon rigorous science and engineering logic. She graduated from the prestigious Imperial College London with a major in Network Information Engineering. This study experience not only gave her a solid technical background but also planted the strict logic characteristic of an engineer and an ultimate pursuit of detail deep within her thinking. After graduation, she joined Westinghouse Securities Co., Ltd. In the grand narrative of financial capital, she learned how to examine the flow of value from an asset perspective. At that time, she might not have expected that this double blessing of engineering logic and asset perspective would later become her key weapon for reshaping the rules of the second-hand luxury industry. With the surge of the Internet wave, global shopping categories experienced unprecedented expansion, and ZHANG Qin keenly perceived that Chinese market demand for online luxury goods was showing an explosive trend. This was not just an opportunity for consumption upgrading, but also a huge commercial trend.

Carrying unique insights into market prospects, ZHANG Qin resolutely decided to return to China and founded a network technology company focusing on the online sales of luxury goods. However, the road to entrepreneurship is never a smooth one. When she actually placed herself in this seemingly flourishing market, she found undercurrents surging beneath the prosperity. Due to the high unit price and high premium characteristics of luxury goods, and driven by huge profits, counterfeiting methods emerged endlessly, and imitations filled every corner. For consumers, every click to purchase was like a risky gamble; for the industry, the spread of a trust crisis caused the second-hand trading market to fall into a long-term stagnation. Many people, even if they had needs for liquidating idle items or purchasing high-cost-performance goods, were deterred by a lack of security. This pain point, where supply and demand were severed by fake goods, led ZHANG Qin into deep thought: if the core proposition of trust cannot be solved, any construction of a business model is nothing more than building a tower on sand.

It was based on this profound insight into the industry's pain points that ZHANG Qin made a decisive strategic transformation. She realized that what the market lacked was not a trading platform, but an authoritative, scientific, and quantifiable authenticity identification system. Thus, she turned her gaze from simple sales to the more difficult fields of second-hand luxury authenticity identification and the opening of standardized recycling and sales processes. This was a tough battle starting from scratch. ZHANG Qin did not define herself merely as an appraiser but examined every item from the height of a commercial asset appraiser. In her eyes, a handbag or a watch is not just a consumer product, but a commercial asset that possesses different values due to differences in authenticity and condition.

This process was full of unknown hardships. In those "wilderness" days when industry rules were not yet established, ZHANG Qin not only had to face increasingly sophisticated counterfeiting technologies but also deal with a lack of market awareness. Outside the spotlight, she often spent hours or even days studying the stitching patterns of a specific brand in a particular year, or the subtle changes of a rare leather under different degrees of oxidation. She deeply knew that a misjudgment by an appraiser concerned not only a loss of money but also the foundation of credibility for the entire industry. This near-obsessive rigor allowed her to gradually establish an authoritative reputation within the industry.

However, ZHANG Qin did not stop at personal professional achievements. She deeply knew that only technological innovation and the reshaping of processes could truly solve the industry's pain points. To this end, she led her technical team to achieve the first industry breakthrough, being the first to introduce image recognition technology into the anti-counterfeiting system of luxury traceability tags. This innovation not only provided a unique "digital fingerprint" for every item but also fundamentally eliminated the way for counterfeiters to sell fakes by forging identification certificates through technical means, achieving an efficient closed loop of "one item, one certificate, one code."

Today's second-hand luxury market has long bid farewell to the chaotic and disorderly era of the past. In this magnificent transformation of the industry, ZHANG Qin undoubtedly played a leading role. Because of the strict and scientific identification system she established, it directly promoted major domestic mainstream e-commerce platforms to adjust their rules and establish admission standards requiring goods to pass inspection. In this process, as an industry pioneer, ZHANG Qin deeply assisted e-commerce platforms in formulating implementation plans that both conform to commercial circulation efficiency and ensure the landing of a quality inspection closed loop, elevating authenticity identification from an "experience-based" metaphysics to the scientific height of asset appraisal. ZHANG Qin effectively filled the market vacancy and activated the long-dormant inventory market. Under her promotion, more and more practitioners began to value standardized operations, consumer confidence has been greatly restored, and second-hand luxury transactions have finally returned to the value essence of a circular economy.

Looking back at ZHANG Qin's professional trajectory, from an engineering star student at Imperial College to a financial elite at a securities firm, and now an identification and appraisal expert in the second-hand luxury market, every turn she took seemed to be a huge leap, but in reality, the internal logic is consistent. She has always used a rational scale to measure value and scientific methods to build trust. At that crossroad where fake goods were rampant and people were panicked, it was ZHANG Qin who keenly captured the call of the times and threw herself into it with great courage. She proved that in the business world, true value lies not only in creating wealth but also in establishing order.