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EnglishArtificial intelligence is redefining the productivity of small teams.
In today’s business world, where AI is quietly reshaping industries, a new, lightweight and efficient form of entrepreneurship is becoming a reality—solo companies and super individuals are no longer just a vision but a tangible reality for everyone.
AI is empowering small teams with intelligent capabilities that were once reserved only for large enterprises. On Taobao, there is a domestic, original designer brand called AlmondRocks, which specializes in "trendy socks." This startup, with annual sales of tens of millions of yuan, uses DingTalk's "AI Tables" to enable its small new-media commerce team to effortlessly manage a social media content network involving more than 6,000 influencer partners. Supporting this "small but beautiful" organizational structure is China's unique digital ecosystem in the textile manufacturing industry.
A mature flexible supply chain enables products that combine quality, price competitiveness, and design to come to life. As founder Zhang Qi puts it, "The category capabilities offered by Chinese manufacturing are unprecedented in history—and hard to imagine anywhere else in the world."
The vibrant digital ecosystem allows AI tools to be rapidly deployed, enabling small and medium-sized brands to access top-tier AI capabilities with low barriers to entry. Competition in the e-commerce industry is no longer about vying for traffic; it has evolved into a battle over multi-platform collaboration efficiency. Merchants still wrestling with Excel during big sales campaigns may not realize that the gap between their business and their competitors could hinge on a single AI table that updates automatically.
Zhang Qi, founder of AlmondRocks
Expressing Individuality Through Socks
During his early years studying abroad, Zhang Qi noticed an intriguing phenomenon on the streets of the UK:
Even when British people dressed in simple, classic English styles, their socks always revealed a glimpse of their uncontainable individuality. This seemingly minor fashion detail sparked his entrepreneurial intuition—socks, he realized, need not be mere functional items; they can also serve as the "finishing touch" in everyday outfits.
In the language of today's social media, it's often said: "Your outfit may be basic—but your socks don't have to be."
In 2010, Zhang Qi returned to China and founded the brand AlmondRocks. At that time, the domestic sock market was dominated by countless white-label products lacking brand identity, with fierce homogeneous competition.
Selected products from AlmondRocks
This commitment to design and fabric quality gradually earned AlmondRocks market recognition. The brand successfully attracted a group of young consumers who value lifestyle quality and embrace individual expression, and it built a sales network centered on Taobao while spanning multiple platforms.
Today, Taobao accounts for the majority of the brand's sales, and AlmondRocks also leverages content platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin for influencer seeding and live-streaming collaborations.
However, omnichannel operations bring more complex management challenges. What started with a few hundred influencer partners has now grown to more than 6,000 active influencers across various social media platforms. The entire process—from initial outreach and collaboration to sample shipping, post publishing, and performance tracking—is managed by just four key commerce staff. As the scale of these partnerships grows, employees often find themselves bogged down in repetitive, process-driven work.
Wu Xian, head of AlmondRocks' content e-commerce platform, admits that long-term exposure to highly repetitive tasks makes it hard for employees to feel a sense of purpose in their work. Moreover, pricing, contracts, logistics information, and content scripts are scattered across different documents and communication apps, making errors easy to occur.
Shanzhu, a frontline commerce specialist, told us, "Before weekly meetings, we always had to work late into the night because the data for the report had to be compiled by then."
We can almost picture the scene: on the eve of a weekly meeting, frontline commerce and operations staff have seven or eight web pages, multiple Excel spreadsheets, and countless WeChat chat windows open simultaneously. Employees must manually "fish out" data on all influencers from the previous week—such as post links, likes, comments, and product links—from this jumbled mass of information, then copy, paste, and verify each piece before consolidating it into a seemingly unified weekly report.
For e-commerce startups like AlmondRocks, which operate across multiple channels, limited organizational resources and manpower create several persistent pain points:
Collaborations with influencers across multiple platforms and brand investments require return-on-investment analysis and data forecasting, but data fragmentation is severe, and integration costs are high;
Lack of effective tools to manage the standardized process of influencer outreach, collaboration, and performance tracking—after all, for growing small and medium-sized brands, implementing a full-fledged SaaS system is not only expensive but also difficult to adapt dynamically as the business evolves;
Employee turnover can easily lead to loss of critical business data, posing risks to the company;
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And as business volume increases, Excel spreadsheets can no longer keep up with management needs—the spreadsheets become unwieldy, data piles up, real-time updates lag, and error rates soar, reminiscent of the "code spaghetti" that accumulates in software after years of patchwork updates.
As early as 2017, AlmondRocks began using DingTalk for office work, but initially, it was used only for basic communication, coordination, meetings, and OA approvals for administrative and managerial tasks. "We were only scratching the surface," Zhang Qi admits.
Later, as challenges related to influencer and data management grew more complex, he realized that a smarter solution might be needed.
This year, AlmondRocks began migrating specific business processes to DingTalk's AI Tables. Today, the founder tells us, "Our company now has about 50 employees, and half of them are working on this table."
The Workflow Revolution Brought by AI Tables
When discussing product design, Zhang Qi frequently uses the word "iteration." He believes that product design itself should evolve continuously based on changing societal stages and conditions to meet evolving needs—a reflection of a long-term, forward-looking corporate philosophy. For example, socks, traditionally viewed as "basic items," are being redefined by AlmondRocks through the infusion of ideas and design—this represents an iterative shift in the very definition of socks in an era dominated by emotional consumption.
We also believe that if a consumer goods company decides to deeply integrate AI into its operations, this, too, can be seen as a "conscious iteration" in the company's organizational structure and the founder's operating philosophy.
AlmondRocks currently applies AI Tables primarily to two key business scenarios: influencer seeding and live streaming.
At AlmondRocks, the team's collaboration with AI Tables feels less like a dramatic overhaul and more like a quiet workflow transformation. Wu Xian shared a key detail: "Unlike the past, when data had to be manually entered into Excel spreadsheets, now we simply input the post link into the table, set the corresponding AI fields, and the AI Table automatically pulls in data on likes and comments. Even the status of sample shipments is updated in real time, freeing us from repetitive manual tasks."
This shift is reflected in the team's daily collaborative rhythm:
A single table aggregates all influencer information
When commerce staff open the table, they can see an overview of all partner influencers' activities. Based on engagement data and best-selling records, the system automatically flags high-priority targets, making collaboration progress instantly clear and rendering the chaotic, multi-platform management of the past obsolete.
Data auto-populates—say goodbye to manual data entry
Employees only need to set the required "core fields" in the table, whether for content data or logistics tracking, and the system generates the information automatically upon input. Instead of manually transferring 10 fields one by one, they now need to enter only 5 or 6, freeing up human resources at the source.
The system proactively alerts for breakout content
When the data for a particular post surges unexpectedly, the AI Table automatically identifies the spike and sends a DingTalk notification through its workflow feature to the relevant commerce staff, ensuring that high-potential content is spotted and followed up on immediately.
Multiple roles work in parallel on the same table
AlmondRocks' commerce, operations, and legal team members collaborate daily on the same table, with information synchronized in real time—this is gradually replacing the company's previously fragmented collaboration model. Wu Xian explains, "We want to create a smoother workflow so that everyone can focus on what they do best. For example, the colleague responsible for expanding our influencer network doesn't need to get bogged down in backend data; instead, she can concentrate on communication skills and her understanding of the brand—that's where human expertise truly shines."
In AlmondRocks' revenue, influencer live streams on social media platforms account for about 30% of the company's total GMV, driving tens of millions in annual sales. In the past, operations staff acted like "ferrymen," shuttling back and forth between platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin, manually transferring conversion data and piecing together a holistic picture—time-consuming, labor-intensive, and unable to capture the real-time dynamics of live-stream performance.
DingTalk's AI Table automatically aggregates and centralizes the brand's live-stream performance data, providing a clear, at-a-glance view.
A single table breaks down "data silos"
With the help of lightweight tools such as RPA, the AI Table automatically aggregates data from platforms like Xiaohongshu's Dandelion and Douyin's Star Map, creating a clear "data cockpit" for live streams that monitors sales trends and performance. This also makes it easier for management to analyze key metrics such as channel ROI, cost per visitor, and marginal profit margins based on quantitative data. Wu Xian explains that this is the tool he uses most frequently: the first thing he does every morning is open the "cockpit" to review the latest performance feedback.
From "one-off deals" to "long-term partners"
The AI Table continuously tracks core metrics for each streamer, such as return rates and average output per session, effectively equipping the brand with a "influencer analyst." Based on real, continuous data feedback, the brand can precisely identify influencers whose style aligns with its own, who enjoy strong user endorsements, and who deliver consistent conversion rates, gradually shifting from one-off collaborations to long-term partnerships. At the same time, influencers benefit from more stable resource support through ongoing cooperation, and both sides grow together in a cycle of mutual trust and positive reinforcement.
Capturing product trends and sensing emerging directions
Apparel and socks, as non-standardized products, see sales fluctuate with the seasons and changing fashion trends. The AI Table can monitor live-stream sales dynamics across channels and among influencers in real time, generating a list of the brand's hottest-selling items and helping the team quickly identify potential breakout products. Combined with inventory information, management can clearly track the popularity of individual products, their turnover rate, and the health of each sales channel.
We learned that AlmondRocks has also introduced AI Tables for monitoring competitor brands, helping operations staff instantly sense external competitive dynamics, understand rival strategies, and respond in a timely manner.
The transformation of AlmondRocks' workflow essentially reflects a "human-machine collaborative operation," and the team's organizational logic has shifted accordingly. Wu Xian told us that in the past, the brand emphasized "well-rounded skills" in hiring, but now it places greater emphasis on "specialization."
A New Paradigm for Lightweight Growth
AlmondRocks' experience highlights two key advantages that startups in the e-commerce industry can rely on today: a domestically leading supply chain infrastructure and mature AI tools.
On the supply chain side, AlmondRocks can flexibly connect with high-quality suppliers in specialized segments based on different product needs, maintaining close communication from yarn selection to production. Behind this lies the robust support of China's manufacturing supply chain. Zhang Qi notes that in recent years, the brand has focused on sourcing high-quality yarns directly from the source, "experimenting with blending materials such as silk, linen, modal, wool, and cashmere to develop more ideal fabrics." Of course, this also means longer R&D cycles and higher trial-and-error costs, prompting AlmondRocks to gradually evolve into a brand whose core values lie in design and innovation.
On the operational side, the introduction of tools like DingTalk's AI Tables has brought significant efficiency gains to the brand. In e-commerce—where businesses operate across multiple platforms, handle numerous concurrent tasks, and manage vast networks of influencers—AI effectively reduces the need for repetitive manual labor and lowers the risk of human error, making it possible to "manage everything from a single table."
Zhang Qi added, "For teams like ours without a technical background, if the cost of setting up an AI Table is too high or the barrier to entry is too steep, it could become a hindrance. But DingTalk's AI Table is highly flexible and scalable, adapting quickly to different business scenarios. Its timely customer service is another key reason we chose it." This underscores that the value of AI tools lies not only in their technological capabilities but also in their accessibility and low barriers to entry—precisely what many small and medium-sized enterprises are looking for.
In fact, AlmondRocks is not alone. Yintai Department Store has used AI Tables to build an online group-buying business, enabling "one person to manage live streams from 62 malls, generating over 20 million yuan in monthly sales"; the e-commerce company "Mizhu" has leveraged a single AI Table to efficiently manage 20,000 private-domain groups and handle millions of customer inquiries, achieving "ultra-efficient after-sales service."
A pop-up store of the brand on Shanghai's West Bank
Looking ahead, AlmondRocks has begun expanding into overseas markets, with independent websites in Europe and the United States soon to launch; domestically, the brand is also accelerating the rollout of physical stores and exploring distributor models. Zhang Qi said, "Next, we want to apply AI Tables to store management, enabling us to track inventory adjustments in each store in real time."
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