November 11, 2026: Four Ones and a Trademark

On November 11, 2009, Alibaba's Taobao Mall ran a 24-hour, 50-percent-off sale with just 27 merchants and brought in about 52 million yuan, or roughly $7.5 million.

The date wasn't random. As the story goes, students at Nanjing University in 1993 picked November 11 as a day for single people because 11/11 looks like four ones standing alone, and by the 2000s young people across China treated it as an anti-Valentine's Day. Alibaba, the Hangzhou company that brought online shopping to China, saw a chance to borrow a holiday that nobody owned.

The business logic was about timing. Alibaba said it chose November 11 because the date was easy to remember and fell in a lull between China's National Day holiday in October and Chinese New Year. Daniel Zhang, the executive running Taobao Mall and later Alibaba's CEO, is most often credited with the idea. Sales grew from $135 million in 2010 to $2.7 billion in 2012, the year Taobao Mall became Tmall, and in December 2012 Alibaba trademarked "Double 11," the holiday's common nickname, then used it to push rivals like JD.com to rebrand their own promotions.

Singles' Day became a spectacle, with a televised gala, a Guinness-recognized $14.3 billion day in 2015, and $38.4 billion in 2019, far beyond Black Friday's online sales in the United States. By 2021, the event had stretched into an 11-day, $84.5 billion sales period, the last total Alibaba published. Amazon's Prime Day, launched in 2015 to fill a slow summer stretch, is reported to have drawn on the same idea. The story shows how a company can find dead space on the calendar, attach commerce to a date that already means something, and make it its own.

Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.

Visit us at www.bsnsDailyPodcasts.com