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Innovation is Beijing’s favourite word these days, as China tries to shake off the moniker of Sweatshop of the World. But there is nothing quite so innovative as a Chinese sweatshop owner who catches a scent of profit, and runs it relentlessly to ground.

In the space of a fortnight, Chinese merchants have capitalised on the fame of Paul the soccer octopus, who predicted the victor of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, to create a whole new market for octopus paraphernalia: octopus-shaped tissue boxes, octopus plush toys, even Sichuan octopus.

Chinese official media have reported a sharp jump in octopus-themed sales on Taobao, the eclectic Chinese version of Ebay.

The owner of one Taobao store based in Guangzhou told the Financial Times that he has sold 200 octopus dolls within the past two weeks and has now been reduced to taking orders for the oracular octopus trinkets because the factory that makes them cannot keep up. The Taobao price of Paul the Octopus dolls ranges from Rmb30 to Rmb5000.

Some Taobao store owners have even changed their store names to Paul or other octopus-linked words in an effort to be more easily found by e-shoppers, according to China Daily. “I added ‘Paul the octopus’ to a product description…and all of a sudden I received more than 20 orders” the official newspaper quoted one Taobao toy seller as saying. “Before I edited the description, I was selling only two or three a day.”
One seller said he was surprised by the octopus craze: “I’m illiterate about soccer and didn’t realize there was any difference between Paul and other sea creatures,” he said. “I’ve got many plush toys of different animal shapes in my store, but in the past octopus-shaped toys used to be put in the slowest-moving category.”

China Daily reports that Song Wen, a 35-year-old owner of a do-it-yourself T-shirt outlet in Beijing’s Dongcheng district, is printing octopus patterns on T-shirts day and night. Song has sold more than 500 such T-shirts priced from Rmb50 to 200 in the past week. He told the paper he must work as fast as he can because no one knows when the Paul phenomenon will fade away.

Not everyone is making money out of octopuses, though: the state-run Xinhua news agency reports that an investor in Fujian province bought an octopus last week to use as a stock forecaster.

The investor drew a dividing line on the bottom of a water basin, with one half labelled “up” and the other “down”, and placed the octopus on the centre line. Chinese Paul did not move, but the market did: stocks rose the next day. Xinhua says the investor plans to make a meal of the unprophetic creature.

With additional reporting by Shirley Chen

Related reading:
Octopus Paul gets big stamp of approval, China Daily