Last night at a dinner party, a recently resigned executive in the fitness industry who had a bit too much to drink revealed: “Zou Shiming’s boxing gym by the Huangpu River rents for 1.05 million yuan a month. He struggled to keep it going for a few years, and in the end, he even sold his family house.”

In 2018, leveraging his Olympic champion status, he stubbornly leased a 18,000-square-meter venue. The fixed monthly costs exceeded 5 million yuan, with employee wages alone reaching 1.2 million. Initially, his fame helped, but boxing is too niche, and very few people bought long-term memberships. High-end gyms clustered along the Huangpu River, and his services had no distinctive advantages. When the pandemic hit, the venue had zero income, but rent and wages still had to be paid. To fill the gap, he and his wife, Ran Yingying, gradually sold multiple properties in Beijing, Shanghai, and even the US. In 2025, he publicly admitted that his entrepreneurial venture had failed, reflecting that “success experiences cannot be copied to other fields.”
Now, just thinking about how fragile celebrity aura is in the business world makes me feel a chill down my spine. Do you have examples around you of people relying on fame to start a business and ending up crashing painfully? $ETH