For Zeng Sheng, director of Shanghai Maiyi Arts, this fall has been a business boon: with the U.S. presidential election, the call for wax replicas of Donald Trump’s middle has been irrelevant.
Instead, the spread of the coronavirus has interrupted new orders and blocked overseas, adding to and from the United States. He is now delaying the production of a reproduction of Joe Biden.
“Tourist sites, amusement parks and other well-known people’s homes are not temporarily open,” Zeng said. “Because they can’t go back to work, we can’t get new orders.”
Shanghay Maiyi Arts was founded in 2012 as a manufacturer and supplier of wax figures.
Located on the outskirts of Shanghai, an hour’s drive from the city center, its showroom also serves as an impromptu museum, where visitors can pose alongside replicas of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, martial arts star Jackie Chan and others.
Zeng says that until 2019, the company will send up to 700 figurines a year to its customers, about a third of them abroad.
However, the virus came to orders twice: first in China, when they closed factories and tourist sites, and then abroad. The business is still about two-thirds of its size, Zeng says.
Zeng says the hardest component to make a reproduction is the face. It can take a month to design and sculpt the best features.
The company uses specialists to make hair and clothing for a replica. It can take 3 months to make a figure come true, from start to finish.
Although Trump is the company’s selling style in the United States, in China the trader is somewhat closer to home: a reproduction of a security guard, asleep and sloping in a chair, reports maximum orders.
Last year, the store produced Trump wax statues, six of which went abroad.