Alex Edmunds, 26, a Princeton graduate from Los Angeles, was on the golden path to investment banking. Today he is a matchmaker living in Beijing. Five years ago he came to China to study the language and decided to stay. He was keen to meet Chinese women and had many blind dates organised by Chinese dating websites. He was struck by the women's materialism and wished there was a better platform to find a significant other. So he set one up himself,
Coucou8.com.
It took me months to experience blind dates the Chinese way. When I socialised among wider groups, I realised there should be a way for people who are interested in Western events, or a Western kind of format, to find their "significant other". We organise offline events for classy people to get together and use our website
Coucou8.com as a portal to book events. Almost every week there are between eight and 24 people for small interest group activities such as badminton, picnics, cooking classes or hiking in the northwest of Beijing. If girls are really good at cooking they can find others who cook well too. If guys are good at badminton, they can show off and attract girls. The events are set up for people to meet in a low-key way. We want to create an environment to let people get to know each other over two or three hours instead of a 15-second conversation going through 200 people at once at a mass blind date organised by a Chinese dating website.
Mostly people with an international background. The majority of our clients have either studied abroad, worked abroad or worked for international companies. Up to 30 per cent of attendees at our events are foreigners. Most of those who attend our offline events are aged 28-35. We also host special events among different companies. Last year we hosted an event for 24 white-collar workers who were born in the 1970s and worked in large American firms. For them we organised a three-course dinner in a French restaurant in downtown Beijing. Between every course, guys switched tables to meet other girls. Sometimes it was hard for us to know whether people would go out after attending the group dating, because it is easy for them to ask each other for their contacts and to continue dating outside of the group. Only when they tell me that things went well would I know about it.
