ByteDance's independent station, Dmonstudio, shut down, opened less than four months ago, and once benchmarked SHEIN

Reporter | Wu Yangyu

Recently, ByteDance's independent site, Dmonstudio, announced on its official website that the website operation will be shut down from February 11, and the team will continue to provide after-sales service for consumers who have shopped, and users can also contact the team through the official mailbox. However, the announcement did not provide any explanation for the reasons for the shutdown, and the relevant social platform accounts have also been cancelled or stopped from dynamic updates.

Pictured from the official website of Damonstudio

Dmonstudio was only recently quietly launched (the domain name was registered in November 2021), and the media coverage was only a few days, and now the shutdown is also very sudden.

According to the previous official website, Dmonstudio updates more than 500 products every week, and users ship 5 to 10 working days after placing an order. Its delivery is mainly through overseas warehouses distributed around the world, covering more than 100 countries. Its users come from the United States, Europe, North America, the Middle East, etc., it is said that there are millions of orders of magnitude, and the team is also equipped with customer service in the corresponding language to serve users in multiple regions.

The most interesting thing is that there has been news that its target is the domestic cross-border e-commerce unicorn SHEIN, and nearly half of the team of more than 400 people comes from SHEIN. It has been observed that Dmonstudio also has a high degree of overlap with SHEIN in terms of category. The latter was once a hidden giant, which attracted a lot of media coverage after the volume was difficult to ignore, and is now regarded as one of the most successful cases of cross-border e-commerce in the domestic fashion field.

When Dmonstudio was still in operation, the "Contact Us" on the official website pointed to a "Guangzhou Chuangxing Media Technology Co., Ltd." located in Panyu, Guangdong Province. Panyu is where SHEIN made its fortune, where the company single-handedly built its core supply chain.

Another TikTok insider has said that Dmonstudio is an S-level project inside Byte, reporting directly to Kang Zeyu, president of Douyin E-commerce. However, according to the background information of the above-mentioned operating entity "Guangzhou Chuangxing Media Technology Co., Ltd.", the company is difficult to be involved with ByteDance in terms of equity structure and senior management team, and the outside world speculates that Dimstudio is required to keep a low profile in the initial stage.

As of now, ByteDance has not publicly responded to the above messages.

ByteDance has been paying attention to cross-border e-commerce for some time. At the end of 2020, as one of the channels for overseas revenue growth, cross-border e-commerce was set by Zhang Yiming as an important new business direction.

In addition to a series of investment moves aimed at the field, TikTok also launched TikTok Shopping, a tabbed showcase displayed on the creators' page in the form of a Douyin shop. Since then, ByteDance has launched a cross-border e-commerce independent website for the European market a few months ago, developed by a team code-named "Magellan XYZ" by Byte. According to official remarks, the app may be positioned on Taobao or Pinduoduo in Europe.

Fanno's mission is to compete directly with Amazon, which is aimed at the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, which are amazon's important sites in Europe and alibaba's AliExpress market.

ByteDance's cross-border e-commerce strategy has yet to be verified, and as for the future of Dmonstudio, it may only be answered by ByteDance's next move in this field.