Recently, SheIn has attracted much attention due to the relocation of headquarters and the rumors of the change of the nationality of founder Xu Yangtian. Although SheIn officials personally debunked the rumors, there is still a hot discussion on the Internet.
SheIn, a name that is not often mentioned in the Chinese e-commerce market. But over the past 10 years, it has quietly grown into an e-commerce giant valued at nearly $50 billion.
Image source: Visual China
According to a Piper Sandler survey, SheIn is the second most popular e-commerce brand for American teenagers in 2020, after Amazon. By May 2021, SheIn had replaced Amazon as the most installed shopping app in the United States. Currently, it ranks first in iOS shopping apps in 54 countries and first among Android devices in 13 countries.
How did SheIn go from being a small e-commerce workshop to the head of the apparel industry and becoming an extremely low-key clothing giant? Unicorn Encyclopedia, Wealth Express; Listen to my three-inch tongue, multiply and long song: next take you into the story of SheIn.
The founding process
SheIn's helmsman, Xu Yangtian, is extremely low-key, with very little information about him on the Internet, and Baidu Encyclopedia has only one sentence to introduce him.
Xu Yangtian, a native of Zibo, Shandong Province, was born in 1984 and graduated from Qingdao University of Science and Technology in 2007. The following year, he traveled south to Nanjing to work in SEO (search engine optimization).
China's cross-border e-commerce industry is in the start-up period, and a number of multinational B2C websites are beginning to show their strengths. Seeing the huge profits of the wedding dress category, Xu Yangtian opened an online store called ZZKKO and turned to cross-border wedding dress sales.
Image credit: Pexels
In the same year, with the first bucket of gold, Xu Yangtian took the domain name of SheInside.com and established his own e-commerce website, SheInside is also the predecessor of SheIn.
At the beginning of 2012, Xu Yangtian's eyes extended to a wider and more frequent category of women's clothing, so he gave up the wedding dress business and started again to officially sell women's clothing overseas.
Since 2014, since the peak period of website orders has reached nearly 50 million yuan, Xu Yangtian personally went from Nanjing to Guangzhou to build a board house, form a design team, and even take the initiative to subsidize the factory, and is also determined to do the garment supply chain center.
In 2015, Xu Yangtian officially changed the name of SheInside to SheIn, and the story of his rise began.
Corporate business
According to iResearch data, the scale of global cross-border e-commerce is growing day by day, whether it is B2B or B2C business, it has maintained a compound growth rate of more than double digits for more than a decade.
SheIn went from selling wedding dresses to selling women's clothing, and now expands into clothing businesses such as men's and children's clothing.
SheIn's target customers are the fashion-conscious but price-sensitive mass population, with 3000-5000 models available on the day. The average age of the whole site is 18-35 years old, accounting for 75% of the total number of users.
In 2020, the average unit price of SheIn is $70, which is $150 in the Middle East and $40 in Southeast Asia. In 2021Q1, more than 60% of customers returned to buy within 90 days, and 15% of consumers even shopped more than 20 times a year, and this proportion is still rising.
Image source: SheIn official website
SheIn has been understated and mysterious in the media, but is ubiquitous on Instagram and TikTok. With the help of influencers, the number of fans on its ins platform has reached 20 million.
In 2021, SheIn decided to rename the high-end series Shein Premium to MOTF and launch a standalone website.
Company valuation
Since its inception, SheIn has experienced 5 rounds of financing, and the main investors are Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, IDG Capital, JAFCO Asia, Greenwoods Asset Management, etc.
Several actions that have attracted high market attention include:
In January 2018, SheIn received a Series C financing from Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $2.5 billion.
In January 2019, SheIn received a $500 million Series D financing from Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global, valuing the company at $5 billion.
SheIn's valuation has soared since its inception and has become one of the most shocking unicorns in the venture capital world right now. At the end of 2021, a number of primary market investors revealed that SheIn's valuation may be as high as $100 billion.
Financial Position
SheIn covers more than 150 countries and territories around the world, and its turnover is also soaring. From $4.5 billion in 2019, to $10 billion in 2020, to $15.7 billion in 2021, the compound annual growth rate in the past three years has reached a staggering 86%.
Bloomberg has commented:
The trade dispute created SheIn, China's first global fashion giant.
In 2018, with the changes in the tariff policies of the two major countries in China and the United States, the way most of SheIn's orders are shipped from warehouses in China is in a favorable position in the operation of multinational enterprises.
Listing rumors
As early as 2020, SheIn was rumored to be preparing to go public for the first time, but due to the uncertain market situation at that time, this plan was once shelved.
In May 2021, it was also rumored that it was preparing to go public. SheIn said in a statement that the company has no plans to conduct an IPO in the short term, and the focus will remain on developing and growing the brand for some time to come.
Recently, there are rumors that SheIn will restart plans to list in New York, and has hired Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to serve its IPO.
For the news of the restart of the listing, the SheIn spokesperson again denied it.
However, some analysts said that given that SheIn's founder Xu Yangtian has always been known for his low profile, it is likely to pursue the principle of "things are secretly accomplished, words are leaked", and the details will not be disclosed unless they reach the final step.
Have cattle lovers used SheIn? How do you see this internationally renowned women's cross-border e-commerce platform? If this were China's second-largest unicorn after ByteDance, would you invest? Welcome to the discussion below.