Cross-border e-commerce has entered the "flowering period": 300+ urban industrial belts have joined hands with SHEIN expedition

Introduction: Some factory production lines have been transformed by SHEIN lean production, and the loss of raw materials has been reduced by 25%.

Author: Dai Runze

Editor: Lin Juemin

Expedition with SHEIN, flowers in full bloom.

Relevant data show that after more than ten years of development, the rise of cross-border unicorn SHEIN has driven more than one million people in the industrial chain to work. Under the platform, SHEIN radiates its own advantages to the whole industry, and continues to help domestic manufacturing products and sellers to communicate globally.

SHEIN has expanded and deepened its platform model on the basis of its own brand, and has also launched the "500 City Industrial Belt Plan", which has covered more than 300 urban industrial belts across the country since 2021, attracting tens of thousands of industrial belt sellers to settle in and go to sea.

Recently, SHEIN has launched two new seller empowerment programs, including the "90-day growth training camp for new merchants" and the "excellent business support plan". Specifically, the plan is intended to provide sellers with a set of meticulous, systematic and transparent solutions to solve some of the problems of the industry to go global.

From a novice to a big seller, Jinjiang's ten-year-old shoe factory has been revitalized in SHEIN

There is no shortage of high-quality industrial belts and factories in China.

Jinjiang, Fujian Province, produces sports shoes for one-sixth of the world's population, with an annual output of more than 1 billion pairs. Jinjiang has also stepped out of national well-known brands such as Anta, Xtep, and 361. However, more small and medium-sized and family-owned enterprises and factories are facing a real problem: more and more customers, thinner and thinner margins, and business is becoming more and more difficult every year.

Factories usually have to cross thousands of mountains and rivers to go to sea on their own, but entering the SHEIN platform to go overseas can shorten the process to a few months.

Li Rui and Wang Li have established a shoe factory for more than 10 years, with 300-500 employees. Seeing more and more peers around them pouring into the cross-border e-commerce track, the two also wanted to try, but they had no experience.

In May 2023, with the recommendation of a friend, the couple decided to settle in SHEIN. After only half a year, the two have set the target positioning for the whole year of 2024 to sell 10,000 orders per day.

Frankly, Li Rui and Wang Li think that their disadvantage is that they have a zero foundation, and they don't understand packaging, operation, and pricing. Just when the two were at a loss, SHEIN's investment manager proposed that the factory has innate price and response speed advantages, and can try the "generation operation" model launched by the SHEIN platform.

Li Rui and Wang Li learned more about the service and found that the "nanny-style" agency operation service includes a beginner's guide, Q&A, official community, etc., as well as courses from store opening preparation to marketing guidance. And seeing the cold start stage, entry and promotion are free, Li Rui and Wang Li only need to focus on developing products and researching popular models.

Delve into the core of the industry and find that there is an aesthetic gap between the domestic and foreign markets for the trend, in fact, in some styles, it is a more cutting-edge understanding in China.

For example, a hip-hop style sneaker with an irregular texture developed by Li Rui became a hit this season. However, differentiation is coming, in terms of overseas markets, the cost of the main color can increase the compound color, but similar styles are not easy to be greedy overseas, at most two or three new models, otherwise it may lead to a decline in sales.

At present, Li Rui and Wang Li plan to continue to expand to board shoes, hiking shoes, casual shoes, etc., and strive for a wider track.

Relying on SHEIN's operation services, there are many cases of becoming a big seller from a 0 basis. Shandong boss Qin Ligang is also one of them, from an apprentice with a monthly salary of 800 hardware abrasives, and now he is a boss with an annual income of 40 million yuan.

12 years ago, as an apprentice, Qin Ligang dreamed of opening a store with a monthly income of more than 10,000 yuan, and later did cross-border e-commerce together at the invitation of a friend. At the beginning of the business, it can be said that one shot changed one place, until the global plastic restriction order and the restriction of plastic products, he found that there was a large market for stainless steel straws, so he earned the first pot of gold.

Going around in 2023, Qin Ligang originally had a wait-and-see attitude towards SHEIN, how to sell tableware if he was good at selling clothing, until he saw a large number of eye-popping backstage orders in his friend's lamp store, and he decided to give it a try.

However, in the first year of settling in, Qin Ligang had a great sense of frustration in his heart. The monthly sales are only 200,000 yuan, and when he sees his peers becoming sellers with an annual income of more than 10 million, he is anxious but can't help it. Qin Ligang contacted the investment manager of SHEIN and mentioned that he wanted to expand the scale. The investment manager drove to his factory that afternoon. The two discussed the characteristics of the SHEIN platform, overseas market trends, as well as the production rhythm and management details of off-peak seasons.

By optimizing the production line, Qin Ligang's products, in addition to the basic models with different colors, also add "disco balls" to the straws, and make leaves, swans and other shapes on the knife and fork. With the improvement of product richness and quality control, the traffic and sales of Qin Ligang's store are getting better and better. At present, the plant has expanded to 10,000 square meters, with more than 200 workers.

In 2024, Qin Ligang set a target sales of 80 million.

There are many examples of how a novice can grow quickly when he goes to sea. For many companies with little experience in going overseas, they are only responsible for R&D products in the early stage, and handing over the other parts to SHEIN seems to be half of the success.

Focusing on fashion attributes, more independent brands are born through platform drive

If the product company wants to deepen the industry, the brand is the route that must be taken. And many categories with fashion attributes can quickly increase their volume with the potential energy of SHEIN's platform.

Different from pure production, making an original brand requires more trial and error costs and repeated polishing. Chang Ruoran has been in the luggage business for many years, and since the cross-border e-commerce track has become popular, she hopes to show her brand's design concept to fashion girls all over the world through the SHEIN platform.

When she put forward the brand idea, SHEIN's employees suggested to her a lot of popular trends in overseas markets, and often began to design new models in a targeted manner, initially producing only 50 pieces per model to test the waters.

With more than 10 years of cross-border experience, overseas users on the SHEIN platform have extremely high stickiness and a high repurchase rate. Chang Ruoran found that her design still needed to be polished and corrected, and after communicating with SHEIN's staff, she readjusted the product line, 50% of which are daily models, 20% are personalized models, and 30% are customized designs according to user needs. Chang Ruoran also redesigned the packaging, tags, labels, etc., and invited different photographers and models to shoot the products. These practices have laid the foundation for the development of her brand, and she has gradually accumulated her own sticky fans on SHEIN.

In addition to bags, there are also great opportunities for fashionable shoes and boots.

Every year in the spring and summer, the United States hosts a variety of music festivals. At this time, most of the high-tube, shiny, laser, rhinestone, tassel and other combat boots under the feet of fashionable people come from the Chinese manufacturing industrial belt in Guangdong, Zhejiang and Fujian.

Zhou Siqi's factory in Huizhou, Guangdong Province, has been supplying offline stalls in Guangzhou for many years, and produces according to customer needs.

In the second half of 2023, Zhou Siqi found that there were more and more factories cooperating with the stalls, and the original order volume gradually decreased. When I see my own factory, I have no mature design ability, I don't understand the market, and I don't have an advantage in my peers. Zhou Siqi decided to settle in SHEIN and shifted from the B-end to the C-end.

After a few months of cooperation, Zhou Siqi's store has achieved monthly sales of nearly one million yuan. In 2024, Zhou Siqi decided to specialize in overseas markets, and the current orders from SHEIN are enough to absorb the production capacity of his three factories and more than 100 workers.

During the period of entering SHEIN, Zhou Siqi and his team improved their product development capabilities, learned to keep up with popular models, and led the team to learn and pay more attention to the systematic building of the brand, including beginning to pay more attention to the visual presentation of its brand and products.

In summary, SHEIN's cross-border business capabilities accumulated over the years have provided many solutions for sellers in the industrial belt who want to go overseas, helping them present different styles and types of products from multiple dimensions such as positioning, shaping, and marketing, so as to meet the personalized needs of hundreds of millions of overseas users. In fact, overseas consumers are also willing to use SHEIN as an online salon store, shopping and buying at the same time.

The benign environment of long-termism and fair competition allows the industry to go overseas with high quality

Many sellers do cross-border e-commerce to pursue stability - stable products, stable returns, plus worry-free operation.

Different from the platform algorithm model that only looks at low prices, the SHEIN platform focuses on cost-effective products, that is, the comprehensive score at the same price is the best. This relatively fair system avoids falling into the price war orientation of absolute low prices, so that the quality sellers and characteristic sellers in the track can also grow benignly in a moderate way, which is conducive to the high-quality export of Chinese products.

The husband and wife Li Rui and Wang Li mentioned above said frankly that SHEIN has strict quality control, such as the quality control of sports shoes is mainly divided into three aspects, one is a customized latex pad, which can allow users to have a more comfortable foot feeling, and there are also things such as glue and stains that need to be investigated, as well as the need to customize anti-fouling shoe boxes. Due to the improvement of product quality by Li Rui and Wang Li, the husband and wife have received positive feedback from consumers and the return of the order volume and daily increase, which also makes the two full of confidence in the achievement of "10,000 orders per day".

Qin Ligang said that SHEIN solves the problems of logistics and operation, so he can pay attention to the timeliness of production and product quality, which is complementary to each other. "Our products are distinctive, the quality is guaranteed, and the store will naturally have exposure and sales if it is highly praised. This also brings a lot of confidence to our factory to continuously develop new products. He also revealed that regarding the price war, which is a headache for sellers in the industry, the traffic design of other platforms is that when niche products suddenly become explosive, many merchants will add price wars and bidding, and SHEIN's algorithm logic is that when the system judges that the seller's performance is stable and the market feedback is good, the traffic will be inclined to such merchants, and the price is only one of the reference criteria.

This is also a return to the original collaboration logic between the SHEIN platform and sellers: a win-win situation can lead to a long-distance run.

Write at the end:

In the past two years, behind the empowerment of industrial belt sellers to share the dividends of the times, SHEIN has also continued to improve the integrated smart infrastructure suitable for cross-border e-commerce, including investing more than 15 billion yuan to lay out an integrated smart supply chain base integrating warehousing, logistics and other functions in China. SHEIN continues to increase its investment in China, which makes the ecological synergy and integration advantages of the entire supply chain continue to improve.

SHEIN focuses on the use of technological innovation, training support and other ways to carry out diversified empowerment of partners. SHEIN's flexible production and small order fast reaction methodology is to continue to carry out lean innovation in the innovation research center established by SHEIN and continuously empower its upstream and downstream partners.

Through SHEIN's efforts, up to now, SHEIN has driven the employment of more than one million people in the industrial chain, and driven 300+ industries to go to sea.

As a bridge, SHEIN not only helps more outstanding small and medium-sized enterprises, brands and products to go to the world, enhance the image of China's "intelligent" manufacturing, SHEIN's supply chain integration and help industrial upgrading, but also feeds back the talent development and training of the manufacturing industry, driving a large number of upstream and downstream industries such as domestic trade exports, manufacturing, warehousing and logistics, transportation, as well as the employment development of millions of people.

The two-way rush with the industrial belt also gave SHEIN positive feedback. According to data.ai data from market analysis agency, SHEIN has won the first place in the 2023 global shopping app download list. In the list of global shopping apps released by overseas authoritative PYMNTS in February, SHEIN has been on the top 1 of the list for seven consecutive months.

Helping domestic industries to go overseas to improve quality and upgrade, and embark on a high-quality development path - this is the meaning of the "SHEIN plan" for industries to go to sea.

Leifeng Net, Leifeng Net