In the same way that TikTok has been repeatedly banned in the United States, as SHEIN becomes more and more popular, accusations against it are also loud.
Recently, the French parliament passed a proposal aimed at cracking down on low-cost ultra-fast fashion in order to reduce the attractiveness of low-cost fast fashion to consumers.
SHEIN、TEMU等平台首当其冲。
While it is popular all over the world, it is subject to various restrictions imposed by various countries for trade protection.
Chinese brands going overseas are on the cusp.
China's e-commerce is being bought by foreigners
Enter the hashtag #sheinhaul on TikTok and you will see one of the most fascinating activities for young foreigners at the moment - e-commerce big shopping.
In the video, they hold the delivery box and pour the products down, and then display them one by one.
Most of them are clothing, but also accessories, wigs, cosmetics, daily necessities...... One video can include more than a dozen sets of clothes to try on, just like playing the live-action version of Miracle Nuan Nuan.
The hashtag #sheinhaul alone has tens of billions of views, and countless people upload shopping and share here every day, and are also planted and ordered by others, just like a bizarre cyber store.
And these addictive products all come from a Chinese fast fashion e-commerce platform, SHEIN (Chinese name: Xiyin).
Although it is not well-known in China, but abroad, SHEIN has become the favorite of contemporary young people, just like the popularity of TikTok in Generation Z, as long as there are families with children, it is difficult not to hear of SHEIN's name.
I have to sigh that the times have changed, more than ten years ago, the hottest fast fashion brands in the business district were always Zara, H&M, and Uniqlo, and the words foundry, Putian, and Yiwu wholesale always sounded like a drop in price.
At that time, the discourse of fashion was still firmly in the hands of foreign brands, and even domestic consumers rarely had the mood to be proud of domestic products.
Unexpectedly, now it is the turn of foreigners to flock to Chinese e-commerce platforms to buy, buy, buy, buy, and the old fast fashion model has been broken, and SHEIN addiction is the general trend.
走出国门的不止shine.
According to the "2024 Mobile Market Report" released by the market analysis agency data.ai, SHEIN ranks first in the global shopping APP in 2023, while TEMU (Pinduoduo overseas version) and AliExpress (Alibaba's cross-border e-commerce) rank second and ninth respectively, while Amazon, which has been the industry leader for many years, ranks third.
This is a battle for Chinese e-commerce to go overseas.
In China, e-commerce competition has entered a white-hot state as early as a few years ago, and major platforms have volume logistics, volume low prices, and volume live broadcast......
Who would have thought that such an involution atmosphere would spill over overseas, and it would directly become a dimensionality reduction blow to foreign consumption patterns.
For example, SHEIN, on the basis of fast fashion's quarterly updates and iterations, has further advanced to "Ultra-Fast Fashion" (Ultra-Fast Fashion), which has greatly accelerated the overall production process, from design, boarding, to production and shelves, and the time has been shortened to one week.
A large number of new styles are updated frequently, which also makes it easier for SHEIN to produce explosive styles, and the new styles in a week can withstand the workload of fast fashion brands in the past year.
Such a liver-exploding model, coupled with a much cheaper price than traditional brands, has allowed SHEIN to attract a group of more sticky consumers.
In the past two years, SHEIN has gradually shifted from a pure online sales model to an offline one, opening pop-up stores around the world. From New York, Paris, Vancouver, to Tokyo, Barcelona, Kuala Lumpur...... Everywhere I went, there were long queues.
TEMU, on the other hand, has copied the model of "pulling people's heads" and "cutting a knife" to the United States.
On social media, many netizens spontaneously shared TEMU's registration invitation code, because every time a new user fills in the invitation code to register, the sharer can get a $20 reward, which is a familiar strategy of "pulling people's heads".
When buying goods, if you share the link with friends to "cut a knife", you can also get discounts, which can be as low as 0 yuan. Such a low-priced product is much more cost-effective than Amazon, and Americans who feel the magic of oriental e-commerce for the first time are obsessed with "cutting a knife".
In just three months, TEMU's monthly active users reached 13.4 million, a soaring speed that has made some established chains such as Walmart feel relevant.
It also took advantage of the victory, and for two consecutive years, it advertised the Super Bowl of 7 million US dollars per 30 seconds, and promised consumers in the advertisement: "Shop like a billionaire", making no secret of its ambition to occupy the European and American markets.
Today, SHEIN, TEMU, AliExpress, and TikTok shop are known as the "four tigers" of cross-border e-commerce, and they are hot overseas.
Behind this battle to go to sea is a new generation of rising Chinese entrepreneurs.
They take the complete industrial chain and business model that China has established in the past few decades to go abroad and go to the world.
SHEIN's popularity is not accidental
The huge counterattack of China's e-commerce seems to be sudden, but it is not surprising at all.
Take SHEIN as an example, its rise is not only the vision of founder Xu Yangtian, but also inseparable from China's booming clothing industry.
In 2008, the predecessor of SHEIN was established in Nanjing, Jiangsu, and the company's main business is to sell wedding dresses across borders. At that time, the tide of the financial crisis hit and the foreign middle class was declining, and Xu Yangtian saw a business opportunity in it—they needed cheaper clothes.
As a result, away from the domestic e-commerce dispute, SHEIN's target market at the beginning was overseas.
As a big manufacturing country, China has a large number of foundries in various fields such as clothing, shoes and hats, bags, digital home appliances, etc., but the profits of making processing workshops for others are low after all, the so-called world factory, but because at that time we had one of the few bargaining chips was labor.
Fortunately, the rich production experience has been preserved and used by the new generation of entrepreneurs.
There is the world's most complete clothing production supply chain, and there are countless choices of fabrics alone, which makes SHEIN come with its own buff from the start.
Small and medium-sized garment factories in the Pearl River Delta region
Source: Yicai Photo: Tan Weishan
In 2014, SHEIN moved to Guangzhou, the center of the garment industry, and the first thing to solve in the transformation of fast fashion was the supply chain problem.
Large fast-fashion brands like Zara have their own supply chains, and in order to test the waters, factories are usually asked to produce a few thousand pieces to the market first.
SHEIN takes a step further on this basis, testing the water with 100~200 pieces, adding if it sells well, and stopping it if it doesn't sell well. On the basis of the same production quantity, SHEIN was able to test more styles.
As a result, a lower cost test of the water, less overstock, and a higher explosion rate. SHEIN was able to defeat the old fast fashion, relying on such an agile and point-and-shoot supply chain.
This is not the victory of individual brands, but the accumulation of the domestic clothing industry.
A SHEIN cooperative factory located in Panyu, Guangzhou
Source: Yicai Photo: Tan Weishan
However, this huge advantage also constitutes the questioning of SHEIN by the outside world in the future.
In the same way that TikTok has been repeatedly banned in the United States, as SHEIN becomes more and more popular, accusations against it are also loud.
Recently, the French parliament passed a proposal aimed at cracking down on low-cost ultra-fast fashion, the main measures include a ban on fast-fashion textiles, fashion advertising, and an environmental tax on low-cost goods.
Starting next year, the bill plans to impose a 5-euro surcharge on fast fashion products on goods, which is expected to rise to 10 euros by 2030, capped at 50% of the list price of goods. SHEIN, TEMU AND OTHER PLATFORMS ARE THE FIRST TO BEAR THE BRUNT.
The public expressed dissatisfaction with SHEIN
People suspect that SHEIN's ultra-fast fashion model is also reinforcing the ravages of over-consumerism.
"With low prices, lenient return policies and free shipping, the purchase decision-making process for consumers is greatly simplified," one reviewer concluded.
The main reason why SHEIN is loved is its low price and many styles. But at the same time, low cost also means low cost, quality may not be passable, and fast replacement is easy to make people addicted to shopping.
Users buy in boxes and may throw them away after wearing them for a quarter, causing a lot of environmental pollution and waste of resources.
ins网友对#sheinhaul趋势的抵制
In addition, there are questions about the human rights of workers abroad.
The rapidly innovating industrial chain is like a double-edged sword, in order to create explosive models, factories need to work overtime at any time according to the needs of the platform. Behind the never-ending platform are ordinary workers whose rights and interests need to be protected.
Whether it is for environmental protection issues, human rights issues, or domestic trade protection considerations, although SHEIN has taken the lead in running well, it still needs to face many tests.
It is a global brand opportunity in China
It has arrived
But it is undeniable that these e-commerce platforms led by SHEIN and TEMU are menacing.
They are like catfish thrown into a fish tank, stirring up the old situation and making new waves.
As Nanfeng Window said in the article "These Four Chinese Post-80s Generations Begin to Take Over the Global Wallet":
"Consumption, algorithms and human nature, when many people are still studying whether they can be turned into a way to make money, there are four "post-80s" in China who have already kneaded them and used them freely. They are the "Four Masters of E-commerce Going Overseas", Zhang Yiming and TikTok, Huang Zheng and Temu, Xu Yangtian and SHEIN, Jiang Fan and Ali International. ”
The business of going overseas has been taken over to the hands of the new generation of entrepreneurs.
Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance
E-commerce is only a small part of contemporary Chinese brands going overseas, and many changes are quietly taking place in a broader industry and field.
Entertainment, a field in which we once had low self-esteem, is also moving towards the world. From "Honkai Impact 3" to "Genshin Impact", miHoYo's hurricane has swept the world, and this game company created by three post-80s generations is making a real cultural export.
As a generation that grew up playing foreign games, I could never have imagined that one day a game that would make the international game market crazy would come from China.
Unexpectedly, our domestic games can dominate the streets of Tokyo, from the two-dimensional holy land of Akihabara to the crowded Shibuya, everywhere you go is the overwhelming "Genshin Impact".
Wang Ning, the founder of Bubble Mart, has changed his life from scratch to worth 20 billion yuan in the past ten years, and such a life script is like the epitome of a new generation of entrepreneurs.
But becoming China's "godfather of trendy toys" is not the end, in 2023, his Bubble Mart empire is also expanding outward, opening stores in more than 20 countries such as Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, and France.
MINISO, which is connected all over the world by co-branding, has entered Times Square in New York, becoming the first new Chinese consumer brand to have a place in Times Square.
"If you don't go to sea, you will be out" has become a clarion call for all walks of life.
As if we were witnessing history, we are witnessing more and more Chinese brands appearing on the international stage.
It is BYD, which is determined to gnaw at the hard bone of Japan, to break out of its own territory in the market that is highly dependent on Japanese cars. Recently, I even invited the top Masami Nagasawa to be the spokesperson, and the advertising slogan was shown on TV: "Good job, BYD".
DJI, which is well known to drone enthusiasts, occupies more than 70% of the global market share by relying on the solid R&D capabilities of the founding team, and ranks first in the world in terms of technical level for 8 consecutive years.
As Peng Xianggui, general manager of Bawang Chaji's overseas business department, said in an interview with "Daily Economic News":
"A key factor behind the success of McDonald's, KFC and Starbucks that cannot be ignored is the cultural and commercial expansion brought about by the overflow of American national power in the last century.
In the coming decades, we firmly believe that China's national strength will continue to rise, and Chinese culture will gradually overflow. ”
We can see that from the Internet, games, electric vehicles, to entertainment, new consumption, such a "spillover" is happening.
This is another resonance of Chinese brands after traditional manufacturing industries such as Lenovo, Haier, and TCL opened up territory in the past.
Today, we are no longer the small row of "Made in China" at the bottom of the product, and we are no longer the origin hidden behind the signage of major department stores.
A new generation of entrepreneurs has set sail.
To write, it belongs to the global narrative of Chinese brands.
To greet the great voyage of our generation.
Resources:
LatePost - Revealing SheIn: The Rise of China's Most Mysterious 10 Billion Dollar Company
Nanfeng Window - These four Chinese post-80s generations began to take over the global wallet
National Business Daily - The "Age of Discovery" of Chinese Tea: Into Europe and the United States, into the South Seas, and into Africa
CBN-Why is SHEIN so fast?