The brand advertised on daytime television shows in the US, and fashion influencers showcased Shein products and hauls alongside other retailers, like Fashion Nova and Zaful. It was, however, the retailer’s early use of TikTok and ability to market viral products that skyrocketed Shein’s popularity. Throughout the early 2010s, Shein launched overseas sites in Spain, France, Russia, Italy, and Germany, and began selling cosmetics, shoes, bags, and jewelry, in addition to womenswear. According to a translated article from the Chinese tech site LatePost, by 2016, Xu had assembled a team of 800 designers and prototypers, dedicated to rapidly producing Shein-branded clothes. Shein also began honing its supply chain, cutting out suppliers that produced “mediocre-quality products or images,” according to a 2016 press release.
- The production of polyester textiles alone emitted about 706 billion kilograms of greenhouse gases in 2015, and hundreds of gallons of water go into making a single cotton garment.
- CBC reported that lead exposure can damage the heart, brain, kidneys, and reproductive system; and contamination can be especially harmful to infants and children, making the levels found in the children’s jacket that much more dangerous.
- A flurry of banners advertise steep sales and discounts on shipping — up to 90 per cent off for an extended May long weekend sale, for instance.
- Shein brings the hottest contemporary styles to customers by offering affordably priced apparel, accessories, and shoes.
This constant cycle of buying has raised sustainability questions, as have the ethics around its rock-bottom prices. Xu created a close relationship with his suppliers from the start, according to Schmidt, by doing something that can sometimes seem radical in this part of the world – paying them currency trading strategies on time. “They know that it’s probably not the best supply chain setup, but they also know that they only have so much money available to look good and feel good,” Winder says. The sheer volume of clothes produced by Shein’s rapid supply and demand cycles also fuels environmental concerns.
A few item categories are not eligible for returns, including bodysuits, lingerie, underwear, jewelry, cosmetics, pet products, and customized products. If an item isn’t eligible for returns, it’ll be marked on the product page (or specified by Shein’s customer service representative if you decide to contact them directly). As mentioned, the quality at Shein can be questionable at best, with many items hardly making it past a wash or two. That means you should probably skip the store for staple clothing you’ll want to wear again and again, like jeans, jackets, and work-appropriate dresses—they likely won’t last as long as you want them to. The site has a large inventory of cheap clothes across multiple categories, meaning shoppers can stock up on everything from winter attire to tropical vacation wear to Halloween costumes all in one place.
Before you consider adding another fitted mini skirt or crop top to your Shein cart, you should know a few things. As one of the biggest fast fashion companies on the planet, Chinese retailer Shein (pronounced she-in) holds its loyal community https://g-markets.net/ of Gen Z customers close through its domination of social media platforms. According to a report compiled by Money.co.uk, Shein has taken over giants like Nike and Adidas as the most-Googled clothing brand, and Zara and Macy’s in online sales.
Shein is one of many fast-fashion retailers nowadays, but the company is unique in the sheer number of new styles it uploads to its website each and every single day. According to a 2022 Wired report, this number is a shocking 6,000, whereas other fast-fashion brands like Gap, H&M, and Zara typically offer somewhere between 30 to 100 new styles within the same time period. Clearly, this model works for Shein, because, according to Earnest Research, the retailer now tops every fast-fashion brand in market shares. Despite it all, perhaps the bigger controversy regarding Shein is the treatment of its workers, who toil away in Chinese factories in unfit conditions. A lengthy investigation by Wired first chronicled how both laborers and consumers suffered from the production of its clothes, while a documentary by the U.K.’s Channel 4 found that Shein employees were working 75-hour shifts with very little time off. Then, Swiss watchdog Public Eye released another detailed report in November which accused Shein of violating Chinese labor laws.
Red Flags When Shopping With Rakuten
There are concerns about item quality, eco-friendliness, and the labor conditions that the company upholds—but shoppers and their wallets will likely remain safe if they place an order on Shein. On August 10, its added a statement on its website about modern slavery, which referenced its requirement for suppliers and manufacturers to comply with all applicable laws, including child-labor laws. Such videos are widely shared on social media and illustrate how many items you can buy for $100, for example.
‘Worst of the worst’: why is fast fashion retailer Shein launching a reality show?
In what author and Chinese technology expert Matthew Brennan has branded “real-time retail”, smaller companies along its supply chain are fed information from its in-house tools on what’s trending or how well certain products are performing. According to Whinston, Shein’s 6,000 new styles per day feature is more sustainable than it seems. In a conference, he claimed that these new styles are created in small batches, which allows the company to figure out which of its styles are most popular before they commit to manufacturing large batches of clothing.
Shein’s business model, like that of its fast forebears, abides by the tenet that more is better, that excess can be made accessible through mysteriously low prices, with little care for environmental costs or transparency about its labor force. It wasn’t until 2014 that Shein began to acquire its own supply chain system, transforming itself into a fully integrated retailer. By 2015, the company had shortened its domain name to Shein, a move that reportedly made the brand more memorable and searchable for shoppers. Yet, prior to these major changes in 2014, the company had a decent online presence and enough customers to expand its operations.
Why is Shein clothing so cheap?
The fast fashion business model was pioneered in the 1990s by the founder of Inditex, the parent company of Spanish retailer Zara. Zara notoriously abandoned the concept of fashion seasons for a year-long cycle of production, which introduced customers to novel items every few weeks. Its success prompted other Western designers and retailers — H&M and Forever 21, to name two — to follow its lead into the next decade. Retailers migrated most of their manufacturing process overseas to countries with lax labor laws, where wages can be low and working overtime (without additional pay) is common.
But its packages often take at least a week to arrive in markets such as the UK and US, unlike competitors such as Boohoo, Asos or OhPolly which offer next-day delivery. The company ships orders to its customers directly, mostly from one 16 million square foot warehouse on the outskirts of Guangzhou. While the private company doesn’t disclose financial figures, data provider CB Insights estimates that sales topped 63.5bn yuan (£7.4bn/$10bn) in 2020. The popularity of the Chinese fast fashion firm has exploded during the pandemic. As of this writing, H&M’s market cap was about $20.5 billion and Zara’s parent company, Inditex, had a market cap of about $114 billion. “To (assume) that all of Gen Z think in the same way is a mistake,” says Jodi Muter-Hamilton, founder of the sustainability and communications consultancy Other day.
Shein has been accused of cultural insensitivity and cultural appropriation
Despite reports that Shein’s clothing is disposable, 62% of respondents reported wearing Shein items 10 or more times and 33% said they get 30 or more wears out of Shein clothes. Pronounced “she-in,” the fast fashion Chinese behemoth was founded in the city of Nanjing in 2008 by Chris Xu, a U.S.-born entrepreneur and search engine optimization specialist. Over the years, Shein went from being a low-cost Chinese apparel merchant to a global, online-only fashion juggernaut, climbing in sales from $10 billion in 2020 (according to Bloomberg) to a whopping $100 billion in 2022. Shein drops up to 10,000 new items on its website daily, for all sizes and tastes. The retailer doesn’t make these clothes in large amounts; it produces a few hundred and orders more only if enough people start to buy them. Yet Shein’s emergence as a fast fashion juggernaut can’t solely be attributed to the price of its clothing or its ubiquitous internet presence.
In May 2022, Emma Carrasco attended the Lovers & Friends festival in Las Vegas. She bought a new pair of shoes — Shein’s Minamilist Platform Chunky Pumps — for the occasion, but they didn’t end up lasting long. Carrasco told Insider that her heel melted and “deflated,” as is shown in her viral video of the experience. “I’m shocked when [people] say they bought shoes from Shein like bby with that quality y’all are brave lol,” one person tweeted. While the fashion industry — most specifically, the fast-fashion industry — isn’t the sole cause of the world’s environmental issues, it is a major factor. If its growth continues as it’s projected to, the Ellen MacArther Foundation predicts that its environmental impacts will be drastic.
Its business model is built around overconsumption. The more customers spend, the more exclusive promotions they are awarded.
It was an early adopter of social media marketing, partnering with fashion bloggers for giveaways and promoting products on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest as far back as 2012. Similarly, Reuters reported that the Modern Slavery Act of 2015 requires companies who do business in the United Kingdom and bring in more than 36 million pounds of items a year to state the actions they are taking to work against forced labor. Reuters found that, in the past, Shein falsely claimed that the conditions in their factories were certified by international labor standards. As of this writing, the fashion brand’s website simply states that it “[supports] the ten principles [of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals] focused on human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption.” Toward the tail end of the 2010s, “ultra-fast” fashion brands — Asos, Boohoo, Fashion Nova, and now Shein — emerged as viable competitors to the dominant fashion empires of the previous decade. With Shein’s prices being so low, it’s probably not surprising that the quality of its products is generally not the best.
But he notes that rumblings of a recession on the horizon mean consumers are caught between turning away from Shein’s “dark sides” and staying on budget. Leconte says that the idea of ordering clothes and wearing them for a single event before getting rid of them has become the “norm” for many today. She tells Global News that Shein’s legal firepower is too much for independent designers to realistically go up against.
This Shein clothing review highlights their bestselling women’s and men’s apparel, and pieces in the Shein Curve collection. Determining your size in any piece of online clothing is tricky business, and that’s especially true at Shein, where standards vary. Most shoppers suggest utilizing the size guide on each product rather than purchasing your usual size.