nown brands with names such as G


Unknown brands with names such as GadgetVLot and Weania marketed their versions of the vest with jumbled strings of keywords: Autumn Preppy Style Streetwear Clothes, Plaid Cotton Knitted Vest Elastic V-neck Sweater Crop.. Capitalising on this shift are companies such as Shein: the most successful, well-known and well-funded online retailer of its kind. Celebrities including Bella Hadid had been photographed wearing shrunken, argyle-patterned styles, channelling classic 1990s movies like Clueless during a wave of millennium-era nostalgia. Seeing the pictures of me up on some random fast-fashion website Id never heard of before made me really upset, King said. This suggests that while some suppliers are offering the same products on multiple websites, apparel factories in China are also extremely adept at mimicking one another and adapting to the same trends. Rui Ma, founder of the investment consulting firm Tech Buzz China and contributing columnist for Rest of World, said that Alibaba could leverage its existing e-commerce expertise for the project, but its not clear how much it will be prioritised. Over the summer, when a $16 crisscross crop top from Amazon went viral, TikTok users began pointing out that it was available for only $13 on Shein and as low as $3.83 on AliExpress. He has sold clothing to consumers in Europe and North America directly since 2011, long before they learned to buy everything from mattresses to toothpaste on Instagram. he Shein model has firmly established a new norm. Through its manufacturing partners on the ground in China, Shein churns out and tests thousands of different items simultaneously. reason to sell: Been eyeing on another cardigan instead of this one.

Everything is optimised with big data, Lin said.

A vest that had started as a one-off vintage find was now available for anyone to buy, and often for an even lower price. Sheins clothes arent intended for Chinese customers, but are destined for export. The Shein model has firmly established a new norm. Replicas of the vest soon began popping up on countless other clothing sites and e-commerce marketplaces, including Amazon, AliExpress, Walmart and Shein. ByteDance, meanwhile, is hiring for dozens of jobs related to international e-commerce, and a crop of other Chinese firms are trying to claim their own slice of the market, too. While that can be the case, test buys conducted by Rest of World suggested that the truth is more complicated. But a month or so later, King received a message from one of her Instagram followers. The company confirmed that it starts by ordering a small batch of each garment, often a few dozen pieces, and then waits to see how buyers respond. (Shein declined to say whether the sales or valuation figures were accurate.). By connecting Chinas garment factories with western gen-Z customers, Shein ushered in a new era of ultra-fast shopping. Today, Lins clothing company, Xiamen Ouchengsheng, known as OCS, earns nearly $100m in annual overseas sales, he told Rest of World. While the items were often extremely similar, most werent carbon copies. After watching the companys rapid rise, major Chinese tech giants and newer startups are now racing to imitate it. Among the test buys were two sweater vests, both marketed using Julia Kings Depop photo: one from Amazon and one from AliExpress. It unites them with proprietary internal management software that collects near-instant feedback about which items are hits or misses, which allows Shein to order new inventory virtually on demand. In a blogpost announcing its investment, the firm described Cider as a marketplace of global factories that makes it possible for users to have more selection than Zara, at the price point of Forever 21, on-demand. As Chinese sellers joined the platform, western consumers were flooded with thousands of new brands selling basic goods, from kitchen supplies to electronics chargers, under unfamiliar names like Nertpow, Fretree and BSTOEM. The requirements are kind of high, he said. HUGE DISCOUNT The result is that more than 70% of products on Sheins website were listed less than three months ago, Malmsten found, compared with 53% at Zara and 40% at H&M. Discarded clothes in the Atacama desert, Chile. I just keep thinking: where does this end?. But a pair of yellow platform clogs from Shop-Pche a clothing brand with a website saying it was founded in New York were indistinguishable from their AliExpress equivalent. Is this really an exciting business model to celebrate? said Lu. In November, Shein appointed a global head of environmental and social governance, and the company told Rest of World, Plaid Cotton Knitted Vest Elastic V-neck Sweater Crop. Rising frustration with Amazon among Chinese sellers opened a window for Shein, which recruited many of them to supply its own platform. Its engineers.

Its impossible to go to work from nine to five. (The factory where they work doesnt supply for Shein, but does manufacture clothes for other foreign brands and for sale on AliExpress.). Equipped with English-language social media profiles, Amazon seller accounts, and access to nimble garment supply chains, they have fuelled the acceleration of trends and flooded closets everywhere with a wave of impossibly cheap clothes. It appears to be a mirror image of Shein, except with far fewer items for sale and a negligible number of reviews. This article was first published on Rest of World. Whereas Zara typically asks manufacturers to turn around minimum orders of 2,000 items in 30 days, Shein asks for as few as 100 products in as little as 10 days. Lin said he feels positive about what Shein has done for Chinese apparel sellers. In June, the company accounted for 28% of all fast-fashion sales in the US almost as much as H&M and Zara combined. Shein is now one of the worlds largest fashion companies, but little is known about its origins. (RM16 OFF) SHEIN plus heart button drop shoulder cardigan, Fast reply Sheins software-driven model allows it to remain at arms length from the labour force actually making the products on its platform.

here is a downside to Shein working with so many different factories at the same time: similar products are popping up all over the internet. But Shein isnt chasing catwalk trends rather, it often knocks off items seen on TikTok and Instagram, where hype cycles move significantly faster. Its the second-most popular fashion website in the world after Macys.com. all went well & smooth!! While constructed in the same way, the colours were different. pc arrived safely ^^ and thanks seller for giving another pc for free im so touch , great buyer to deal with. Its not clear how long ultra-fast-fashions environmental impact can be ignored. - Size 3XL but M-sized fit (oversized fashion) In May, the company became the most popular shopping app in the US on Android and iOS, and, the same month, topped the iOS rankings in more than 50 other countries. Taobao, a domestic Chinese e-commerce platform owned by Alibaba, helped pioneer interactive features such as custom product recommendations, and even built a miniature social network into its app. Several experts expressed concerns about the models long-term prospects. Since they dont seem exclusive or unique, consumers are wary about getting duped into paying more than they should. Shein just kind of blew Zara out of the water, she said. In September 2021, Rest of World ordered five clothing pieces from different shopping sites (Cider, Shein, Amazon, Halara and Shop-Pche), and what looked like imitations of the same products on AliExpress. They alerted her to the fact that an obscure, now defunct Chinese shopping site called Preguy was using her photo to sell its own cheap reproduction of the thrift-store vest. Because some suppliers such as Lin sell through multiple channels, consumers have complained on social media about seeing the same clothes appear on Shein, AliExpress, Amazon and stand-alone e-commerce sites, all at different prices. Over the past decade, thousands of Chinese clothing manufacturers have begun selling directly to international consumers online, bypassing retailers that traditionally sourced their products from the country. There were similar differences, subtle but noticeable, between two cherry-print cardigans from Shein and AliExpress. As with many fashion trends, it had been plucked from social media and dropped into the frenzied machine of the global e-commerce market. Since they dont seem exclusive or unique, consumers are wary about getting duped into paying more than they should. Many of the sellers werent entirely happy with Amazon either, which required them to abide by an ever-shifting set of policies, and to pay hefty fees for services such as warehousing and order fulfilment. It was founded in 2012 under the name SheInside, and reportedly began by selling wedding dresses abroad from its first headquarters in the Chinese city of Nanjing. The company says its founder, Chris Xu, was born in China, though a since-deleted press release described him as being from the US. Do we really need more companies like Shein? It was multiplying, almost of its own accord, in the factories of Chinas swelling ultra-fast-fashion industry. The results of that reporting reveal how Chinese apparel makers have evolved to cater to the desires of internet-native consumers and transformed their consumption habits in the process. In an environment where the competition can rapidly copy your products, a company is set apart by its marketing. Lin said Shein originally approached OCS because it was one of the top sellers of dresses on AliExpress, Alibabas e-commerce platform for markets outside China. But Shein does not have high design requirements. Shein realised that and decided to optimise it.. Receiving timely payments is a huge problem for factories in China, said Malmsten, the market analyst. (A spokesperson for Shein denied it ever sold wedding dresses, but declined to specify other details about its history.)

Like all the manufacturing industries in China, the number of employees working overtime is basically already saturated, said the worker, who asked to remain anonymous because they werent authorised to speak about their job publicly. Starting around 2013, the e-commerce giant began aggressively recruiting manufacturers in the country to sell cheap products abroad on its third-party marketplace. A big brand might need a very high-end designer, or a designer with top technology, and even then may only be able to produce 20 or 30 styles a month, said Lin. Lin Zhen is a Chinese clothing manufacturer and the head of the largest organisation of Amazon sellers in Fujian, one of Chinas main garment-producing provinces. - only worn ONCE to TRY

This year, about half came from Amazon, a third from the companys website, and the rest came through AliExpress or selling to other businesses, including Shein. He has sold clothing to consumers in Europe and North America directly since 2011, long before they learned to buy everything from mattresses to toothpaste on Instagram. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. If the cropped sweater vest is a hit, Shein orders more. Last year, Julia King, a 20-year-old art student and influencer from Texas, noticed that a particular kind of sweater vest was taking over the internet. Rest of World, a non-profit, tech-focused journalism outlet based in New York, spent six months investigating this new ecosystem, speaking with manufacturers, collecting social media and product data, making test buys and interviewing shoppers and industry experts in China and the US. Between July and December of 2021, it added anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 individual styles to its app each day, according to data collected in the course of Rest of Worlds investigations. Shein has poured significant funds into Google and Facebook advertising campaigns, influencer deals, and even its own social-media reality show co-hosted by Khlo Kardashian. Comparisons to fast-fashion giants such as H&M miss the point: its more like Amazon, operating a sprawling online marketplace that brings together about 6,000 Chinese clothing factories. The company has become a poster child for the energy-intensive fast-fashion sector, which has become notorious for making goods with hazardous chemicals that quickly end up in landfills and oceans. This cost is very high, said Du Tianchi, the founder of an apparel company in Chinas Jiangsu province that sells on Amazon and AliExpress. A spokesperson for Shein declined to say much about the software, but said the company invests heavily in training, technology and IT support to help our suppliers become more efficient and profitable. thank u so much for buying from me <3 stay safe, Mudah.mySdn Bhd [200701024583 (782603-V)]a Carousell Group company. Shein brought that style [of shopping] to the west, and it really works with Gen Z, she said. That pressure to produce clothes more rapidly ends up falling on Chinese garment workers, who sew products for Shein during long shifts in poorly regulated workshops, according to reporting by the Chinese media site Sixth Tone. But new and well resourced rivals are watching, and following close behind. Sheins fast growth has brought with it a series of controversies. In October, Alibaba which pioneered the Taobao-style of shopping that Shein originally learned from launched its own shopping site for North America and Europe, called AllyLikes. Eventually, retailers began using their own product photos, but that didnt make the experience any less surreal. Shein eventually expanded to offer apparel for women, men and children, as well as everything from home goods to pet supplies, but its core business remains selling clothes targeted at women in their teens and 20s a generation who grew up exploring their personal style on platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. The company has become a poster child for the energy-intensive fast-fashion sector, which has become notorious for making goods with hazardous chemicals that quickly end up in landfills and oceans. Amazon whet the palate for online shopping, taught [Americans] how to shop online, and created the habit, said Allison Malmsten, a China market analyst at Daxue Consulting in Hong Kong. But Shein didnt just try to compete with Amazon: it joined it. Get the Guardians award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morning, Fashion's dirty secret: how sexual assault took hold in jeans factories, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty Images, How Shein beat Amazon at its own game and reinvented fast fashion, ast year, Julia King, a 20-year-old art student and, hein is now one of the worlds largest fashion companies, but little is known about its origins. -on hand Its all there., The software contains simple design specifications that help manufacturers execute new orders quickly. Fast fashion is well known for its very frequent replenishment of products, said Sheng Lu, a professor at the University of Delaware studying the global textile and apparel industry. It calls the system a large-scale automated test and re-order (LATR) model. Online shopping in the country has evolved into a form of entertainment, featuring livestreamers, flash sales and enticing pop-ups that compel consumers to scroll through the newest products. The same month, a report circulated that Shein was worth more than $47bn, making it one of the tech industrys most valuable private startups. In emailed comments, Shein said the company takes all supply chain matters seriously and is fully committed to upholding high labour standards. Theyve built a lot of loyalty from their suppliers, so they can have more urgency on their orders, she said. Amazons activity in China may have inadvertently contributed to Sheins success. Amazon gave these factories the enormous opportunity to cut out western middlemen and begin learning about the tastes of American shoppers. Receive your order as listed or get your money back. Click Buy to place an order. - DM for details (eg: close-up photo) The duplicated products are often brandless basics such as T-shirts, or knockoffs of items from independent labels and major fashion houses. Customer complaints about counterfeits and dangerous products from China were putting a dent in the tech companys reputation, and this September, Amazon banned hundreds of Chinese merchants for allegedly using fake product reviews.