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Shein vs Zara : A fast Fashion Case Study

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Once, a few people succinctly described fashion as an imitation of an instance that satisfies all the demands for social variation. When a piece of clothing becomes popular, there will be a much higher demand for its cheaper version. 

People these days are wondering who's the fastest in the fashion realm. Currently, Zara and Shein have been the two most well-known fashion stores that dominate the fashion world. 

Around  6.42 million  individuals use the Shein app, and the company delivers its products to over  220 nations  across the globe. On the other hand, Zara's brand value was around  $13.2 billion in 2021 . 

To have a clear idea of these two fashion firms and how they are going head-to-head against each other in the market, please take a look at the information provided in this article. 

Shein vs. Zara: Who Exactly Are They?

People who spend a lot of time scrolling through their Facebook or Instagram accounts will surely come across these two brands.

Many individuals are pretty familiar with these two brands on the online platform as they offer some of the best quality clothing and accessories. Buyers who are within their target demographic and within their 20s will surely come across their content regularly.

But it's not possible to explore the Zara and  Shein clothing company  without proper knowledge and understanding of who they are and what they provide to the customers. Given below is a small introduction about these two fast-fashion firms.

Shein: Getting To Know The Company

Shein is a popular and well-known online fashion store. Established in 2008, the company has its headquarters in Nanjing City, China. When it comes to unique clothing items and apparel, this online fashion platform has a lot to offer. 

The company has a lot of apparel in various styles, sizes, and for diverse occasions. Buyers will also come across their collection for all the plus-size individuals as Shein has taken plus-size fashion to a whole new level. 

Shein also offers stylish apparel and fashion wear for women. What's more? The company also offers clothing for kids and has a section for jewelry, gadgets, and beauty products. 

Zara: Brief Introduction

Zara is one of the best and leading international fashion companies globally. The company has dominated over  93 markets ,  and this particular fashion brand has more than 2000 stores across the world. 

Popular among the worldwide urban communities, Zara generates over 18 billion Euros annually.

When it comes to the fashion kingdom, this brand is successful and offers great designs to all its customers.

What Made Shein To Become A Fast Fashion Firm?

A few reasons behind Shein's transformation into a fast-fashion firm are:   

1. Bringing Out Newness

The loyal customer base of Shein includes individuals within the age group of 16 to 30 years. But to captivate the attention of online shoppers, they need to update their inventory now and then. In 2020, the company launched more than 150,000 products and launched around 4000 womenswear each week. Individuals will come across hundreds and thousands of items on their site launched every week. 

2. Low-Budget Clothes

Even though they offer some of the best styles in fast fashion, the price for all their clothing is pretty reasonable. Depending on their budgets, buyers will have plenty of choices, which is one reason why this brand gained so much popularity.

How Did Zara Transform Into A Fast Fashion Brand?

Zara is a fast-fashion company, and there are several reasons behind it. These reasons are: 

1. The Product Line-Up 

The company keeps its focus on manufacturing fashion-sensitive items, and the designs on products constantly change according to their consumer's preferences. Zara launches hundreds of clothing products each year, and instead of relying on the designers, they concentrate on the catwalk trends and aim to make something similar. 

2. Fast Supply 

When it comes to the Shein vs. Zara debate, it's pretty clear who's ruling the quick supply category. Zara carries a lot more physical presence when compared with Shein, and Zara dispatches its creations twice every week to all the stores located across the globe. Customers and fashion enthusiasts can get the products easily and create their own style-story.  

So, fashion brands, outlets, and designers need to keep pace with the latest trends and create something that will be at par with these two mammoth brands. 

What Can Fashinza Do?

In spite of the ongoing debate, there’s no denying the fact that both Shein and Zara have made a mark for themselves in the fashion arena. Quite naturally, that will inspire quite a few other labels to wear their creative hats and come up with exclusive products. They would require the best materials, and Fashinza, a popular and reputed B2B clothing manufacturing platform, can take care of that. This particular site is ideal for all those fashion professionals and brands who wish to source the best materials for their creative work. 

Fashinza has been dominating the market with its outstanding services, and they take the responsibility to look after the entire manufacturing process. Quite naturally, fashion label owners, designers, and fashion store owners will have the opportunity to get great materials from Fashinza, which will help them go ahead with their creation. 

Their partnered brands only have to place the order, and they will take care of the rest. They have aided many companies and even fashion experts and aim to do so in the upcoming future. 

Choose Fashinza! 

All fashion brands and professionals can now place orders for their manufacturing supplies at Fashinza. The company offers outstanding services, and they also have a customer support team, which is available 24x7. Interested fashion professionals, designers, and store owners can contact them through their mail address or contact number available on their official site. 

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How Shein outgrew Zara and H&M and pioneered fast-fashion 2.0

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How Zara Is Beating Shein

• Daniel-Yaw Miller

Not so long ago, Chinese e-commerce giant Shein burst onto the fast fashion scene, threatening to unseat the likes of Zara and H&M as leaders of the category. The meteoric rise of Temu too has disrupted the industry, wooing consumers with jaw-dropping low prices — such as a pair of $0 fur boots that made the rounds on fashion media this week — at a time when spending is tight.

There have been casualties. Digital retailers like Asos and Boohoo Group lost significant share, while H&M is in a protracted slump as it struggles to find the right positioning in the market.

But two fast-fashion players have been largely immune, if not emboldened, by the new competition.

This week, Zara-owner Inditex reported record sales of €35.9 billion ($39 billion) in 2023, up 10.4 percent year-on-year. Fellow Spanish retailer Mango, a fast fashion chain similar to Zara in price and trendy assortment, also hit an all-time high with sales of €3.1 billion, a 19 percent annual lift.

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Both retailers have been able to stand their ground against Shein and Temu by doing the seemingly impossible: creating an elevated consumer experience around fast fashion. In practice, that means selling higher-quality clothes (relative to Shein, at least) at higher prices, and investing in physical retail, where Shein and Temu have minimal presence.

Zara in particular has undergone a concerted push upmarket. It sells $699 leather coats and $439 leather blazers, and shoppers can find cashmere sweaters and evening dresses among the usual assortment of cheap, trendy staples. In its marketing, Zara also follows in the footsteps of luxury brands, working with photographer Steven Meisel on campaign imagery, and stylist Karl Templer for its biannual premium capsules, dubbed Studio Collections. The result is a sophisticated customer interface that starkly contrasts with the chaotic, graphic-heavy online shops of Shein and Temu.

Collaborations with London-based ready-to-wear label Studio Nicholson, which yielded two collections of elevated men’s and womenswear basics, also signalled Zara’s status as a bona fide player in fashion rather than just a fast fashion retailer.

“We see [Inditex’] proposition of good quality, good value fashion resonating more strongly even in its better penetrated region,” Jefferies analyst James Grzinic wrote in a note published Wednesday. “This at a time of growing discount propositions with poorer quality garments, and a luxury end becoming less affordable to the masses.”

The far smaller Mango has taken this cue from Zara’s playbook, investing in its own creative collaborators to differentiate its products. Last summer, it released a womenswear collaboration with Los Angeles-based label Simon Miller, followed by a menswear collection designed by heritage Italian tailoring company Boglioli in the fall.

Mango’s double-digit growth is largely driven by retail expansion. While the retailer is well known in Europe, the US market has become a key growth region. Mango opened a flagship store on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 2022, where its neighbours include Armani and the celebrity hangout The Polo Bar. Around 20 of the 130 stores Mango opened last year were in the US — currently its fifth largest market — while the brand plans to add a further 30 locations in the country by 2026. It will open 500 more stores worldwide in the next two years, taking its store count to 2,700.

The expansion is expected to help the retailer generate annual sales of €4 billion and double its net profit by 2026 as a result of the expansion, CEO Toni Ruiz told investors this week.

Meanwhile, Inditex is also investing in US retail, with Zara flagships planned for Los Angeles and Las Vegas set to open later this year.

Both retailers have invested heavily in the look and feel of brick-and-mortar locations, which has helped differentiate them from rivals, online and off. Zara in fact announced it would close 1,200 locations in 2020, or about a quarter of its footprint, but sales continued to grow because remaining stores were renovated and as a result have become more productive. Eighty of Mango’s existing stores were refurbished last year, according to the brand’s financial report.

Zara is testing a new store layout that’s bigger and more immersive in brand visuals; last year, it opened a 30,000-square-foot store in Rotterdam — just smaller than the average supermarket. CEO Óscar García Maceiras said the retailer will double the size of its flagship stores in Paris and Miami in 2024.

For now, retail is an outsize advantage against the Chinese e-commerce behemoths, which have yet to explore physical stores beyond Shein’s partnership with Forever 21 .

The sustained growth for Inditex and Mango, despite brutal conditions across the retail sector, is a case study for other mass retailers struggling to engage their customers and losing market share to the likes of Shein and Temu.

By investing in the quality of products, retail experience and of creative identity, these two Spanish fast fashion retailers demonstrate the power of differentiation in the face of competition.

THE NEWS IN BRIEF

FASHION, BUSINESS AND THE ECONOMY

Federer-backed On disappoints with sales forecast and results . Shares tumbled as much as 19 percent in early New York trading, the most since On’s initial public offering in September 2021. On expects sales to grow at least 30 percent this year to 2.25 billion Swiss francs ($2.56 billion) or more.

Mango’s US expansion helps sales top $3 billion in 2023 . Sales jumped 19 percent last year through a focus on party wear and fashion pieces for upmarket shoppers who are less sensitive to higher prices. Mango’s net profit rose to €172.1 million, from €81 million in 2022.

Inditex gets spring season boost from upmarket fashion . Sales jumped 11 percent at constant currencies in the first half of its spring season. Shares rose as much as 4.4 percent to a record high in early Wednesday trade after it reported the figures for Feb. 1 to March 11.

Arkhouse says in talks with Macys for due diligence amid push for higher bid. Investment firms Arkhouse and Brigade have provided a due diligence request list to Macy’s, which includes customary items that it will need to provide to confirm or potentially increase their take-private offer, Arkhouse disclosed in the filing.

Brunello Cucinelli posts 39 percent jump in 2023 EBIT and confirms guidance . The brand posted 2023 earnings before interest and taxes of €187.4 million ($204.1 million). Sales rose 23.9 percent last year, preliminary data showed in January, defying a sector slowdown thanks to a focus on the industry’s high end.

French lawmakers approve bill to apply penalties on fast fashion. The bill calls for gradually increasing penalties of up to €10 per individual item of clothing by 2030. It also calls for a ban on advertising for ultra-fast fashion products.

Zalando jumps as online fashion retailer sees return to growth . The stock jumped as much as 18.5 percent after the company also said late Tuesday it would buy back up to €100 million ($109 million) of shares, starting from March 13. The company expects a gross merchandise value of between 0 and 5 percent this year, after a 1.1 percent decline to €14.6 billion in 2023.

Dick’s Sporting Goods rises as sales surpass expectations . Comparable-store sales rose 2.8 percent for the quarter ended Feb. 3, much higher than the 0.8 percent predicted by Wall Street. The retailer issued an outlook for this fiscal year that fell in line with estimates.

Kering and Essilorluxottica possible suitors for Italy’s Marcolin, according to sources . Marcolin’s owner, private equity firm PAI Partners, is seeking a valuation of about 1.3 billion euros ($1.4 billion) for the company.

Li Ning considers taking the company private, sources say . Li is considering leading a consortium to buy out Li Ning Co Ltd, which has a market capitalisation of HK$52.85 billion ($6.8 billion). He owns slightly more than 10 percent of the company.

Gucci unveils ‘Who is Sabato de Sarno?’ film. The short film offers a behind-the-scenes look at the new Gucci designer’s debut last September. De Sarno’s first show was a palette cleanser after the magpie maximalism of predecessor Alessandro Michele.

US retail sales rebound in February and weekly job claims fall . Retail sales rose 0.6 percent last month, the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau said. Consumer spending slowed as households grappled with inflation and higher borrowing costs.

EU probes AliExpress over possibly illegal online products . AliExpress could face a hefty fine after the European Commission on Thursday opened an investigation into dissemination of potentially illegal and pornographic materials. AliExpress said it respected all applicable rules and regulations in the markets where it operates.

Dior to show Cruise in Scotland . The gardens of Drummond Castle in Perthshire, Scotland will be host to Dior’s Cruise 2025 show. Maria Grazia Chiuri is expected to spotlight local traditions and collaborate with local artists and craftspeople.

THE BUSINESS OF BEAUTY

Hedi Slimane launches Celine beauty line . The designer is making a foray into cosmetics at the LVMH-owned megabrand-in-making. Celine’s Rouge Triomphe lipstick will debut in the autumn, with a full range of 15 satin-finished colours slated for January 2025.

The Body Shop files for bankruptcy in the US and Canada . The company filed for Chapter 7 insolvency putting about 400 jobs at risk including those in a distribution centre that still holds millions of dollars-worth of stock. In Canada, 33 of the 105 shops have closed, with the loss of more than 200 jobs.

Ulta Beauty’s annual profit forecast misses estimates as costs climb. The company’s shares fell 4.5 percent in extended trading .The beauty retailer reported a profit of $8.08 per share for the fourth quarter ended Feb. 3, compared with expectations of $7.53.

CVC’s beauty chain Douglas sets terms for a $991 million IPO . The shares are being marketed at €26 to €30 each. The offering seeks to raise about €850 million for the company through the sale of new stock.

Eli Lilly partners with Amazon to deliver Zepbound and other drugs . The drugmaker said prescriptions sent to LillyDirect Pharmacy Solutions would now be delivered by either Amazon Pharmacy or Truepill, depending on the patient’s insurance coverage and other factors.

Under Armour’s founder to return as CEO . Kevin Plank will return to the company as CEO, effective April 1, succeeding Stephanie Linnartz. Linnartz will step down as president, CEO and member of the board.

Allbirds names new CEO as sales slide continues . Co-founder Joey Zwillinger is stepping down and will be succeeded by COO Joe Vernachio on March 15. Allbirds announced the news as it reported that sales fell 14.7 percent in 2023 to $254.1 million, a decline attributed to lower selling prices driven by heavy discounting.

Modes hires Simon Whitehouse as CEO . Whitehouse previously led communications firm Reference Studios and JW Anderson. He will take the reins from Aldo Carpinteri, who founded the retailer, then called Stefania Mode, in Trapani, Sicily in 1971.

Naomi Campbell gets V&A exhibition . The exhibition will open in June and is sponsored by Boss . Dresses made for Campbell by Azzedine Alaïa and Valentino will be on display.

Bernard Arnault receives highest French honour . Founder of luxury conglomerate LVMH received the Grand-Croix de la Legion d’Honneur at the Elysee Palace. It’s the highest rank in a system of government recognition that dates back to Napoleon.

Harper’s Bazaar names new executive digital director . Lynette Nylander joins the publication from Dazed , where she most recently served as executive editorial director. In her new role, she will oversee content and strategy for the magazine’s website, including social media and report directly to editor-in-chief Samira Nasr.

Meghan Markle launches new brand American Riviera Orchard in return to Instagram. The brand’s trademark filing application includes cookbooks, tableware, linens, a range of spreads and preserves including jellies, jams and nut butters, alongside table place card holders.

MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY

US House passes bill to force ByteDance to divest TikTok or face ban . The bill passed 352-65, with bipartisan support, but it faces a more uncertain path in the Senate. It is unclear whether China would approve any sale or if TikTok’s US assets could be divested in six months.

Chioma Nnadi unveils first cover for British Vogue . The cover stars British actress and singer FKA Twigs. It was styled by Ib Kamara and shot by Johnny Dufort in British landmarks and locations.

Compiled by Yola Mzizi.

Daniel-Yaw Miller is Sports Correspondent at The Business of Fashion. He is based in London and covers the intersection of sports and fashion, as well the sportswear and sneaker markets.

• Retail : Fast Fashion

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How to Apply AI-Powered Personalisation to Omnichannel Retail

BoF shares insights on the application of AI into omnichannel strategies to meet increasing consumer expectations that retail experiences be ‘composed’ to match their preferences, sourced from BigCommerce’s recent thought leadership.

Do Mass Brands Need Creative Directors?

This week, Uniqlo appointed Clare Waight Keller the creative director of its main line, while Stefano Pilati signed on for a collection with Inditex flagship Zara and Zac Posen staged a New York Fashion Week bash with Old Navy. The jury is still out on whether hiring designers from high-fashion will drive retail results.

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Head-to-Head in Global Fast Fashion: Shein vs. Inditex (Zara)

What's Inside

Fast fashion is a growing global market led by Shein and Inditex, the owner of Zara. In this Head-to-Head report, we provide key comparative insights about the two companies’ business models, performance and strategic initiatives.

Learn more about Shein in our separate report .

Read more in Coresight Research’s Head-to-Head series .

Contents (Click to navigate)

Introduction

Market Scale and Opportunity

Shein vs. Inditex (Zara): Coresight Research Analysis

Business Overview.

Target Audience

Business Model: Fast-Fashion Positioning and Pricing and Promotion Strategies

Delivery Capabilities

Automation and Data-Driven Inventory Management and Personalization

Leveraging Brand Mashups

Sustainability

What We Think

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Explained | How Shein beat Zara and H&M, pioneered fast-fashion 2.0

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New York: With Zara-owner Inditex and H&M set to disclose their most recent sales results, investors will be focused on one major question: how are the two fast-fashion pioneers responding to the current market leader, Shein?

Shein has a huge valuation and is primed for an IPO. With sales almost entirely online, the retailer generated about $23 billion in global revenue in 2022, according to research firm Coresight.

Shein accounted for nearly one-fifth of the global fast-fashion market in 2022, outpacing Zara and H&M. Shein's low prices - $5 t-shirts and $10 sweaters - also draw shoppers who might have otherwise shopped at clothing discount stores.

“Shein’s actual strength is acknowledging that they have no idea what you want to wear,” said Rui Ma, an analyst and founder of the newsletter Tech Buzz China . “What they have confidence in is their ability to ramp up production very quickly.”

For Inditex, which reports results on Wednesday, and H&M, which reports quarterly sales on Friday, the China-founded e-tailer has emerged as a major threat in the market for cheap clothing and accessories.

On Dec. 6, Deutsche Bank analyst Adam Cochrane downgraded Inditex and H&M to a “sell” rating, citing challenges including price deflation within clothing, and pressure from Shein and its fast-growing competitor, PDD-owned Temu.

H&M declined to comment on Shein's market share. Zara did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

To be sure, Shein has some features in common with Zara and H&M, which are often credited with spearheading the concept of replicating runway looks and bringing them to shoppers for less, also known as "fast-fashion."

All three retailers have faced criticism for allegedly stealing designs from other brands, but some critics say that Shein's super-fast production cycle makes it an especially egregious offender.

A lawsuit in July for intellectual property infringement alleged Shein uses artificial intelligence and a proprietary algorithm to scrape the internet for design ideas, sometimes resulting in direct plagiarism.

But Shein’s key strategy, according to analysts and investors, is to tap a network of largely China-based suppliers, which buck traditional manufacturing trends by accepting small initial orders and scale up based on demand.

That ultra-flexible supply chain allowed Shein to create a fundamentally different business model than established fast-fashion players like Zara and H&M, which pioneered shorter production timelines but still largely rely on predicting what styles shoppers will buy.

“For the most part, a Zara or an H&M is still anticipating fashion trends, pre-ordering that product between three to 12 months ahead of sale, and committing to fairly large order volumes,” said Simon Irwin, a former Credit Suisse analyst who has researched Shein’s pricing strategies.

One 2022 study found Shein typically receives orders within five to seven days and can then send the products directly to consumers via air freight.

Shipping can still take up to two weeks, depending on the product and a shopper's location. However, the direct-to-consumer model gives Shein an advantage over brick-and-mortar retailers, which must distribute apparel across a global network of stores and keep those locations stocked, according to Sheng Lu, a professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware.

Patricia Cifuentes, senior analyst at Bestinver’s securities division, which holds Inditex shares, said delivery speed is a fundamental advantage for Zara compared to H&M and even Shein.

"The sooner a customer receives the garment, the less likely they are to return it. So Inditex wants to be the fastest in sending you the product, but also if you do not like it, they want to put it back into the system as quickly as possible to maximise the chances it will sell at full price."

From November 2022 to November 2023, Zara and H&M respectively brought 40,000 and 23,000 new items to the US market, according to data from Lu. The data analyzes each retailer's "stock keeping units," or SKUs, used to identify individual products, including different sizes of the same garment.

Shein introduced 1.5 million products over the same period - 37 times more than Zara and 65 times more than H&M.

And while both companies still work with suppliers in China, Inditex and H&M have large manufacturing bases in other countries.

In 2022, 98% of Inditex’s production was based in 12 countries, including Portugal, Morocco, Turkey and Spain, where the company is headquartered. H&M counts Bangladesh, along with China, as its largest production market for clothing, a spokesperson said.

Shein declined to comment on its supplier network, but recent import records show virtually all of its products imported in bulk to the US came from China.

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Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: Inside Shein’s Sudden Rise

Last fall, in the stagnation of pandemic life, I became fascinated with videos of influencers standing in their bedrooms and trying on clothes from a company called Shein.

In the TikToks , hashtagged #sheinhaul, a young woman would hold up a big plastic bag and rip into it, releasing a cascade of smaller plastic bags, each containing a neatly folded item of clothing. The shot would then cut to the woman wearing one piece at a time, rapid-fire, interspersed with screenshots from Shein’s app showing the prices: an $8 dress, a $12 swimsuit.

Down this rabbit hole were variations on the theme: #sheinkids, #sheincats, #sheincosplay. The videos invited the viewer to marvel at a surreal collision of low cost and abundance. The comments, in keeping with the mood, were performatively supportive (“BOD GOALS”). At some point, someone would question whether such cheap clothing could possibly be ethical, but a chorus of voices would leap in to defend Shein and the influencer with equal zeal (“There so cute tho.” “It her money, leave her alone.”) and the original commenter would go silent.

What made this more than random internet arcana is that Shein has stealthily become an enormous business. “Shein emerged very quickly,” says ​​Sheng Lu, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies the global textile and apparel industry. “Two years ago, three years ago, nobody had ever heard of them.” Earlier this year, the investment firm Piper Sandler surveyed 7,000 American teens about their favorite ecommerce sites and found that while Amazon was the clear winner, Shein came in second. The company claims the largest slice—28 percent—of the US fast-fashion market.

In April, Shein reportedly raised $1 billion to $2 billion in private funding. The company was valued at $100 billion—higher than the combined worth of fast-fashion titans H&M and Zara, and higher than that of any private company in the world besides SpaceX and Byte-Dance , the owner of TikTok.

Shein’s success at attracting this kind of capital startled me, given that the fast-fashion business is among the most harmful industries in the world. Its dependence on synthetic textiles damages the environment, and, by encouraging people to refresh their wardrobes nonstop, it produces tremendous waste; the volume of textiles in US landfills has nearly doubled over the past two decades. Meanwhile, the workers stitching the clothes are paid little to labor in exhausting, sometimes dangerous conditions. In recent years, many of the largest fashion companies have felt pressure to make small moves toward reform. Now, though, an emerging generation of “ultrafast-fashion” companies has come along, and many are doing little, if anything, to adopt better practices. Among them, Shein is by far the biggest.

One evening in November, while my husband put our 6-year-old to bed, I settled onto the living room couch and opened the Shein app. “THIS IS BIG,” read a banner across the screen advertising a Black Friday sale, the words flashing for emphasis. I tapped on an icon of a dress, sorted all the listings by price, and, curious about the quality, selected the cheapest item. It was a skin-tight, long-sleeved red dress made of sheer mesh ($2.50). In the sweatshirt section, I added a cute color-block pullover ($4.50) to my cart.

Each time I chose an item, of course, the app showed me similar styles: Mesh body-con begat mesh body-con; color-block comfort wear begat color-block comfort wear. I scrolled and scrolled. When the room darkened, I couldn’t bring myself to stand and turn on a light. The situation felt vaguely shameful. My husband, coming through the living room after our son had gone to sleep, asked, with a tone of faint concern, what I was doing. “Nothing!” I cried. He turned on the light. I selected a cotton puff-sleeve T-shirt from the site’s premium collection ($12.99). After the Black Friday discount, the total came to $80.16 for 14 items.

I’d been tempted to keep buying partly because the app encouraged it, but mostly because there was so much to choose from and it was all so cheap. I was in high school when the first generation of fast-fashion companies trained shoppers to expect a passably cute top to cost no more than a night of takeout. Now, more than 20 years later, Shein was undercutting a deli sandwich.

Here’s some of what’s known about Shein: It’s a Chinese-born company with nearly 10,000 employees and offices in China, Singapore, and the US. Most of its suppliers are located in Guangzhou, the Pearl River port city about 80 miles northwest of Hong Kong.

Beyond that, the company has shared surprisingly little information with the public. Being privately held, it doesn’t disclose financial information. Its CEO and founder, Chris Xu, declined to be interviewed for this article.

As I began looking into Shein, it seemed almost as if the brand existed in some liminal space occupied by people in their teens and twenties and no one else. In an earnings call last year, a financial analyst asked executives at the fashion brand Revolve about competition from Shein. Mike Karanikolas, a co-CEO, responded, “You’re talking about the Chinese company, right? I’m not sure how to pronounce it—s-h-e-i-n.” (It’s SHE-in.) He dismissed the threat. One federal trade regulator told me he had never heard of the brand, and then, that evening, emailed: “Postscript—not only did my 13-year-old daughter know the company (Shein) but was wearing a pair of their corduroys tonight.” It occurred to me that if I wanted to understand Shein, I should start with the people who seemed to know it best: its teenage influencers.

0ne bright afternoon last December, a 16-year-old named Makenna Kelly greeted me at the door of her house in a quiet suburban neighborhood of Fort Collins, Colorado. Kelly, a redhead with the vibe of a glamorous Cabbage Patch Kid, is famous for ASMR content: tapping on boxes, tracing words in the snow outside her house. On Instagram, she has 340,000 followers; on YouTube, she has 1.6 million. A couple of years ago, she started filming hauls for a Shein-owned brand called Romwe; she posts a new one about once a month. In a video I first watched last fall, she twirls around in her backyard, in front of a tree with golden leaves, wearing a $9 cropped argyle sweater. The camera is trained on her midriff, while, in voice-over, her tongue makes juicy sounds. People have watched it more than 40,000 times; the argyle sweater is sold out.

I had come to watch Kelly film a haul. She skipped off to the living room to dance around—a warm-up—then led me upstairs to the carpeted second-floor landing where she does her shoots. There was a Christmas tree, a cat tower, and, in the middle of the landing, an iPad mounted on a tripod and haloed with a ring light. On the ground lay a mound of shirts, skirts, and dresses from Romwe.

Kelly’s mother, Nichole Lacy, scooped up the clothes and headed to the bathroom to steam them. “Hello, Alexa, play Christmas music,” Kelly said. She joined her mother in the bathroom, then, over the next half-hour, emerged wearing one new outfit after another—heart-patterned cardigan, star-print skirt—and silently modeled in front of the iPad camera, making kissing faces, kicking a leg up, fingering a hem here or a tie there. At one point, the family’s sphynx, Gwen, sauntered into the frame, and they cuddled; later, the other cat, Agatha, made an appearance.

For years, Shein’s public face has taken the form of people like Kelly, who make up a federation of influencers filming hauls for the company. According to Nick Baklanov, a marketing and research specialist at a company called HypeAuditor, Shein is unusual in the industry for the enormous number of influencers it sends free clothing to. They in turn share discount codes with their followers and earn a commission on the sales. This strategy, HypeAuditor says, has made it the most talked-about brand of any kind on Instagram , YouTube , and TikTok.

Along with the free clothes, Romwe also pays Kelly a flat rate for her posts. She wouldn’t name her fee, though she said she makes more in a couple hours of video work than some of her friends with normal after-school jobs make in a week. In exchange, the brand gets relatively low-cost marketing, in the places where its target audience, teens and twentysomethings, prefers to hang out. While Shein has collaborated with major celebrities and influencers (Katy Perry, Lil Nas X, Addison Rae), its sweet spot seems to be the ones with medium-size followings.

In the 1990s, before Kelly was born, Zara popularized a model of borrowing design ideas from whatever was getting attention on runways. By manufacturing clothing near its headquarters in Spain and streamlining the supply chain, it offered up these already proven styles in a matter of weeks at prices that felt shockingly low. Connie Chan, an investor at Andreessen Horowitz who invested in a Shein competitor called Cider, told me that Shein represents a newer phase of fast fashion: Now, what appears on runways and in fashion magazines matters less, and people look to one another for what to wear. “They don’t care that Vogue doesn’t think it’s a cool piece,” she said. Boohoo, a UK-based company, and Fashion Nova, based in the US, are part of the same trend.

After Kelly finished filming, Lacy asked me how much I thought all the pieces—21 of them, plus a decorative snow globe—cost on Romwe’s website. They looked better than what I had bought by intentionally clicking on the cheapest items, so I guessed $500, at least. Lacy, who is around my age, smiled. “It was $170,” she said, widening her eyes as if she couldn’t believe it herself.

By the mid-2000s, fast fashion was the dominant paradigm in retail. China had joined the World Trade Organization and had quickly become a major clothing production center, and Western companies moved much of their manufacturing there. It was around that time, in 2008, that the name of Shein’s CEO first appeared in Chinese business filings, as Xu Yangtian. He was listed as a co-owner of a newly registered company, Nanjing Dianwei Information Technology, along with two others, Wang Xiaohu and Li Peng. The filing shows Xu and Wang each owning 45 percent of the business and Li having the remaining 10 percent.

Wang and Li shared their recollections from that time. Wang said that he had met Xu as a work colleague, and in 2008, they decided to start a marketing and cross-border ecommerce business together. Wang took on business development and some aspects of the finances, he said, while Xu was in charge of a range of more technical matters, including SEO marketing.

That same year, Li gave a talk about online marketing at a forum in Nanjing. Xu—a slender young man, with an oblong face—introduced himself and said he was looking for business advice. “He was a novice,” Li said. But Xu seemed tenacious and diligent, so Li agreed to help.

Xu invited Li to join him and Wang as a part-time consultant. The three of them rented a little office in a modest low-rise building, with a big table and a handful of desks—no more than a dozen people could fit inside—and their company was incorporated in Nanjing in October. At first, they tried selling all kinds of things, including teapots and mobile phones. Wang and Li said the company later added clothing. If foreign companies could hire Chinese suppliers to make clothes for customers abroad, certainly a Chinese-run company could do the same more successfully. (A spokesperson for Shein disputed this account, writing that Nanjing Dianwei Information Technology was “not involved in the sale of clothing products.”)

According to Li, they began sending buyers to a wholesale clothing market in Guangzhou to purchase individual samples of clothing from various vendors. Then they listed those products online, using all kinds of different domain names, and published basic English-language posts on blogging platforms such as WordPress and Tumblr to improve SEO; only when an item began selling did they place a small bulk order with a given wholesaler.

As sales rose, Li said, they began studying online trends to predict which new styles might become popular and placing orders in advance. They also used a site called Lookbook.nu to find small-time influencers in the US and Europe and started sending them free clothing.

All this time, Xu worked long hours, often staying at the office well after the others had gone home. “He strongly wished to succeed,” Li said. “It would be 10 pm, and he would be nagging me and buying me late-night street food and asking more. And then it could end at 1 or 2 am.” Li gave Xu advice over beer and meals—boiled and salted duck, vermicelli soup—observing that Xu listened carefully and learned fast. Xu didn’t speak much about his personal life, but he told Li he’d grown up poor, in Shandong province, and was still struggling.

Li remembers that early on, the average order size they received was small, around $14, but that they sold 100 to 200 items a day; on a good day, they might surpass 1,000 items. The clothing was cheap, and that was the point. “We were going for low margins and large quantities,” Li told me. Plus, he added, the low prices kept expectations about the quality down. The company grew to around 20 employees, all of whom were paid decently well. Xu fattened up and expanded his wardrobe.

One day, after they had been in business for more than a year, Wang showed up at the office and found Xu missing. He noticed that some company passwords had been changed, and he became concerned. As Wang describes it, he called and texted Xu and got no response, then went in search of Xu at his home and at the train station. Xu was gone. Worse, he had control of the PayPal accounts the company used to receive international payments. Wang informed Li, then eventually paid the company’s remaining expenses and dismissed the employees. Later, they learned that Xu had defected and continued in ecommerce without them. (The spokesperson wrote that Xu was “not in charge of the company’s financial account” and that Xu and Wang “separated peacefully.”)

In March 2011, the website that would become Shein—SheInside.com—was registered. The site called itself “a leading worldwide wedding dresses company,” though it sold a range of women’s clothing. By the end of that year, it described itself as a “super international retailer” bringing “the latest street fashions from the high-streets of London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai & New York quickly to the shop floor.”

In September 2012, Xu registered a company with a slightly different name from the one he had founded with Wang and Li—Nanjing Dianshang Information Technology—in which he held a 70 percent stake and a partner held 30 percent. Neither Wang nor Li were ever in touch with Xu again—which, as far as Li is concerned, is for the best. “When you are dealing with someone with bad morals, you can’t tell when he’s going to hurt you, right?” Li said. “If I can stay clear from him early on, at least he’s not able to hurt me later.”

In 2013, Xu’s company raised its first round of venture capital funding, a reported $5 million from Jafco Asia, according to CB Insights. In a press release from that time, the company, calling itself SheInside, describes itself as having been “launched as a website in 2008”—the same year Nanjing Dianwei Information Technology was founded. (Many years later, it would start using a founding year of 2012 instead.)

In 2015, the company scored another $47 million investment. It changed its name to Shein and moved its headquarters from Nanjing to Guangzhou, to be near its supplier base. It quietly opened a US headquarters in an industrial part of Los Angeles County. It also acquired Romwe—a brand that, as it happens, Li had started with a girlfriend years earlier but had left before the acquisition. In 2019, Coresight Research estimated, Shein brought in $4 billion in sales.

In 2020, the pandemic gutted the apparel industry. Shein’s sales, though, kept growing, to an estimated $10 billion in 2020 and $15.7 billion in 2021. (It’s not clear whether the company is profitable.) If some god had decided to invent a clothing brand tailored to the pandemic era, in which all of public life contracted into the rectangular space of a computer or phone screen, it might look a lot like Shein.

I had been reporting on Shein for several months when the company agreed to let me interview a few of its executives, including George Chiao, the US president; Molly Miao, the chief marketing officer; and Adam Whinston, the director of environmental, social, and governance. They described to me a model that’s fundamentally different from how traditional retailers operate. A typical fashion brand might design a few hundred styles a month in-house and ask its manufacturers to make thousands of pieces for each style. Those pieces go on sale both online and in brick-and-mortar stores.

Shein, in contrast, works largely with outside designers. Most of its independent suppliers both design and produce clothing. If Shein likes a design, it places a small order, 100 to 200 pieces, and the clothing gets the Shein tag. To get from concept to production takes as little as two weeks.

The finished clothing is sent to Shein’s huge distribution centers, where it gets sorted into packages for customers, and those packages are shipped directly to people’s doorsteps in the US and more than 150 other countries—as opposed to first sending huge amounts of clothing all over the world on shipping containers, as retailers have traditionally done. Many of the company’s decisions are made with the help of its custom software, which quickly identifies which pieces are popular and automatically reorders those; for styles with disappointing sales, the software halts production.

Shein’s online-only model means that, unlike its largest fast-fashion competitors, it can avoid the expense of operating and staffing physical stores, including dealing with racks full of unsold clothing at the end of each season. Its reliance on suppliers for design, aided by software, makes the work faster and more efficient. The outcome is an endlessly flowing stream of clothing. Every single day, Shein updates its website with, on average, 6,000 new styles—an outrageous figure even in the context of fast fashion. Lu, the University of Delaware professor, found that in a recent 12-month period, the Gap listed roughly 12,000 different items on its website, H&M had about 25,000, and Zara had some 35,000. Shein, in that period, had 1.3 million. “We offer something for everyone at very affordable prices,” Chiao told me. “Whatever customers need, they’ll be able to find it on Shein.”

Shein isn’t the only company that makes small initial orders with suppliers, then re-ups when products do well. Boohoo helped pioneer that model. But Shein has an advantage over Western competitors; while many brands, including Boohoo, use suppliers in China, Shein’s own geographical and cultural proximity allows it to be extra nimble. “It’s very difficult to build this kind of company and almost impossible for a team that’s not based in China to do this,” Chan, from Andreessen Horowitz, said.

Simon Irwin, a Credit Suisse analyst, has spent time puzzling out Shein’s low prices. “I cover some of the most efficient sourcing companies in the world, companies that source on a vast scale, have 20 years of experience, have incredibly efficient logistics systems,” Irwin told me. “Most of them admit that they couldn’t get product to market at the same price as Shein.”

Irwin is skeptical, though, that Shein’s prices are kept low entirely, or even mostly, by efficient sourcing. Instead, he points to how Shein cleverly takes advantage of the international trade system. Under an international agreement, it often costs less to ship small packages from China to the US than from other countries, or even from within the US itself. Also, China hasn’t taxed exports by Chinese direct-to-consumer companies since 2018, and US import tariffs don’t apply to shipments worth less than $800. Other countries, Irwin said, have similar provisions allowing Shein to avoid import taxes. (The spokesperson for Shein said it “complies with tax laws in the regions where it operates and is subject to the same tax regulations as industry peers.”)

Irwin made another point, too: Many retailers in the US and Europe are spending more, he said, to comply with regulations and norms governing labor and environmental policies. Shein, he added, appears to be doing far less.

During a cool week in February, just after the Lunar New Year, I asked a colleague to visit the district of Panyu in Guangzhou, where Shein has operations. Shein had declined my request to speak with suppliers, so my colleague had come to see their working conditions firsthand. A modern white building with Shein’s name painted boldly along one wall stood in an otherwise quiet residential village, amid schools and apartments. During the lunch hour, restaurants filled with workers wearing Shein badges. Around the building, bulletin boards and utility poles were densely packed with ads for jobs at garment factories.

In a nearby neighborhood—a dense warren of small, informal factories, some housed in what seemed like repurposed residential buildings—bags printed with Shein’s name could be seen stacked on shelves or lined up on tables. Some facilities were clean and uncluttered. In one, women worked quietly at sewing machines, wearing sweatshirts and surgical masks. On a wall, Shein’s code of conduct for suppliers was prominently plastered. (“Employees must be over 16 years old.” “Pay salary on time.” “No harassment or abuse of employees.”) In another building, though, bags stuffed with garments were piled on the floor, requiring complicated footwork for anyone trying to get through.

Last year, researchers visiting Panyu on behalf of a Swiss watchdog group called Public Eye also found large bags of clothing blocking corridors and exits in some buildings, an apparent fire hazard. Three workers interviewed by the researchers said they typically arrived at 8 am and left around 10 or 10:30 pm, with breaks of around 90 minutes for lunch and dinner. They worked seven days a week, with one day off per month—a schedule that is prohibited under Chinese law. Whinston, the director of environmental, social, and governance, told me that after learning of the Public Eye report, Shein “took it upon ourselves to investigate.”

The company recently earned a score of zero out of 150 points on a rubric maintained by Remake, a nonprofit advocating for better labor and environmental practices. The score partly reflects Shein’s environmental record: The company sells an enormous volume of disposable clothing, and it discloses so little about its production that it’s impossible to even begin to gauge its environmental footprint. “We still don’t have any real insight into their supply chain. We don’t know how much product they make, we don’t know how much material they’re using in aggregate, we don’t know their carbon emissions,” Elizabeth L. Cline, Remake’s advocacy and policy director, told me. (Shein did not respond to questions about the Remake report.)

Earlier this year, Shein published its own sustainability and social impact report, in which it committed to using more sustainable textiles and disclosing its greenhouse gas emissions. An audit the company conducted of its suppliers, though, discovered big safety problems: Of nearly 700 suppliers audited, 83 percent were operating with “major risks.” Most violations were of “fire and emergency preparedness” and “working hours,” but some were considerably more serious: 12 percent of suppliers had committed “zero tolerance violations,” which could include underage labor, forced labor, or severe health and safety issues. I asked the spokesperson what those violations were, but she didn’t elaborate.

Shein’s report states that the company will provide training to suppliers that commit serious violations. If a supplier fails to fix issues within an agreed-upon time—immediately, in severe cases—Shein might stop working with them. Whinston told me, “There’s more to do—just as any business needs to improve and grow over time.”

Labor rights advocates say that focusing on suppliers can be a superficial response that fails to address why dangerous conditions exist in the first place. Fast-fashion companies bear ultimate responsibility for pushing manufacturers to produce ever more quickly at cut-rate prices, they argue, a demand that makes poor labor conditions and environmental damage all but inevitable. This isn’t unique to Shein, but Shein’s success makes it especially notable.

Cline told me that when companies such as Shein brag about how efficient they are, her thoughts leap to the people, often women, whose bodies and minds wear out so that the company can maximize revenue and minimize costs. “They’re the ones who have to be flexible and work all night so the rest of us can press a button and have a dress delivered to our door for $10,” she said.

One former supplier, Liu Zhiyong, said he appreciated Shein’s prompt payment, within 30 days, as opposed to an industry norm of 45 days or more. But he stopped producing for the brand last year, partly because employees struggled to learn so many new designs and turn them around so quickly.

Scott Nova, the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, also worries that Shein’s reliance on Chinese suppliers may mean that its clothing contains textiles sourced from Xinjiang. (The region, known for widespread use of forced labor by the oppressed Uyghur population, is the source of more than 80 percent of China’s cotton.) In December, President Biden signed a law barring the import of products made in Xinjiang; it goes into effect in June. But since Shein’s packages are generally sent by mail, rather than on shipping containers that are scrutinized more thoroughly by US Customs, the law may be difficult to enforce. “We should know where Shein products are coming from in the same way that we know where Zara products are coming from,” a congressional aide told me. (They asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the record.)

While many countries, including the US, have denounced the use of forced labor in Xinjiang, the Chinese government denies a problem exists, and Chinese shoppers have boycotted businesses that have suggested otherwise. When I asked Whinston if Shein’s suppliers use textiles from Xinjiang, his answer was vague: “We have a program in place to identify the origin of cotton, we do transparency exercises, we talk with our suppliers, and we make sure that all of the product that we’re sourcing and buying is compliant with the market that that product is going into.” When he paused, Shein’s spokesperson, who was on the line, interjected: “We’re not going to say anything else on that, given the politics of it.”

In December, a bulging white bag, like a pillowcase made of plastic, arrived at my doorstep. It was my Black Friday order. I tore into it in anticipation, but of the 14 items, none looked as good in reality as they had onscreen. The $2.50 mesh dress could be balled up and stuffed in a pocket; the $4.50 color-block pullover had the texture of a panty liner, thin and spongy. The $12.99 premium T-shirt was made of richer material, a firm cotton, though it didn’t fit quite right. The return address, on the bag in which the order had come, was in California.

Shein’s US base is in Los Angeles; the company also recently opened an Indianapolis-area distribution center and an office near Washington, DC. Its growing US presence comes at a time when Shein is already attracting the attention of regulators. In January, Congress introduced the Import Security and Fairness Act, which, if signed into law, would eliminate the tax exemption for packages from China worth less than $800. It would also require Customs and Border Protection to collect more information on those kinds of shipments. Earl Blumenauer, the Oregon congressman who introduced the bill, told me that Shein is an especially large beneficiary of the tax exemption and expressed concerns about the business as a whole. “They’ve got it set up at an industrial scale, to take advantage of modern technology and the cheapest possible manufacturing operations, and there’s no guarantee that they’re following the rules,” he said.

Then, in March, the European Commission introduced a proposal meant to address fast fashion’s environmental harm. It included setting standards for how durable and reusable clothes must be and requiring companies to include information about sustainability on labels.

Pressure is coming from inside Shein’s workforce too. In interviews or lawsuits, several US employees described an unpleasant, disorganized work environment where complaints went unaddressed. A former US Shein employee with years of experience in her field told me, “I worked at Shein because I needed a job, and it was remote and easy as heck.” She was surprised, though, to see Shein cutting corners in the design and safety of its products. She noticed that offensive items, such as a swastika necklace and a Muslim prayer mat sold as a decorative rug, were removed only after customers complained.

She also saw children’s clothing that seemed not to meet safety standards set by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. In July 2021, following testing, the commission announced a recall for thousands of Shein-branded children’s sleepwear sets that violated the federal flammability standard, leaving children exposed to potential burn injuries. In December, a Canadian health agency recalled a Shein children’s jacket after a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigation found that it contained dangerous amounts of lead. When she raised concerns, the former employee said, her supervisors didn’t respond. Disillusioned, she eventually left.

On social media, stories have circulated about outright design theft. Leah Flores, a photographer and artist in Portland, discovered last year that Shein had copied a photo of hers—foamy waves crashing into sand, the sky pinkish-orange behind it—and was selling it on a tapestry for $10. As she scrolled deeper on Shein’s website, she found seven additional works belonging to her. Flores sued Shein and, last June, obtained a $40,000 settlement. Then, a couple of days after receiving her first settlement check, she found four more of her images on Shein and Romwe. “My lawyers were like, ‘I can’t believe this,’” she said. Again, she took action against the company; again, they settled, this time for an amount she would only describe as “substantial.” (Shein did not respond to a request for comment.)

In far more cases, though, small designers seem to be simply taken advantage of. Last spring, a 26-year-old musician named Katie Bailey found a strangely familiar image on Shein’s website: a T-shirt she had commissioned from an illustrator to promote her band, Southbound 17. The page had dozens of reviews from people who for months had been buying the T-shirt, listed at $9. But Southbound 17 hadn’t even started selling the shirt yet.

After Bailey posted about her experience on social media, she got an Instagram message from Shein: “Hello,” it began. “Please allow us to apologize for what happened.” The message explained that the “unlicensed items” had been sent to Shein by a supplier who promised there were “no copyright issues.” While no further explanation was offered, Bailey suspected that someone working for the supplier had pulled the design from the Instagram feed of the illustrator she had hired to create it. In her exchange with Shein, the company representative wrote that the T-shirt had been removed from its site, and that it wouldn’t work with the supplier anymore. They promised to review designs more thoroughly in the future. But a month later the T-shirt resurfaced, with slight edits, on Romwe. Exhausted, Bailey dropped the issue; the T-shirt sold out. By then, her initial TikTok about the ordeal had been viewed more than 300,000 times.

Shein’s growth is not unstoppable. Irwin, of Credit Suisse, published a research note in February arguing that it is “highly likely” that in the future US lawmakers will try to rein in fast-fashion companies—and that Shein in particular will struggle to comply.

Shein’s executives seem to be bracing themselves for scrutiny. Since last fall, the company has posted numerous job listings for positions concerning regulatory and legal matters: director of sustainability, senior product safety and labeling counsel, senior privacy counsel, marketing counsel, intellectual property counsel.

In an October guidance document about copyright violation that I reviewed, the company’s legal team wrote, “There have been many IP infringement complaints recently, leading to millions of dollars of damages and attorneys’ fees being paid and negative news articles and social media posts about the company.” It goes on, “Copyright infringement is a straight liability offense, meaning ‘We did not know’ is not a defense.”

The document suggests that Shein’s reliance on suppliers for fast, cheap designs—which the company publicly describes as a competitive advantage—might be a problem. “It appears that our suppliers are searching the internet, including Instagram and Etsy, and copying other people’s works, then selling them to us.” The legal and PR costs fall on Shein, they write, hurting its reputation. While urging its buyers not to purchase non-original, unlicensed designs from suppliers, the document also warns Shein’s own designers who find original works on the internet to modify the work enough so as to make it “no longer recognizable.” Chiao told me Shein now has a team of more than 100 employees reviewing products before they’re added to the site, and uses image-recognition technology to make the process more accurate.

On his LinkedIn page, Whinston recently posted the listing for a director of sustainability at Shein. Someone asked, in a comment, how an ultrafast-fashion business like Shein can be sustainable. Whinston didn’t respond, though he told me later he believes it’s possible. (In April, Shein announced a line using “responsibly sourced materials” called evoluSHEIN.) But people who follow the industry say that if Shein improved its labor and environmental practices, its costs would inevitably increase, a price the company might be reluctant to bear.

In any case, even if Shein does make changes, another startup may well come along to take its place. Other companies based in China are following a similar business playbook. Last year, Alibaba, the giant Chinese ecommerce company, launched a low-cost shopping site for the European market called AllyLikes.

So far, though, Shein dominates. Rui Ma, an analyst specializing in Chinese tech companies, told me she envisions Shein becoming even bigger by moving beyond fashion: “We’ve been comparing it to Zara, but it could become like an Amazon .” When I ran this comparison by Chiao, he stopped short of endorsing it but pointed out the wide range of products that Shein offers: pet items, household goods. “I think of us as more than just a fashion company,” he said. “We look at ourselves as a go-to online retail location for all things fashion, beauty, and lifestyle.”

In a recent article in Techonomy , a tech publication, Miao wrote: “In a perfect world, fashion companies should be able to offer customers close to infinite style options.” She pictured companies producing exactly one item of each style at a time, restocking after each customer’s order “in a moment’s time.” Shein’s goal, she added, is to gradually move “toward this ideal model.”

The vision seems startling on the face of it—at best an offering that no one really needs, at worst a perversion of the concept of choice, an infinite scroll of thumbnail-sized images of clothing standing in for a more meaningful version of self-determination. But then, companies offering endless but meaningless choices, in turn requiring endless but meaningless consumption, is hardly new.

In the absence of well-enforced regulations that adapt to the practices of fast-rising global ecommerce companies, the burden of making fashion more ethical will continue to rest largely on individual consumers—a strategy sure to fail. Shoppers have long been trained to prize getting the best deal over such slippery concerns as labor rights and climate change. The online tech publication Rest of World reported that, last year, when a $16 crop top from Amazon went viral, TikTok users pointed out that a similar piece could be found on Shein for $13 and on AliExpress, owned by Alibaba , for $3.83.

I’m reminded of the comments I’d see on the #sheinhaul videos, in which well-meaning but ineffective calls for sustainability were drowned out by defenders of the industry. Contorting the language of equity and justice, viewers would ask: In a world in which the minimum wage isn’t enough to properly live on, can’t Shein’s prices be seen almost as a public service? As ableism and fat-shaming abound on the internet, isn’t Shein a haven for all kinds of bodies?

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, Shein sent customers a push notification with three raised-fist emoji in varying shades of brown. “I had a dream … That every one of all shapes, sizes, and colors can access fashion!” the text read. That afternoon, I noticed in my closet a bag that I’d almost forgotten about. Months earlier, I had been shopping at my local Goodwill and found, browsing in the red section, a fuzzy oversize sweater for $5.99. It was from Shein. The sweater had sat untouched in my closet all this time. That evening, I searched for the sweater online and spotted an almost identical one, in a yellowish color the company was calling “apricot,” listed at $6.99. For a moment, I felt relieved that at least Shein couldn’t undercut its own secondhand clothing. But then, as I moved the apricot sweater to my digital cart, a 15 percent discount was automatically applied—in honor of King—nudging the price down to $5.94.

Zeyi Yang and Wency Chen contributed reporting to this article.

This article appears in the June 2022 issue. Subscribe now .

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How SHEIN and Temu Conquered Fast Fashion—and Forged a New Business Model

Two China-based retail platforms, SHEIN and Temu, are getting a huge amount of attention in the fashion industry these days. I believe that the significance of these platforms goes way beyond the ability to give consumers trendy, low-priced fast-fashion merchandise.

Both retail websites rely on information technology to directly match consumer demand to dispersed production by a collection of factories in China. This method of reaching customers should inspire any business that provides products or services that come from many producers to reconsider their manufacturing and distribution methods.

“The success of Amazon, Shopify, and social commerce sites such as Instagram convinced consumers to move much of their purchasing power online. ”

That the model was born in China is not surprising because China has long had the problem that SHEIN and Temu were designed to solve. Ever since the late 1970s, when China ramped up its manufacturing production and began to open its economy to the world, its small and mid-sized factories struggled to gain access to the large consumer markets of the United States and Europe. American consumers bought Chinese products, but typically they did so under globally recognized brand names, including the private labels of mass merchants such as Walmart, Costco, and Target. Most of those profits accrued to the brands, rather than the Chinese suppliers.

E-commerce and the gradual supplanting of the sales and marketing roles of brands by consumer reviews gave American shoppers the courage to venture beyond the safe harbors of retail mass merchants. The success of Amazon, Shopify, and social commerce sites such as Instagram convinced consumers to move much of their purchasing power online.

More important, these channels taught Chinese businesses that they could approach the markets of the US and Europe more directly. Indeed, Amazon was the teacher. Beginning in 2013, the retail website began to recruit Chinese manufacturers to sell on Amazon Marketplace. The seeds for the birth of SHEIN were sown.

SHEIN’s two-sided platform

Selling on Amazon Marketplace was difficult for the small factories in mainland China because many knew little of fast-changing American consumer fashion tastes. SHEIN came to the rescue.

SHEIN, which had never sold products in China, began to make its presence felt among the North American teen and young women’s fashion crowd in 2019. Today, its revenues exceed $24 billion, making it the world’s biggest fashion retailer. It offers a rapidly changing assortment of affordable clothing, shoes, accessories, and beauty products for young women and, increasingly, for children and men. The company outsells H&M and Zara combined and does so with minimal reliance on brick-and-mortar stores.

“What SHEIN contributes to make the platform hum is remarkable sensitivity to the fashion tastes of its consumers.”

SHEIN is a platform. One face of the platform looks toward its consumers. It leverages deep skills in digital marketing to place stylish fast-fashion merchandise in front of target customers on social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, as well as on its own website and mobile apps. Additionally, it has used email marketing, influencer marketing, and paid advertising to reach its target demographics, first in the US and later throughout much of the world.

The other face of the platform looks toward a wide network of 6,000 of those once-struggling small clothing factories in China. In this way, SHEIN acts as the go-between, linking Chinese factories to customer demand throughout the world.

But SHEIN is much more than an online marketer for these factories. What SHEIN contributes to make the platform hum is remarkable sensitivity to the fashion tastes of its consumers. It monitors what trendsetters wear on social media. When the company spots a design that looks as if it has potential, it commissions a small order from one of its factories, often just a few dozen pieces, which it floats on its channels to see if consumers are interested. If they are, the company reorders more products.

It calls the system “the large-scale automated test and reorder (LATR) model.” A business trade publication estimates that between July and December 2021, SHEIN added 2,000 to 10,000 items per day to its app. Sheng Lu, an associate professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware, estimates that LATR generated 20 times as many new items as H&M or Zara in 2021.

SHEIN uses data and software to match consumer demand for designs to the capabilities of particular members of its manufacturing network, and it also keeps close tabs on customer outreach, order receipt, payment guarantees, and direct shipping services offered by manufacturers to customers. It monitors manufacturer performance as closely as it monitors customer preferences. This tight integration likely helps SHEIN persuade factories that it is better to work exclusively with SHEIN than to leak SHEIN’s insights about hot fashion trends to competing platforms like AliExpress and Amazon.

Temu follows suit

SHEIN’s rise to dominance in global fashion caught the eye of another Chinese data and software specialist firm, Pinduoduo. The company had begun as a platform to sell fresh produce by inviting consumers in China to combine their perishable needs with those of other consumers, and then inviting farmers in China to respond to the aggregated demand. Pinduoduo, later renamed PDD Holdings, opened an office in Boston’s Back Bay and launched Temu in September 2022.

“Temu uses the software of its parent company to match China’s manufacturing capacity to consumer demand in the US, and soon it’ll do the same kind of matching throughout much of the world.”

Temu announced its presence in a Super Bowl ad in early 2023 with two spots costing an estimated $14 million. The ads told Americans to “shop like a billionaire.” Younger Americans already knew Temu. In December 2022, it was the most downloaded app on Apple and Google, and, by January, it had been installed 19 million times.

Temu uses the software of its parent company to match China’s manufacturing capacity to consumer demand in the US, and soon it’ll do the same kind of matching throughout much of the world. It does this matching not only for fashion but for retail goods in general. Where SHEIN has 6,000 tightly integrated producers, it appears Temu has 100,000, offering a wide range of goods at startlingly cheap prices, such as an electric cooking pot for $2.14, a retractable kitchen storage rack for $6.58, and a swimsuit for $6.18 with free shipping.

The low prices may be temporary, but the integration with manufacturers is permanent. Whether that integration is tight enough in Temu’s case to discourage manufacturers from defecting to other retail sites, only time will tell.

Will this pioneering idea catch on?

The significance of SHEIN for global competitiveness is that for the first time since Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping opened the country to world trade in the 1970s, a proud Chinese retail brand bridging physical and digital domains has emerged in the Western world and is outselling Europe’s Zara and H&M combined. SHEIN is likely just the first made-in-China, sold-beyond-China retailer, as Temu’s fast follower launch suggests.

SHEIN and Temu are not just retailers. They are pioneering tech-enabled platforms that are changing the very nature of business. In the old days, a brand like General Motors leveraged its marketing and distribution power by buying up manufacturers. A brand like McDonald’s used franchising to achieve the same goal. SHEIN and Temu rely on IT to do the job.

Will other platforms follow suit? For instance, could YouTube and Spotify do a better job of matching users to artists if they played a more assertive role in artists’ production decisions while preserving their autonomy? Is there scope for Airbnb to better coach its hosts on the needs of its guests? Can platforms like Amazon Marketplace play a larger role in proposing product ideas to merchants?

Because the internet has enabled high-income consumer markets that respond to direct-to-consumer branding and low-cost producer markets that respond to data-driven coordination, more tightly coordinated models of global business have become possible and are likely to grow.

John Deighton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard Business School. Deighton studies consumer behavior and marketing, with a focus on digital and direct marketing.

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SHEIN vs. Zara: Digital transformation in the fast-fashion industry

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Product Description

Publication Date: December 12, 2021

Industry: Retail and consumer goods

Source: University of Hong Kong

In May 2021, SHEIN overtook Amazon as the most downloaded shopping app on the US iOS and Android app stores. During the pandemic in 2020, SHEIN achieved substantial sales growth and is now catching up with the fast-fashion giant Zara. This case first briefly discusses the apparel and fast-fashion industry and the creation of the fast-fashion model by Zara. Then it covers SHEIN's historical development and its "fast-fashion 2.0" business model-using big data and algorithms to identify customers and their preferences. The case also discusses various perspectives of SHEIN's business operations: products and pricing, marketing and branding, and supply chain management. The case further discusses several challenges that SHEIN faces: product quality, transparency of company disclosure, environmental impact, and geopolitical risk. In the last section, the case presents several options that SHEIN may be able to pursue in the future. The case is suitable for MBA, EMBA, and undergraduate students who are interested in competitive strategy, technology or digital strategy, innovation, blue ocean strategy, China strategy, global strategy (cross-border e-commerce), and the fashion industry. The case can be used in core strategy courses at different levels, as it covers various topics.

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The Zara Vs Shein Row Is A Fast Fashion Race To The Bottom

Life Reporter

Fast fashion brand Shein has found itself accused of duplicating designs from the popular high street clothes chain Zara.

Users on TikTok particularly have pointed out the similarities between dozens of designs from both brands, with #ZaravsShein reaching 34.6 million views and #ZaraDupe hitting 40 million.

This isn’t the first time Shein has been called out for copying designs. Brands such as Levi Strauss, AirWair International (producer of Dr Marten boots) and Ralph Lauren have already taken legal action against the brand over alleged copyright infringement.

In the past, Zara has separately been accused by independent designers of copying designs , leading to the company confirming some items had been taken off shelves.

@iam.awilda Zara vs Shein #shein #sheinhaul #zaravsshein #zara #sheingals #fashionhacks ♬ BORN FOR THIS - Foxxi

@beatrizestraada ZARAvsSHEIN 12👯♀️ 15% DESCUENTO en @sheinofficial código: 15BEATRIZ15 Vestido Shein ref: 5107477 Zara ref: 8672/338 #zaravsshein #zara #shein ♬ LA FAMA (feat. The Weeknd) - ROSALÍA

In response to the latest comparisons, a Shein spokesperson told the Guardian : “Shein suppliers are required to comply with the company’s code of conduct and certify their products do not infringe on third-party IP.”

HuffPost UK has also contacted the brand for comment.

The items in question have received mixed reviews on TikTok. While some shoppers are raving about their bargain buys, others are warning that fast fashion will “destroy the planet”. As one TikTokker points out, Zara is still considered a fast fashion brand, despite its higher price point to Shein.

Zara is part of the Inditex Group, whose brands include Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius and Oysho. As the sustainable fashion index Good On You highlights, Zara’s business model is based on an incredibly high turnover of the latest fashion items.

So what does it say about fast fashion if brands are borrowing designs from each other?

Michaela Leitz, a 28-year old fashion stylist and influencer from Germany, thinks copycat fashion fundamentally diminishes a brand’s identity and creativity.

“Shein is known for creating 700 to 1000 new designs a day. It’s not a creative process – you can’t even do that if you have a huge team of designers,” she tells HuffPost UK.

“And because they’re producing at that rate the clothes are usually bad quality. So after two or three washes your clothes are already falling part, which is destroying our planet because the clothes aren’t decaying.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Plus Size Stylist & Influencer (@aboutmichaela)

Shein is known for its cheap price point, which is why the brand has such a huge appeal to young people. So much so, the company’s revenue has quadrupled since 2019, according to the Business of Fashion website , with sales rising from $15.7bn (£12.1bn) to a huge $100bn.

But even though Zara has pricier items, its retail model tells a different story.

“Zara produces 52 sub-seasons a year whereas high quality designer brands have two main seasons a year, so it’s still a fast fashion brand,” Leitz says. That’s despite the fact, she adds, that “you’re able to go into a Zara store and see the designs [and] it feels more luxurious than Shein.”

When fast fashion brands start stocking similar designs, Leitz says it feeds into “micro trends” – which are bad news for the planet and your fashion sense.

Micro trends are when a fashion item or aesthetic become really popular quickly, but goes out of style equally quickly,. While macro trends can last from five to 10 years, micro trends can last as little as three – or an even shorter timeframe.

“Micro trends don’t allow you to have your own signature style,” says Leitz. “As a consumer you just keep buying all these clothes that you won’t wear again. Which is of course really bad for the environment.”

For Leitz, the Zara vs Shein hashtag highlights how fashion is losing its meaning. “Fashion is self-expression for clothing, it’s storytelling and showing who you are. These brands aren’t original in my opinion,” she says.

Leitz believes fast fashion dupes take away from creativity and individualism. “We’re seeing brands creating 700 designs today. There’s no innovation, so where does fashion go from here if brands are just copying each other?”

However, boycotting fast fashion brands is harder said than done. If you’re someone on a low income it can be challenging to shop sustainably, and for some people, there are added barriers.

“I specialise in plus-size fashion so I know how hard it is find clothes and understand that not everyone can afford the expensive price points,” Leitz says.

“When I was in my early 20s I also didn’t have the funds to shop at expensive brands but I recommend trying to shop vintage. Or save up some money and buy fewer items that you can rewear. That way you can create your own signature style that you can have for years.”

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Shein is the future of fast fashion. Is that a good thing?

The Chinese retailer is quickly becoming one of Gen Z’s favorite fashion brands, for its low prices and savvy social media use.

by Terry Nguyen

If you’ve spent some time scrolling and shopping on TikTok, you’re probably familiar with the fashion retailer Shein. From personal experience, however, “familiar” doesn’t properly contextualize how pervasive the brand is, at least online. Perhaps a more accurate description is: I am haunted by Shein. As a consumer who falls squarely within the brand’s target demographic — a woman in her 20s, who buys most of her clothes online — I encounter Shein-related content almost daily, algorithmically fed to me through Instagram advertisements, YouTube hauls, and viral TikTok recommendations.

Shein’s ubiquity, most notably on TikTok, has catapulted the retailer to cult status among young women across the globe. And while Shein is based out of China, it ships to 220 countries, with the US serving as its largest consumer market. In June, Shein overtook Amazon for the first time on the iOS App Store to become the leading US shopping app, a title it holds in over 50 countries. This comes after a pandemic year of record-breaking sales: Shein raked in close to $10 billion in 2020 , which was reportedly its eighth consecutive year of revenue growth over 100 percent. The retailer is also one of the most talked-about brands on TikTok and YouTube, and the most visited fashion and apparel site in the world, according to the web analytics platform Similarweb. Shein had enough in its coffers to place a bid to buy Topshop in January, which it ultimately lost to Asos.

Shein has collaborated with well-known musicians (Katy Perry, Nick Jonas, Lil Nas X, Tinashe) for concerts and events and, like its trendy competitors, has sponsored influencers (Addison Rae) and created capsule collections with D-list reality TV stars ( The Bachelor ’s Hannah Godwin, The Only Way Is Essex ’s Amber Turner). But Shein isn’t a brand made for and peddled by the rich and famous. In fact, it has cemented its reputation among regular people, particularly Gen Z shoppers, who promote the brand through unsponsored clothing hauls and outfit posts on social media. Friends and coworkers have recommended Shein swimwear and dresses to me in casual conversation, over text and even on Slack. On TikTok, a recent crowd favorite is Shein’s cross-wrap crop top — a $13 garment that resembles a halter top, but with a strategically placed cutout that reveals extra cleavage.

There are tens of thousands of styles on the retailer’s site, and each day, about 1,000 more are added. For context, this production pace is even speedier than the “ultra-fast” sites that dominate fast fashion’s Instagram era; Missguided and Fashion Nova, for example, reportedly release about 1,000 new styles a week. 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.

A skilled Shein shopper can theoretically buy an entire outfit, accessories and shoes included, for $30 or less. In fact, there are entire sections on the site that help customers clinch the cheapest deals: A shopper can browse for tops under $5.99 , dresses under $9.99 , and clearance items under $5 . The wardrobe possibilities, it seems, are endless. One Twitter user recently observed that $280 spent on Shein can create a year’s worth of outfits.

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. The retailer is also nowhere to be found in the physical world — at least not in brick-and-mortar stores, although it has previously hosted in-person pop-up events. Shein appeared to have sprung out of thin air into the mainstream, unlike fast fashion’s old guards, whose spacious, brightly lit stores were proof of their dominance. Yet, Shein is so far ahead of competitors like H&M, Zara, and Asos, according to an analysis by Apptopia , that it’s difficult to compare them.

So what makes Shein so special? The answer might seem simple (two words: supply chains), if not for its influence over ever-changing trends and its impact on fashion consumption. There’s no doubt that it’s Shein’s world, and we’re just shopping in it.

A brief, incomplete history of Shein

Shein was first launched in 2008 under the domain SheInside, as a site that sold wedding dresses and women’s fashion geared toward US and English-language shoppers. The retailer was started in Nanjing, a province in China, by entrepreneur Chris Xu, who specialized in search engine optimization marketing. Xu has yet to publicly express any interest in women’s fashion or clothing design (granted, it doesn’t seem like he has done many interviews in English); his expertise lies in SEO and brand marketing, key factors that have contributed to Shein’s online popularity.

During Shein’s early years, there was very little that distinguished the brand from other Chinese e-commerce retailers, except that it sold wedding gowns. According to reporting from PandaYoo , an English-language site published by Chinese bloggers, Shein sourced its products from China’s wholesale clothing market in Guangzhou, a region where many Chinese garment factories and markets are centralized. Shein wasn’t involved in any aspect of garment design or manufacturing. It operated much like a dropshipping business that sells products from third-party wholesalers directly to overseas shoppers.

It wasn’t until 2014 that Shein began to acquire its own supply chain system, transforming itself into a fully integrated retailer. That year, it purchased Romwe, another Chinese e-commerce 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. 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.

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 .

By 2017, the present-day iteration of Shein had begun to take shape. 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.

Is Shein simply “fast fashion,” or is it the future?

While venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs tout Shein as the future of fashion, the company’s rise didn’t occur in a vacuum. Its success is predicated on a confluence of factors, from geopolitical trade policies to a decades-old, disaggregated global fashion ecosystem.

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. This, of course, made fashion companies more profitable, as shoppers became hooked on a cycle of novelty. But soon, things were about to get even faster.

• Fast fashion, explained

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. Last October, Reuters reported that investors think “Zara … is going to be crushed by fast fashion 2.0.” These ultra-fast fashion companies are able to reach millions of young shoppers directly through social media without the need for physical retail space, and relied on search traffic and customer data to foreshadow trends.

But by virtue of Shein’s location and software technology, the retailer developed a speedy edge on its competitors. Matthew Brennan, a Beijing-based writer and analyst of Chinese technology, likened its pace to “real-time” retail. That means Shein is constantly gathering and analyzing customer data and uses that knowledge to craft new designs — within as little as three days.

“Each new design is basically a bet because Shein can estimate how well a product is going to do, but it doesn’t know for sure until it sells,” Brennan explained. “Compared to its fast fashion competitors, Shein is able to take more bets, but at a lower risk. It’s able to place very small initial orders with these factories, about 100 or even smaller.” These batches were much smaller than Zara’s and that of ultra-fast fashion retailers like Boohoo, which reportedly ordered about 300 to 500 units per style . If a specific top goes viral overnight on TikTok, for example, Shein will be able to instantaneously ramp up production on the garment and place additional orders depending on demand.

Shein has spent years cultivating relationships with Chinese garment factories and manufacturers, whereas most Western brands generally outsource this work. Inditex is similarly situated close to a garment production center in the northeast region of Spain, but according to Brennan, business in China moves much faster.

“Shein doesn’t work with very large factories but [with] small to mid-sized workshops that pick up orders daily,” Brennan said. “It’s very much like an Uber system, where new orders are coming into factory owners’ phones and they receive the order. It’s very scrappy, but efficient.”

“It’s very much like an Uber system, where new orders are coming into factory owners’ phones and they receive the order”

Most retailers place a main order at the start of the season, according to Craig Ryder, director of the UK-based Supply Chain Consulting Group: “It depends on where the order is made and where it’s being shipped to, but generally, between a retailer placing an order and getting it to market, there is very limited time to order more.”

And despite Shein’s popularity, the company remains largely unknown among Chinese consumers. The Chinese apparel market is extremely competitive, and Shein’s priority from the beginning has been to export goods abroad. The retailer has also benefited from deteriorating trade relations between China and the US. China began waiving export taxes for direct-to-consumer companies in 2018 after the US imposed more tariffs, Bloomberg reported . Since Shein ships its orders directly to customers from Chinese warehouses, packages worth less than $800, or small-value shipments, generally remain duty-free. In other words, Shein has managed to circumvent paying both export and import taxes for about three years, something brick-and-mortar retailers aren’t able to avoid.

“If you’re Zara, there’s no way you’re going to get around US import duties because you’re not shipping to individuals. You’re selling to stores and importing in bulk,” Michael Horowitz, a consultant at the firm Retail ROI, told Bloomberg. “[Zara has] too much of a physical presence. It can’t get away with it.”

Still, receiving a shipment from Shein can take a week or longer, which is a prolonged timeline for most US-based retailers and, of course, Amazon. (The company does offer free shipping on all orders.) Shein has, in a sense, served as an accelerant in the fashion world. It has forced competitors to reassess the emphasis on speed to increase profit margins, at the cost of everything else.

Is Shein’s speediness ethical?

Over the past year, Shein has received backlash from customers for selling, among several offensive items, a necklace with a Buddhist swastika pendant, a phone case with an image of a handcuffed Black person outlined in chalk, and a Muslim prayer mat as a decorative rug. The company has apologized for these incidents, which Shein has spun as a lack of cultural sensitivity and understanding of its global audiences.

But these hiccups — which are offensive at worst, and weird at best — are partly a direct result of Shein’s fast production cycle. Following the completely legal copycat model of most fast fashion retailers, Shein employs workers to recreate trending designs for its own products. The artwork on Shein’s offensive phone case was replicated without permission from a 2014 drawing by French graphic artist Jean Jullien, in the wake of the Ferguson uprisings. Several designers and artists have accused the company of making blatant rip-offs of their work, but there’s little that can be done, besides drawing the internet’s attention to it.

There’s a running, unproven accusation on TikTok that Shein depends on child labor. These comments usually appear on videos of Shein hauls or styling videos, in which users try to shame well-off creators for buying from a purportedly unethical company. To be clear, there is no evidence that Shein employs children or produces an unsafe labor environment, but the company has not publicly disclosed workers’ wages or hours. In August, Reuters reported that Shein has yet to disclose information about its working conditions and supply chain to the British government, which the retailer is required to do under UK law. Shein had also previously falsely stated on its website that its factories were certified by international labor standard bodies, according to Reuters.

In China, however, LatePost reported that Shein has developed “a reputation for timely payment [to factories],” which is a rarity in the country. The retailer also appears to have a good rapport with the factory owners it employs, who were willing to relocate their operations alongside Shein in 2015.

Yet much remains unknown about Shein’s business practices, and timely payment alone should not be cause for praise or relief from consumers. What are the ethics of producing and selling thousands of garments a day at a breakneck pace, even if workers are reportedly paid on time? Shein’s business model drives — and depends on — overconsumption. Some of the most popular Shein-related TikToks feature young women buying hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothes to try on for every season or fashion TikTok trend. Sure, not every consumer can afford ethically made goods or have easy access to a thrift store, but it’s not low-income shoppers who are keeping Shein and the fast fashion industry alive.

I’ve previously written about how the fashion industry is one of the world’s most resource-intensive sectors, even though there is no official research that fully summarizes fashion’s environmental impact. 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. Most of the clothes from Shein are made from synthetic fabrics, which are responsible for releasing plastic microfibers into oceans.

The retailer has stayed mum on ethical fashion and sustainability, but it’s hard to imagine Shein embracing corporate accountability without widespread consumer pressure. Regardless, Shein seems poised to be the fashion giant of the decade, and investors are scrambling to look for other retailers that could copy its speedy supply chain. And as the fashion industry adjusts to Shein’s blinding pace, it’s safe to assume that shoppers are encouraged and expected to buy more and more. All it takes is another viral must-have product from a brand that might be the next big thing. For now, though, Shein doesn’t seem willing to give up the throne.

Update, August 10, 3:30 pm: This story was updated to include information about Shein failing to disclose its working standards to the UK government, and false claims the company made on its website about its factories’ certifications.

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