Xu Yangtian had no tailoring experience when he founded Shein in 2008. Instead, the creator of the fashion world’s latest sensation was a specialist in search-engine optimisation
AMANCIO ORTEGA, founder of the Zara fast-fashion empire, got his start selling bathrobes in northern Spain. Erling Persson of H&M peddled women’s clothing in a small-town shop in Sweden for decades before going global. Xu Yangtian had none of their tailoring experience when he founded Shein in 2008. Instead, the creator of the fashion world’s latest sensation was a specialist in search-engine optimisation.
Shein has managed to pull this off by combining a mastery of fashion supply chains with the sort of on-demand manufacturing originally enabled by Chinese e-commerce giants like Alibaba. It starts with design. A Shein team trawls the internet for the latest trends using algorithms to determine what is grabbing the most attention on any particular day. One member of this team told Chinese media last year that he visits thousands of websites to come up with ideas.
Shein has deployed digital savvy not just in its procurement but also in sales and marketing—the second pillar of its success. Besides handing out products free of charge to thousands of influencers, a common practice these days, it has also recruited hundreds of local designers in America and several other countries. As well as dreaming up new clothes, they market its products and backstories on social media. The company plans to hire another 3,000 such third-party designers in 2022.
Shein has also evaded scrutiny from the Chinese Communist Party. In part that is because selling frocks is not as contentious an industry as making semiconductors or writing artificial-intelligence software. Its tiny presence at home has also spared it the sort of headaches that have afflicted Alibaba and other consumer-internet groups with large domestic operations as President Xi Jinping intensifies his campaign to right the perceived wrongs of Chinese capitalism.
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