First published by The Times on 21 October 2021
In a Venn diagram of things that interest both teenage girls and Tory MPs there is very little overlap. Right in the centre, however, is the online fashion brand Shein. Shein (pronounced “she-in”) may be the biggest business you’ve never heard of; I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that it’s taking over the world.
A purveyor of clothes, cosmetics and homeware, Shein was founded in 2008 by CEO Chris Xu, also known as Yangtian Xu, who doesn’t give interviews, so information about him is sketchy: some reports say he was born in the Chinese province of Shandong, while others say he’s American. The company itself is run from the Pearl River Delta in South China and ships clothes to 220 countries with its largest market being the US, where this year it overtook Amazon as the most downloaded app. Its popularity in the UK, however, is catching up fast, and that’s presumably a priority for Shein, because in January the company put in a bid to buy Topshop. Last year, Shein hit an estimated revenue of $10 billion; it’s valued at more than $15 billion.
If you have heard of it, you probably have an adolescent daughter. When I put the word out that I’m interested in experiences of the site, parents come forward from far and wide. London-based journalist Sam (not her real name, for reasons that will become clear) tells me her 12-year-old is a devoted fan, but I also receive a message from my American friend Anna, 4,500 miles away in Portland, Oregon. “Shein is all the rage among the pre-teens and teens here in the US,” she writes. She has 11-year-old twins. “My daughters order stuff all the time. It’s so cheap, they think it’s free.”
How cheap does something have to be for a customer to round it down to “free”? I visit the site to find out, and am hit by an immediate barrage of discounts. Not once but four times on the home page I am told that standard shipping is now “£2 (was £4)”. Orders over £35 ship for free. If you spend £30 you get an extra 15 per cent off; if you make that £80, the offer rises to 20 per cent (this is accompanied by a ticking countdown clock). If I give them my email address I can have £3 off, and if I download the app, I get 15 per cent off. The effect is disorientating: Shein bewilders us, all the better to sell to us.
Last year the company’s chief marketing officer, Molly Miao, told Forbes that 700 to 1,000 new products appear on the site every day. There are always more than 2 million items in stock, and today I can browse 8,000 dresses. I look at them in order of price, from the lowest up, and the first frock displayed is £1.99 in the sale (there’s always a sale) – I’m well over 1,000 dresses down the list by the time prices reach £5. The products are cheap as, or cheaper than, chips; they are modelled by pouting bombshells; and they’re so numerous that it’s dizzying. Shein is a tumble-dryer of tat.
I am told by fans, however, that the quality has improved – so I do some shopping to test it out. Along the way, I witness horrors: a pair of thigh boots with suspenders attached, for example. There’s also a crop-top and flares set in which the flares have large peekaboo holes on either side of the crotch.
Instead, I choose some high-waisted jeans (£19.49), a tank top (£5.99), a couple of cardigans (£16.99 and £17.99) and a plastic ring (£1 and suspiciously similar to La Manso’s popular jewellery, which costs about £60 a pop). To wear with them I try some braided, low-heeled sandals that are a shameless rip-off of a Bottega Veneta design; the originals cost £940 while Shein’s are £12.75. (I buy a higher-heeled version too, at £17.25.) I add a white trouser suit to my basket – £33.99 – which I can wear with trainers that look very Adidas-like, for £13.49. And finally I try a belted, printed dress (£16.99) and high-heeled black boots (£37.75).
In total, this comes to £193.68, though I am offered a number of discounts along the way, all of which I apply. Shipping is waived because it’s over £35, but Shein adds a “handling fee” of £29, which goes towards “warehouse processing” (and I suspect subsidises shipping). In total, I pay £184.12 for 11 items, including the two-piece suit.
These mountains of cheap clothing, of course, raise alarm bells from an environmental point of view. The clothing sector is a bad offender anyway; the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs estimates that it accounts for about 2 per cent of carbon emissions, but some organisations put the level much higher. Synthetic fabrics – so ubiquitous on Shein that you can almost hear the crackle as the website loads – contribute to water pollution; a study earlier this year found microplastics throughout the Arctic Ocean, from Europe to the North Pole, and 73 per cent of the fibres found were polyester, probably shed in the laundry.
Then there’s the huge problem of waste. In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency reports that landfills received 11.3 million tons of textiles in 2018 (around 12.6 million British tons). This is massively plumped up by fast-fashion brands like Shein – when we can buy so inexpensively, we buy more, and with less concern for durability. “I know girls that buy boxes of Shein bikinis and throw them out with tags on because they’re so cheap,” says Sarah, a 31-year-old teacher who lives in Dubai.
Shein defends itself here. The website includes a page titled “Our products/Our planet”: the company reduces waste by producing clothes in batches of only 50 to 100 pieces per product, it says, and only ups this when there’s high demand. It “does its best” to source recycled fabrics, and uses a printing process that is apparently less polluting than conventional screen printing. I call Aja Barber, fashion consultant and author of Consumed, a book about consumerism and sustainability, and I read out these eco claims. I can almost hear her eyes rolling.
“It doesn’t matter if you create the world’s most sustainable garment,” she says. “It can be 100 per cent organic clothing, sewn by elves that love to make it, but if you’re selling billions of items that people don’t need, which is Shein’s business model, then that can’t be sustainable. On average, fast-fashion consumers buy 68 items of clothing a year, but I’ve seen hauls on TikTok where someone spends $1,000 and gets more than 100 items of Shein clothing in one go. Nobody needs to buy the amount of clothing that fast-fashion consumers buy.” When I mention the prices, she is despairing: “From a sustainability point of view, we talk about the race to the bottom – but is there a bottom?”
This is why Sam, mother of a 12-year-old Shein fan, requests a pseudonym. “Can you not name me? I’m totally ashamed of this,” she begins, before explaining her battles with her daughter. “I’m trying to encourage a more sustainable approach, and these terrible clothes that weigh next to nothing keep arriving in plastic bags. Cries of, ‘But it’s only £9,’ for a trendy skirt or a crop-top vest make me want to faint.”
Many kids find Shein via TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform that was the world’s most downloaded app last year. Shein promotes heavily there, using paid partnerships with people like Addison Rae, an influencer with 85 million followers. There’s even a hashtag so that fans of the brand can show off their purchases: #sheingals has had 1.3 billion views on TikTok.
But there’s more to that hashtag than the unsuspecting user might realise. The company allows anyone to register as an affiliate; if I post a video featuring a Shein dress and one of my followers clicks through and buys something, I get a commission of between 10 and 20 per cent. This of course turns me into a saleswoman and encourages me to buy bigger “hauls” and share them more frequently. You don’t have to be famous to be very useful to Shein.
The brand is also big on Instagram, which targets a slightly older demographic; 37-year-old Khloé Kardashian, with her 189 million followers, is one of Shein’s partners there and judged a design competition for the company in August. So it’s not surprising that there are plenty of grown women who shop at Shein too; if you want to dress well and don’t have a lot to spend, all this clever marketing is very tempting. Cathy, a 32-year-old business analyst from North Lincolnshire, tells me, “I’ve ordered from them several times and never had any issues. Shipping isn’t as speedy as some of the others, but it comes from abroad I think, so that’s to be expected. I’ve never really thought about the environmental impact. I think – and this sounds awful – that until now, I’ve been willing to ignore any negativity to get the best price.”
For Lauren, 34 and from London, shopping there involves a little conscience-wrangling: “I’m really aware of how bad fast fashion is, and I’ve made efforts to decrease what I buy. However, I tend to buy from Shein when I’m on a very tight budget for something fairly basic,” she says. She’s also impressed by a particular feature: “The great thing is that all their items are reviewed and reviewers can upload photos, so you can check what it looks like on someone with a similar body to you before you buy.”
These reviews, it turns out, are incentivised by Shein’s rewards scheme, in which points can be put towards purchases. Points are earned by reviewing what you’ve bought, with extra points for including photos and sizing information; if enough other users then click “like” on your review, you’ll get a further boost. (This explains why many reviews end with the words, “Please click like, I need help”.) You can also earn by registering your email address; by shopping; by joining in online competitions for the best outfits; and by simply “checking in” to Shein every day – your points accrue until you miss a day. To bargain hunters, these are all brilliant opportunities to save money. To me, they feel manipulative.
The other big trick behind the success of Shein is data-harvesting. Say you search online for a tartan dress; a third-party cookie (a small data file) may be recording your interest. Later, you pop onto Facebook and see Shein advertising a tartan dress at a bargain price. This is not unique to Shein; many companies monitor our online behaviour, our likes and dislikes, and market to us accordingly. What Shein does better than others, however, is very quick production in response to what its customers are looking at; its factories leap into action to manufacture items similar to popular pieces from other brands, and can produce new products in as little as three days. As a result of this strategy, Shein clothes don’t have a particular aesthetic: they simply mirror whatever we’re looking to buy.
This brings us to the Tory MP and chairman of the foreign affairs committee, Tom Tugendhat. In August he wrote a furious op-ed about Shein, describing the company as a “sinister cross between surveillance and capitalism”. “It’s a competitive business, which is fine, but the thing that really struck me was the way in which the app collects an awful lot of data,” he tells me now. “That’s not incredibly unusual, but as it’s collecting data that’s going to a particular destination, it does raise some concerns.”
The destination, of course, is China. “I’d like to know what Shein’s ownership model is, which is not exactly open,” he adds. “I’d like to know where their data is stored, how it is held and who it is shared with, which again is very far from clear, and I’d like to know that their manufacturing plants use only the kind of labour that we would agree with – free labour, and properly paid.”
Certainly, the race-to-the-bottom prices of fast fashion raise questions about how any brand’s staff are paid and treated – although as of August this year, Shein has published a modern slavery statement on its British website, declaring that it pays fair wages in accordance with applicable laws of the countries in which it operates. The company was also criticised recently for job adverts that appeared on recruitment sites and specified that certain ethnic groups, including Uighurs, must not apply. Shein said it did not fund or approve the ads and has launched an investigation. It’s rumoured that the company plans to float on New York’s stock exchange; if that’s the case, then it will need to clean up its reputation and introduce much greater transparency.
Another problem with Shein’s methods is that they sometimes lead to serious mistakes. In the space of one week in July 2020 the brand had to apologise for selling Islamic prayer mats (they were marketed as “Greek carpets”, and some featured an image of Mecca), and then for a swastika pendant (Shein argued that it was a Buddhist swastika rather than the Nazi symbol). In fact, “mistakes” may be too generous a term; independent designers including Bailey Prado, Mariama Diallo and Elexiay have complained of Shein lifting their designs and producing almost identical clothes at a fraction of the price.
Another error is evident in my haul when it eventually arrives, 11 days after ordering. The knee-boots look fantastic but are literally unwearable. They have no zip and no give in the fabric, so short of dislocating my foot, there’s no way to get them on, and a colleague with feet two sizes smaller can’t do it either. I go back to the website and read the reviews; the customers who have managed to crowbar the boots on are a small minority. Though Shein promises that products go through “rigorous testing and inspection”, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that these boots were not tested on a human at all. For the photoshoot I wear a £195 pair from Dune, and they fit like a dream.
Everything else is at least wearable. At the top of the pile, the jeans and a teal cardigan look quite nice. The trainers are strangely lightweight, not being made of leather, but they’re very comfortable; the knock-off Bottega Veneta sandals are a bit tatty. The suit is perilously thin and bunches weirdly in the crotch when I sit down, and the dress is badly fitted and unlined. I would be surprised if some of these pieces survived being worn a handful of times. With flattering light, careful styling and a safety pin here and there, however, it all works on camera – and to the youthful users of TikTok, that’s absolutely good enough.