Shein offers cheap products, But it’s killing small businesses,Threatening
people’s security, And putting lives at risk.
Welcome to China Uncensored, I’m Chris Chappell.
High fashion is a world unto itself.
Daring.
Bold.
Always pushing boundaries.
And satanically expensive.
I guess that’s why the devil wears…well, you know.
But with price tags like that…
Most people don’t have the luxury of buying the kind of high-class, fashionable clothes
found at the Met Gala.
Apparently the theme this year was furries.
In.
Spaaaaaaaace.
Enter fast fashion.
It’s got most of the style at a fraction of the cost.
H&M, Zara, and Fashion Nova are some well known and well established fast fashion companies,,
but all of them are losing their edge to a relative newcomer called Shein , also known
as the “TikTok of Ecommerce.”
Shein is an e-commerce clothing retailer.
It has no physical stores, and, partially because of that, it’s a bit mysterious.
If you haven’t heard of Shein, don’t feel bad.
A lot of people haven’t heard of Shein.
And yet, it’s somehow simultaneously wildly popular.
Shein is so popular that it was ranked as the number one shopping app by Business of
Apps in 2022, beating the likes of Amazon and Nike.
And it was the number one fashion website on Similar Web earlier this month.
Even I’ve been targeted by their ad campaign.
And I’m definitely sure I'm not their target demographic.
Shein exports to customers in more than 220 countries.
And according to the UK financial website Money, based on the number of Google searches
received, it’s the most popular fashion brand in 113 of them.
Even the US is gobbling up Shein’s products.
According to Bloomberg, by November 2022, Shein made up half of all fast fashion sales
in the US.
It’s now America’s 4th most downloaded app, period.
Behind only TikTok, Instagram, and
Mustapp: the app that puts mustaches on everything you take pictures of.
Okay, that’s not America’s most downloaded app… but it *should* be.
With all that popularity comes money.
Shein was at one point valued at over $100 billion in 2022, more than Zara’s owner
Inditex and H&M combined, though now it’s valued at around $64 billion.
Thanks to the pandemic and digital marketing, as well as its grossly cheap prices, Shein
became the most talked-about brand on YouTube and TikTok in 2020.
Which has to be eating Walmart alive.
“Hey, we’re grossly cheap, too!
Emphasis on gross.”
All of this has led some to say that Shein is the future of fast fashion.
But they’re also wondering if that’s a good thing.
Spoiler alert: it’s not.
I’ll tell you more after the break.
Online clothing retailer Shein has become incredibly popular throughout the world.
Which isn’t great.
For a lot of reasons.
One reason is where the company is based.
You guessed it: China.
Although it took a while for that to become public knowledge.
Shein has a history of being very secretive about its origins.
So secretive that in this 2017 archived About Page you can see that the company claimed
to have “started as a small group of passionate fashion loving individuals in…
New Jersey in 2008.”
The page has now been removed.
Man, you know China is bad when they list New Jersey as a better alternative.
But things have changed.
In 2021, Shein admitted to the Wall Street Journal that they have offices in Guangzhou
and Singapore and that they are backed by investors at Sequoia Capital China.
Forbes’ Shein company webpage has them headquartered in Nanjing.
Still, Shein downplays its connections to China.
Whenever it does mention China, it’ll only pass it off as one of many different regions
around the world that sources the company’s products, without sharing metrics.
Considering how many Chinese companies try downplaying their ties to China, I’m starting
to think even China knows how bad China is.
One online newsletter says that Shein’s shipping status updates reportedly use generic
terms such as “source country” and “port of departure” to avoid referring to Guangzhou
or Hong Kong.
But all linguistic trickery aside, it’s a Chinese company, and, as we know, that comes
with some serious strings attached.
It’s also a very untransparent, even by Chinese standards.
Shein’s supply chain is so untransparent that it scored 0 out of a hundred in Fashion
Revolution’s 2022 Fashion Transparency Index’s measure of traceability.
Again: zero out of 100.
And since China is known for using slave labor, I think we’re getting an idea of how everything
on Shein can be so cheap.
Although Shein keeps information about its supply chains hidden, we do know that it reportedly
has more than 6,000 suppliers, most in the southern province of Guangdong, the heart
of China’s manufacturing and export hub.
But that still doesn’t tell us a lot, and the company isn’t about to give anything
away.
Going through Shein’s “about us” page, the company says very, very little about itself.
And what it does say is buried under corporate jargon.
We don’t even know much about Shein’s founder, Xu Yangtian, who also goes by Chris
Xu.
Good choice for English names, though.
There’s not much information about him available, and what information there is sometimes conflicts.
For example, a Forbes article in 2021 said he was an American-born graduate of Washington
University…
…While this online Chinese media published an article a week later saying he was born
in 1984 in Shandong Province, China.
Either way, the company certainly benefits from its ties to China.
The only place that’s more secretive about its supply chain is Santa’s workshop.
And that jolly old tyrant uses elf slave labor.
In 2020, Shein’s CMO reported that Shein releases 700 to 1000 new products each day.
But by 2022, Fortune Magazine reported that Shein posts 6,000 new items on its site a
day.
Let me repeat: 6,000 a day.
Despite making so many new items, the company usually makes only fifty to a hundred copies
of each item first to see which ones click with customers most.
This pays off in the end because the constant bombardment of new items encourages people
to always go back to the Shein app for more.
That’s part of what makes the app so addictive.
According to an analyst at Coresight Research , “By refreshing thousands of products daily,
Shein has trained customers to visit its platform regularly or risk missing out on the latest
designs.”
How can Shein make so many new items so fast?
Are they leasing elves from that monster Santa?
Part of it is thanks to its in-house software, which has a deep-learning AI that can recognize
trends across social media platforms.
Shein can instantly send the data collected to its suppliers, and, from there, it takes
no more than 10 days to manufacture and ship items, instead of weeks like its competitors.
But here’s where Shein starts to get more than just a little bit shady.
Surprised?
Yeah, I know.
Neither am I.
I’ll tell you more after the break.
Welcome back.
Shein's got a shady background full of holes, but it also has shady practices.
Its in-house software allows it to track trends, instantly send the information to its suppliers,
and receive products with incredible speed.
And suppliers want to work with Shein because money.
There’s just one catch: all suppliers have to use Shein’s software.
There’s a good bet that means the Chinese government has access to all that data.
And that’s not all.
It’s also got a history of fashion robbery.
Stealing and China.
Name a more iconic duo.
Besides human rights abuses and China, suppression of information and China, and downplaying
ties to China and…
China.
The theft has made designers and brands angry enough to want to wage war against it.
One case example is fitness entrepreneur Cassey Ho.
According to her, Shein copied so much of her design that it even copied the way it
was advertised.
Hmm, I sort of see what she means…
Some might say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I say the sincerest form of flattery is asking permission and paying royalties.
Many other designers and artists all over the world also claim that Shein has been stealing
their designs and selling them for a fraction of the cost.
Here are just a few examples
Shein responds to complaints by quietly removing items from its listings.
Other times, the item in question may just reappear.
Shein, of course, claims that it respects intellectual property rights
And that it takes all claims of infringement seriously.
Shein’s actions, however, say the complete opposite.
And they’ve ended up facing dozens of lawsuits because of it.
Design theft aside, there are a ton of other shady things that Shein does.
After all, if Shein wants to make more green than this bikini bottom, it’s gotta do more
than just steal ideas.
Although, if this is one of their original ideas, I see why they steal.
This looks like if the Grinch were a bedwetter.
In addition to theft, it’s also an environmentalist’s worst nightmare.
We’ll forget for a moment that the whole point of fast fashion is to constantly chase
ever-changing trends with cheap, quickly replaced and quickly discarded clothing.
Shein, in particular, also uses materials that are not just cheap but harmful.
Given that fabrics make up around 60% of the cost for clothes, it makes sense that Shein
resorts to using cheap materials.
But they’re not just cheap.
According to Bloomberg, Shein products contain over 95% new plastic.
And they shed microplastics each time they’re washed.
Microplastics by the way, have now been found even in the placentas of unborn babies.
Wait a minute.
Microplastics from China are getting into unborn baby placentas?
That means they’ve been part of Chinese territory since ancient times!
But it’s not just plastic, either.
The Environmentalist group Greenpeace released a study claiming that various hazardous chemicals
used in Shein products broke EU regulations.
And Greenpeace weren’t the only ones.
In 2021, a CBC Marketplace investigation found that “one in five items had elevated levels
of chemicals — including lead, PFAS and phthalates — that experts found concerning.”
This included a Shein jacket for toddlers that contained almost 20 times the amount
of lead that Health Canada deems safe for children.
I’m surprised Shein doesn’t brag about this when accused of theft.
“They’re totally different.
Your skirt is made of safe products.
Ours is made from lead.
This way, Superman can’t see through it!”
Remember back in 2007 when there was a massive scandal involving lead paint on toys made
in China?
I guess giving lead poisoning to children still isn’t enough of a reason to stop doing
business with China.
The cost of cheap Shein products isn’t just the environment or our physical health, either.
User data is offered on a silver platter to Shein.
Remember when I mentioned how Shein’s inhouse software uses AI and other advanced technologies
to track fashion trends in real-time?
Well, where do you think it’s getting the data?
“Shein collects data from customers using their social media apps and sites to track
their shopping behavior, as well as customize their preferred clothes at lower costs than
competitors.”
Given that every Chinese company is compelled by Chinese law to give the Chinese Communist
Party access to data whenever it asks for it, you’d best assume that the CCP can access
whatever Shein accesses.
You know what app you don’t have to worry about that with?
Mustapp.
This is why it should be #1!
But it’s not just the CCP getting their hands on that data.
Criminals can easily access user data as well, as New York discovered after 39 million Shein
users had their accounts stolen.
This included credit card information and personal information, including names, email
addresses, and hashed account passwords.
And Shein had the audacity to lie about it, saying that only 6 million consumers were
impacted.
They were fined $1.9 million, but that’s just a slap on the wrist for a multi-billion
dollar company.
What wasn’t known at the time was that Shein collected a lot more data than just that.
Microsoft researchers later discovered that Shein’s Android app also read clipboards,
meaning that whatever you copied, such as passwords, financial details, or other sensitive
information—Shein could see it.
Clipboard access is definitely not even remotely necessary for users to use Shein’s app.
Google and Microsoft confirmed that Shein removed this feature after it was discovered,
but who knows what other data collecting mechanisms Shein secretly tries to let slide?
Although, the same could be said about every Chinese app . Just a reminder - don’t use
Chinese apps.
We also have to talk about the labor conditions.
There’s a lot of documentation of labor abuse, especially in Shein-affiliated factories
in Guangzhou.
Their labor conditions make Santa’s workshop look like the Keebler Elves’ workshop.
They unionized.
They have an in-office gym and a PS5 in their breakroom.
“In one factory, workers were paid the equivalent of $556 a month to make 500 garments a day.”
“In another factory, workers had no base pay and were instead paid 4 cents a garment.
These workers were fined heavily for mistakes in stitching or sewing.”
Shein is also facing scrutiny by the US government over the company’s alleged forced labor,
Especially since investigations like Bloomberg’s lab tests link Shein’s cotton to Xinjiang,
the region where Uyghurs are being placed in forced labor camps.
Shein denies that it’s using forced labor, but given how it has a track record of lying,
I’d take Shein’s word with a grain of salt, in a bucket of salt, with a salt-lined
rim like a martini glass.
Shein shady practices deserve consequences, and the first step is to delete it if you’re
already using it.
Support designers and local clothing businesses instead.
Protect your own personal information.
Don’t be complicit in ruining the environment and people’s lives.
And while not everyone can afford to dress like a furry in space, if you really want
grossly cheap prices,
There’s always Walmart.
Ugh, you know Shein is bad when Walmart is the more conscientious option.
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Once again, I’m Chris Chappell.
See you next time.