Shein

Shein began in Nanjing, China, in October 2008 as ZZKKO, a business started by Chris Xu, also known as Xu Yangtian, a search-engine marketing specialist. Details of his background remain unclear: as the Guardian reported in 2022, accounts of his education and nationality conflict, and the company has said only that he was born in China. In its early years the business did not design or make clothes at all. Trading from 2011 as SheInside, at first as an online seller of wedding dresses, it worked much like a drop-shipping firm, buying from Chinese wholesalers and selling directly to customers overseas.

The company renamed itself Shein in 2015, and in the years that followed it built its own design and supply operation around Guangzhou, working with hundreds of small factories that could produce a few hundred pieces of a new style, test demand online and scale up only what sold. Data from its app and website, aggressive social media marketing and an early embrace of TikTok and influencers made it a phenomenon among young shoppers, particularly in the United States. An investigation by the publication Rest of World found that in the second half of 2021 Shein was adding between 2,000 and 10,000 new styles to its app each day.

Growth was extraordinary. The Wall Street Journal reported revenue of about US$24 billion in 2022, close to that of Zara and H&M, and a funding round that year valued the company at about US$100 billion. Shein moved its headquarters to Singapore, where Roadget Business, the entity that owns its trademarks, is registered, and opened a third-party marketplace in 2022. In 2023 it formed a partnership with SPARC Group, owner of Forever 21, under which each took a minority stake in the other.

That scale has drawn sustained criticism: over labour conditions and working hours in its supplier factories, allegations of copying independent designers' work, the environmental cost of ultra-fast fashion, and political scrutiny in the United States and Europe of its Chinese supply chain and its use of duty exemptions for low-value parcels. Plans for a public listing moved from New York to London and then, reportedly, towards Hong Kong, delayed by regulatory and tariff pressures.

Shein remains privately owned, with no physical shops beyond temporary pop-ups and no named designers. Within little more than a decade it has shown how quickly a digital retailer can overtake the established high street, and it has become the reference point in every debate about the cost of cheap clothing.