Shein: the New Favorite Shopping App

Shein is an online-only clothing store that sells the latest in fashion at very affordable prices. Its more famous and liked by the budget-conscious young adults across Europe, Asia and the Americas. It is dominating the shopping category in app stores in over 50 countries with its current success rate, taking a peck from Amazon. Amazon being among the 4 Big Tech, dominates the e-commerce world. While it is has provided a beneficial platform for new start ups and emerging businesses trying to get off the ground. On the other hand many of the more successful companies with a strong foothold are now more inclined to compete on their own terms free of the Amazon’s confines and leverage their own web stores, social media presence and supply chains to build their business and identity without having a marketplace like Amazon get in the way. Shein is a shining example of this trend. The Shein app was downloaded 14 million times in the United States in March, according to Apptopia.

Businesses going independent are more in the trend as the online shopping flourished more in the past five years. Setups like Casper the mattress maker, Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club the men’s personal care brands, Allbirds and Zaful footwear and apparel makers, gadget store Banggood, and power-bank maker Anker are just a few of the brands that choose to leverage their own web stores, social media presence and supply chains to build their business and identity without having a marketplace like Amazon get in the way.

By shortening lead times i.e. the time it takes for clothing to reach the store floor from the designer’s desk, brands like Zara, H&M and Forever 21 for the past couple of decades were nick-named the “fast Fashion”, when Gap and Calvin Klein were the fashion trend setters. Shein further takes this fast fashion trend one step further: Where brands like Zara and H&M take about three to four weeks to bring clothing from the ramp to the store, Shein bring the latest fashion trends to its online store in just a week or two by using a combination of real-time customer and predictive analytics, hyperaware fashion designers and an extremely quick and agile supply chain based in China to  from Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and TikTok .