SHEIN the ultra-fast fashion brand
what is SHEIN's business model?
SHEIN is the pioneer of a new type of Fast Fashion, the Ultra-Fast Fashion, and if the Fast Fashion business model was horrible, you may only imagine how bad this new model really is. Furthermore, SHEIN’s business model is so fast that it is considered to be real-time, not only Ultra-Fast Fashion, which is crazy.
Basically, SHEIN monitors fashion trends 24/7 with their strong social media presence, even more, they create trends where there are not any that benefit them by using influencers to achieve their goals.
Afterward, they produce these garments using a super short manufacturing cycle of 5-7 days which is terrible for the environment and the workers, even more than ultra-fast fashion’s 1-2 weeks manufacturing cycle.
Then the clothes arrive at the customers. Another absolutely dreadful practice of theirs is giving their customers bags full of clothes for a few dollars, terrible quality clothes that who knows how they are made to be that cheap and that will be disposed of after a couple of uses, partly because their customers do not need them.
In a nutshell, this is SHEIN’s business model, but there is a lot more to cover so if you want to dig deeper into their business practices feel free to read this article about SHEIN’s business model in detail.
what is fast fashion?
If we haven’t explained it to you later, and you have doubts about what are we talking about, Fast Fashion can be explained as cheap, in-vogue clothing that takes ideas from the catwalk or high-fashion culture and transforms them into articles of clothing in stores dangerously fast to satisfy buyer needs, with no regard to sustainability.
The idea is to get the freshest styles available as quickly as possible conceivable, so customers can eat them up while they are currently at the peak of their fame and afterward, tragically, dispose of them after a couple of wears. It frames a vital piece of the harmful pollution, toxic waste, overproduction, and utilization that has made fast fashion one of the world’s biggest polluters, producing 10% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
This is only Fast Fashion, you can only imagine what Ultra-Fast Fashion does. Anyway, if you want to know more about fast fashion and its consequences on our society, check the article is fast fashion a social issue?
why is SHEIN so bad?
SHEIN is not bad, it’s horrible, terrible, the worst of the worst you may say. As we said earlier, they have created a fashion business model 1000 times worse than Fast Fashion, which is so horrible and it’s the reason this blog exists. To make you understand it better here’s why SHEIN is so bad:
- Their clothes last for a few wears if they are worn at all. SHEIN has a model where customers buy so many clothes at once that many of them are thrown without even being worn at all.
- Their cheap clothes are made with synthetic materials like nylon and polyester, which because they are plastics last for thousands of years in the landfill without decaying.
- Their clothes are so bad that they do not even have a „quality” at all, this is a well-known fact even by their customers but the ridiculous prices „compensate for the horrible quality of their garments”.
- Their real-time trend following makes them create 1000 designs per DAY, which next to the fact that their clothes take 5 days to produce, is crazy, and makes you wonder what dark strategies they have to be doing to achieve that.
- They have no transparency about the making of their clothes at all, which is a huge red flag and makes many people think they have a bigger environmental and social impact than we think.
- They have been involved in many scandals where they created products of terrible taste, like Muslim prayer mats marketed as „frilled Greek carpets”, for which they apologized but sold a damn swastika necklace only a week later.
- They steal designs from small designers online, one example is the artist Tiina Menzel (@therese_nothing on Instagram), whose designs were stolen by Shein 6 different times in less than a year.
SHEIN has many other reasons that explain why they are so bad, if you want to dig deeper into the information listed above, feel free to read Jerren Gan’s article on why you should not buy from SHEIN.
does SHEIN care about the environment?
We know that SHEIN’s environmental impact is dreadful, but do they care about the environment and do they plan to change it? Let’s discuss it:
Officially SHEIN says they care about the environment and „they use materials and manufacturing cycles that are sustainable”, in reality, there is 0 proof SHEIN even tries to do any of that. Looking at their business model and the price and quality of their clothes, their statement can’t be further from the truth.
They make terrible quality clothes that are going practically straight to the landfill, without decaying because they are made from plastics and pollute the rivers and seas with the microplastics that wear off from their terrible quality garments. They have basically made cheaper than ever to pollute.
Not only that, the labor conditions of their workers are suspected to be slavery-like, which is the reason they do not disclose that information in any way. They say that „they treat workers with respect to the law” (Which is also bad because the laws vary a lot between countries), but considering their statements on the environment and their actions and how cheap their clothes are, it is no surprise that they may use slavery-like labor.
We are not done yet, sadly, because their impact on animal welfare is also improvable. Although they do not use exotic animal products, they use wool and they do not really care about animals or if their products have anything to do with animal suffering because they do not disclose their sources and do not have any policies regarding the matter.
Overall, SHEIN has a terrible impact on the environment, the workers, society, animals… unlike anything we have seen until now. This is very sad when so many people are in the slow fashion movement to stop Fast Fashion and its consequences. Something even worse is how SHEIN tells their customers that they care about the environment and the workers but make 0 effort to even care.
summary
This is all for today, now that you know more about SHEIN and their terrible impact on our planet, we hope you put this information into good practice and spread awareness in case any of your friends shop from this brand. If you yourself are a customer of SHEIN, please do not support such a planet-killing business model, shop 2nd hand, even from Fast Fashion if you have no other option, everything is better than SHEIN.
We hope you have learned a lot today, We’re thrilled to teach people around the world :). By the way, do you know about fast fashion and its terrible consequences for the environment, the people, and the economy? Do you know what Slow Fashion or the Sustainable Fashion movement is? You have to read these articles about this unknown but urgent subject, click here to read „Can Fashion Ever Be Sustainable?”, knowledge is power, ignorance is doom.
We also have a big surprise just for you! We have prepared a carefully dedicated About Us page where we will tell you who we are, what we do, our mission, our team, and many more! Do not miss out on this opportunity and click here to check it out. Also, you can visit our Pinterest, where we will pin sustainable fashion-related content and clothing designs that you will surely love.
