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。
什么是快时尚？
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 为了满足买家的需求，他们以危险的速度将它们转变为商店里的服装，而不考虑可持续性。
我们的想法是尽快提供最新鲜的款式，这样顾客就可以在它们目前正处于名气巅峰时吃掉它们，然后不幸的是，在穿了几次后就把它们扔掉。它揭示了有害污染、有毒废物、生产过剩和利用的一个重要组成部分，这些因素使快时尚成为世界上最大的污染者之一，产生了世界温室气体排放量的 10%。
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,检查文章快时尚是一个社会问题吗？
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.
概括
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.
我们希望您今天学到了很多东西，我们很高兴能够教世界各地的人们:)。顺便一提，您知道快时尚及其对环境、人民和经济造成的可怕后果吗？您知道什么是慢时尚或可持续时尚运动吗？你必须阅读这些关于这个未知但紧迫的主题的文章， 点击此处阅读“时尚能否可持续发展？”，知识就是力量，无知就是厄运。
