Zara stores are located in the city’s shopping malls. EFE/Xoán Rey
Chinese giant Shein is thrilled with the fast -paced fashion sector where Spanish Zara reigns supreme. According to an article published in the Spanish newspaper El País, this sector is worth 1.4 billion euros.
There have long been accusations of Zara’s plagiarism against Shein that only sells on the web. According to El País, thanks to a business model based on Zara’s, combined with the development of algorithms similar to those of e-commerce giant Alibaba or the short video application TikTok, this Chinese startup has secured a spot in the exclusive top three unicorns worth over $ 100 billion (about 96,000 million euros). Despite the doubts surrounding the brand’s quality and retention standards, as well as the countless criticisms it has received for plagiarism, Shein attracts millions of young people from around the world every day. day thanks to the speed with which they allow to renovate your wardrobe at a very cheap price.
Shein has brought about a revolution for fast fashion similar to the arrival of TikTok on social networks. “They achieved something that seemed impossible: create trends at a ridiculous cost and very quickly. That these three factors are fulfilled is very complex. Zara dictates fashion and changes its windows frequently, but Shein offers thousands of new products every day and the lowest prices on the market, ”Sucharita Kodali, sales analyst at Forrester said in the El País article. .
the success of the Chinese group was immense in the United States. According to consultancy Earnest Research, in the first three months of 2022 it accumulated nearly one-third of total apparel sales in the United States, which exceeded the sum of H&M (17%) and Inditex (10%).
It is also, the third best valued startup on the planet, also after Chinese ByteDance, parent of TikTok, and SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk. Its recent assessment at 100,000 million dollars is higher than the sum of the market capitalizations of Inditex (64,000 million euros) and H&M (20,600 million euros).
However, according to El País, Shein is so vague that even the U.S. investment funds that supply it, such as Tiger Global and General Atlantic, do not offer information.. That low profile allowed him to avoid campaigning against possible national suspensions with which his countrymen dealt last year, even in the face of growing rumors about an IPO on Wall Street, which, if fulfilled, will be first equity. operation of a Chinese company in the United States since July 2021.
And it is little known within the Asian giant about this company created in Nanjing in 2008 under the name SheInside. The business initially specializes in wedding dresses, which started in 2015.
Source: Clarin
