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Shein, the fast-fashion giant known for its nearly infinite selection of goods, could go public as soon as next year.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Shein filed confidential paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering. The underwriters for the long-rumored IPO are Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. The company was valued at $66 billion in May and will likely seek a $90 billion valuation when it goes public, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.
Shein (a contraction of "SheInside," the company's original name) was founded in 2008 in Nanjing, China, by Chinese American entrepreneur Chris Xu. Its promise was to deliver the kind of very fast fashion that was popular with shoppers around the world while cutting out much of the markup by keeping marketing and other business functions in China.
In doing so, Shein built up a network of an estimated 6,000 suppliers, mostly in China, and saw annual revenue reach nearly $23 billion last year, according to Financial Times. Shein also attracted investors including Sequoia Capital China, Tiger Global Management, and the United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund.
Along the way, Shein became notorious for its constant churn of new products. According to a 2021 investigation by the nonprofit publication Rest of World, Shein adds between 2,000 and 10,000 new products a day, often in small batches to see what takes off. The report also found that Shein typically offers 20 times more items than competitors like H&M and Zara.
All of those on-trend pieces -- many selling for less than $10 -- made it a hit with online influencers, who post videos to TikTok and Instagram featuring their "Shein hauls." The company has recently begun experimenting with pop-up stores, and recently took a stake in Los Angeles-based Forever 21, another fast-fashion brand popular with Gen Z.
Although Shein moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2021, its strong ties to China have put it in geopolitical crosshairs. Shein will likely face strong scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers and calls for investigations into its supply chain before an IPO can go forward. Members of Congress and others have raised concerns that products sold on the website are made with cotton produced with forced labor in China's Xinjiang region. (Shein has said it has zero tolerance for forced labor and works with third-party auditors to monitor its supply chain.)
Independent designers have complained their work has been copied in cheap imitations that end up on Shein's website. Like all fast-fashion sellers, Shein's business model is often criticized for not being environmentally sustainable.
Lately, Shein has also faced fierce competition from Temu, a marketplace that predominantly offers goods directly from Chinese manufacturers. Temu, which is owned by Shanghai-founded, Nasdaq-listed PDD Holdings, has overtaken Shein in recent months, but both online retailers lag far behind Amazon in overall sales.
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Love It or Hate It, Shein Is Going Public
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29.11.2023
The Year IPOs Fell to Earth
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Small Businesses Find Their Clever Holiday Selling Approaches Paid Off
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Shein, the fast-fashion giant known for its nearly infinite selection of goods, could go public as soon as next year.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Shein filed confidential paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering. The........
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