Author Description

With roughly 15.7 billion USD of revenue in 2021, SHEIN has emerged a new global superpower in the fast fashion. SHEIN provides clothing, shoes, accessories, and beauty products under 10 brands to customers at more than 200 countries and regions outside of the Mainland China. Although the total downloads of SHEIN Application (APP) in US was only lower than those of Amazon, the daily and monthly downloads of SHEIN APP has been higher than those of Amazon since March 2021. In addition, the speed at which a product is designed and introduced to the market on SHEIN is significantly faster than that on Zara. The market value of SHEIN is up to 100 billion USD, which has only been achieved by a few high-tech unicorn companies -- start-ups valued at 1 billion dollars or more. How did SHEIN, a company in a traditional garment industry with fierce competition, achieve such high market value in the global market? What is the development process of SHEIN? Which business model does SHEIN conduct? Is its model sustainable? How could SHEIN continue its success and sustainable development in the future? Answers to these questions would provide insight into the current practices and theories of innovation strategies and international businesses. This case introduces the developmental process of SHEIN by demonstrating SHEIN's agile supply chain system, reverse geographic arbitrage, and direct-to-consumer (DTC) business model, and demonstrates the company's success code. This case is designed to provide students with an opportunity to understand the applications of digital supply chain systems in the fashion industry and further explore the impact of business model innovation and international supply chain management on SHEIN's market growth and penetration whilst considering how SHEIN should maintain its long-term success.