Not long ago, SHEIN announced that it will enter the plus-size menswear track. As soon as the news came out, the annual revenue exceeded 10 billion US dollars, ranked first among shopping apps in 56 countries, and surpassed Amazon in the second quarter of this year to become the "fast fashion" cross-border e-commerce platform with the number one downloads of shopping apps in the United States. SHEIN, once again "breaks" into the public eye.
Founded only more than 10 years ago, it started by selling wedding dresses. How did this very low-key cross-border e-commerce platform in China grow into an "invisible clothing giant"? There's a key element to the answer: digital.
Taking the global fast fashion brand ZARA as an example, the delivery cycle from market research, design to production and shipment is three weeks. But SHEIN only takes 10-15 days.
How to achieve super Zara efficiency for more than 7 days? The answer given by SHEIN is that it has powerful data collection and front-end and back-end linkage capabilities.
Based on this, Morketing hopes that this article will cut in from the perspective of digitalization and marketing, and interpret the story behind SHEIN from the aspects of product production, user access and platform construction.
1. Create a "digital brain" to achieve "real-time fashion "
In the field of fast fashion, the first problem to be solved is "fast" - to quickly capture the trend of fashion and complete product production as soon as possible; and cross-border e-commerce also faces unfamiliar local markets, and it is difficult to capture the needs of consumers in different regions. problem.
Taking SHEIN's 1015-day shipping cycle as an example, it relies heavily on strong data support. Xu Yangtian, founder and CEO of SHEIN brand, worked in search engine optimization in a cross-border service consulting company in his early years, and has certain experience in network data analysis. Around 2014, SHELIN began to develop its own data collection and feedback system.
The system can access the framework provided by Google Trend Finder to detect current trends in any region, and also access a patented technology developed by the SHEIN team to collect user feedback from applications. The information collected through this system will be provided to SHEIN's suppliers to guide them in designing products and making immediate responses to consumer preferences.
Then, the information will be connected to SHEIN's supply chain information system. Through complex calculation methods, the number of stock orders that suppliers need is calculated, and the calculated results will be sent to each clothing supply factory of SHEIN, and the production end can follow this data. Carry out stock production. In addition, the system can detect inventory and sales in real time, and feed back to the manufacturer to avoid the problem of inventory backlog.
With such an intelligent system, after 2015, SHEIN telemarketing list moved the company headquarters to Panyu, the garment manufacturing center in Guangzhou. SHEIN requires all cooperative suppliers to be within a 5-hour drive from Guangzhou, the procurement center, in order to obtain the most concentrated and interactive industrial cluster.
And all suppliers must also use SHEIN's supply chain management software. As a result, a clothing production line composed of thousands of manufacturers is connected to the same "brain". The front-end sales data and the data of the back-end links are shared in this system, and different manufacturers can coordinate and divide labor. To achieve the best cooperation and scheduling.
At the same time, SHEIN has also improved its own distribution system and invested considerable manpower in the warehousing and logistics department. It has more than 4,000 employees around the world and can deliver goods to more than 220 countries and regions around the world.