At DigitalX this week, part of the RetailX Spring Festival, one of the most thought provoking sessions was a fireside chat with Peter Pernot-Day, EVP, Head of Strategic and Commercial Affairs for North America & Europe at Shein. You might think that Shein’s phenomenal sales was the point of interest, but it’s actually Shein X.
Shein have essentially broken down the entire fashion supply chain into components, separating all the parts of the process to enable them to iterate fast, constantly producing new fashion garments and manufacturing them in small runs of maybe 100 pieces and getting the online for sale. Peter puts this in marketing terms as a giant A-B test but for product instead of content. Shein can tell, almost within hours, if a particular garment is going to be a hit or a flop and they amass a ton of data on what’s selling and what’s not enabling them to iterate fast.
But what Shein X has done is to recruit thousands of designers around the world to do the design work for them – Designers can upload factory production ready products and get small runs in front of their global audience, effectively becoming a design marketplace where talented fashion designers, artists and brands can scale their businesses like never before.
And the interesting word here is ‘Brands’. Yes, designers and artists can work with Shein to sell their products on the platform leveraging Shein’s on-demand manufacturing. But brands can also leverage Shein’s ability to create product.
So the long term play for Shein X is not simply to empower design talent around the world. Their aim is to offer their manufacturing capability to anyone and everyone who wants to access it. There’s no real difference in the processes Shein has put in place for a designer working from their flat in London to an inhouse design team working for a brand. Shein X can offer brands the ability to iterate their fashion designs faster and more easily than ever before and become an outsourced manufacturer in a similar way to many businesses today outsource their cloud computing to the likes of Amazon AWS.
We’re all familiar with SAAS (Software as a service) and just about every business (and individual!) will be using some SAAS service, MAAS – Manufacturing as a Service is where Shein X is heading.
2 Responses
Yeah it works great if you have
1) A workforce you can exploit
2) A government whose goal is to undermine your main consumer’s economies and thus provide tax breaks
3) A slave workforce from genocide picking cotton and other raw materials
4) Having subsidized shipping to your main consumer markets, makes it cheaper to sell than in your customer’s market itself.
5) Your main consumer market being too useless, it cannot impose VAT, customs duty, or any other kind of tax based on profit, cost, or sales price.
6) A government-controlled social media app that lets you access millions of consumers
If you have all these things in place, things work great.
’. Yes, designers and artists can work with Shein to sell their products on the platform leveraging Shein’
Note : Shien will then steal your designs, and you will need to create news ones, which Shein will then steal again.
Basically with most western small ecommerce businesses now dead, and not investing in new models or designs and taking risks to copy.
They need new products but dont want to take the risk or upfront costs themselves.
Lovely.