Shein in 5 key figures
The brand generated more than $15 billion in revenue in 2021 (a 900% growth in 3 years!). We are talking about the 6th largest fashion e-tailer in France (2.6% market share ahead of H&M 2.4 and Zara 1.3) which was recently valued at $100 billion . This is more than the valuation of Inditex which markets the brands Zara and Stradivarius (67.5 billion) and H&M (23.2 billion) combined. For comparison, ByteDance (TikTok group) was valued at $140 billion.
Shein claims more than 40 million spam database active buyers, returning to the site or app at least once a month.
Shein is among the top most downloaded apps in 2021, in 6th position in France (ahead of Facebook) and in 2nd position in the United States.
The Keys to Shein's Success
We can clearly talk about success after citing these different figures. A word on the concept of ultra fast fashion to start, these are companies that renew their collections very regularly, every week or even every day.
Several ingredients can be put forward to explain this success: low prices, monitoring fashion trends, testing many products in small quantities, real-time analysis of sales data, the use of a large network of workshops for manufacturing and reduced production times, the mobile application that was designed like a video game, or even a social media, the massive use of traffic creation levers such as SEO, online advertising and social networks, and finally the solicitation of influencers. We will look more specifically at this last point in this article and to discover Digimind's analysis from the consumer point of view, you will have to download the study.
Influencers who talk about Shein
Reech analyzed posts from 3K influencers who mentioned Shein on social media in 2021. Several things to highlight:
– The brand has been mentioned many times since March 2020 and the lockdown period associated with the closure of stores in France.
– Shein is one of the Fast Fashion brands most mentioned by influencers in France, in 3rd position (18%), behind Zara (40%) and H&M (20%).
– The influencers mentioning the Shein brand are mainly from the mid tail, i.e. having between 10,000 and 100,000 subscribers on their main network.
– 94% of the influencers mentioning the brand are women, 32% of them are between 18 and 24 years old and 50% of them are between 25 and 34 years old.
– The followers of the influencers who mention the brand are 79% women, the majority of whom are between 18 and 34 years old.
– Instagram is the platform most used by influencers mentioning the Shein brand. Outside of stories, they mostly make posts (55%), then carousels (43%) and videos (2%).
– Influencers mentioned the brand on average 7 times during the year with peaks between June and August.
– The top hashtags used in organic posts show that the outfits worn are very present on influencers' posts (#ootd, #outfitinspiration, #look…), which can surely be explained by the absence of stores to try on the products.
– The top hashtags used in partnership posts are #sheinpartner, #collaboration, #partnership but are not always very explicit (#ad).
– Practices that could be greatly improved in terms of transparency of partnerships, only 30% are declared in accordance with ARPP rules.
– A very positive sentiment in the comments of influencers’ posts and the use of many positive emojis such as the heart, the smiley face, the fire…
– Shein surpasses its competitors on impressions, engagements and media value of influencers’ speaking engagements (EMV).
