Shein: from wedding-dress drop shipper to the world's biggest fashion retailer
Shein began in Nanjing in October 2008 under the name ZZKKO, reselling clothes from Guangzhou wholesalers without designing a single garment. Within about fourteen years it had become the largest fashion retailer on the planet, adding thousands of styles to its app daily, while drawing persistent accusations over labour conditions, taxes and trademark fights.
Its founder, Chris Xu, was a search engine marketing specialist whose life story is oddly murky. Some accounts call him a Chinese-American graduate of George Washington University; others say he was born in Shandong in 1984 and studied at Qingdao University of Science and Technology, and the company insists he was born in China. In March 2011 the business registered SheInside.com, pitching itself as a leading wedding dress seller while also offering everyday womenswear.
From 2012 it built its own supply chain and courted fashion bloggers on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Buying the retailer Romwe in 2014 completed the shift to a fully integrated business, a shorter name followed in 2015 because it was easier to find online, and by 2016 Xu had 800 designers and prototype makers. It jumped on TikTok early, and by 2022 more than 3,000 suppliers around Guangzhou fed it. Between July and December 2021 it added somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 new styles a day.
Sales hit a reported $10 billion in pandemic-era 2020, the seventh straight year of more than doubling. A funding round in April 2022 valued it at $100 billion and it claimed 28% of American fast fashion; that year it also moved headquarters to Singapore while keeping warehouses and factories in China. Revenue reached US$32 billion in 2023, yet by February 2025 its valuation had slid back to $30 billion.
Young millennials and older Generation Z buyers drove the boom, and a 2022 survey of 7,000 American teenagers ranked it their second favourite shopping site. Bloomberg Businessweek argued the China and United States trade war handed it customs advantages. It has also faced reports of sweatshops and child labour, product safety worries, tax evasion allegations and lawsuits from rivals.
Source: Shein
