Won the top download list in the United States, Shein with Chinese genes has become another phenomenon-level application

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Text/Juny

Source/Silicon Star (ID:guixingren123)

It can be said that the situation of Shein’s development is described as overwhelming.

Just a month ago, Shein just completed $1.5 billion in financing and turned into the world’s third largest unicorn at a valuation of $100 billion. This month, Shein once overwhelmed other popular applications such as TikTok, Instagram, and Google Map. It won the championship position of the free app download list in the United States.

You must know that although Shein has already emerged before, its main record is still in the field of “shopping”. To be placed in the big pool of all application categories, Shein still has a certain gap with the champions of other tracks such as social networking, map navigation, and image processing.

But Shein has obviously entered an ultimate fighting state of “God blocking God”, and many giants such as TikTok, Meta, Google, Snap, etc. cannot resist its progress. Today, its popularity among consumers in the United States and around the world is much like a state where TikTok was born a few years ago, and it has truly become a phenomenon-level application.

According to the observation of Silicon Stars, although the daily rankings have fluctuated recently, Shein has been firmly in the top ten downloads in the free category, and the ranking is basically ahead of Tiktok, Instagram, Amazon and other applications.

Who would have thought that one day, the top two companies in the US App rankings would actually be two companies with Chinese genes? What’s interesting is that behind the rapid growth of TikTok and Shein, there are even some meanings of mutual achievement and hand in hand.

Traffic and sales, a win-win “collaboration”

As we all know, although Shein has been established for more than ten years, the time period when it really broke out is the last two or three years, which is almost synchronized with the rise of TikTok (with a slight lag).

This has a lot to do with Shein’s marketing model. Today, the reasons for Shein’s success can be roughly classified into two major aspects: one is a strong real-time supply chain system, and the other is a marketing strategy built on social media.

In fact, before Shein, ASOS, Boohoo and other fast-moving consumer goods brands have already started to work hard on the supply chain, and they have already surpassed Zara and HM in terms of timeliness. But none of them caught fire. It can be seen that between the two, a successful marketing strategy is the more critical factor for Shein’s explosion.

A major feature of FMCG brands is that they are trendy in style and low in price. Their target consumer groups are those young people who are not strong in purchasing power but like to follow trends. Shein realized this early on, and astutely captured that social media was the best way to reach this consumer group.

As early as 2012, when domestic Internet celebrities and live broadcasts were not very popular, Shein was already trying to cooperate with established Internet celebrity platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, starting with some small Internet celebrities and gradually groping out. A routine for creating popular traffic stickers. Around 2018, when TikTok, which has viral power, was just gaining momentum, Shein quickly seized TikTok’s territory.

At that time, Shein’s marketing on TikTok was very “barbaric”.

Regardless of popularity or the number of fans, KOLs can participate in promotion as long as they have an account, and once the promotion is successful, they can get 10%-20% commission for each order; everyone’s videos may be forwarded to Shein’s official account to get traffic Support, attracting users to post try-on videos and tag themselves; send free merchandise to these posters every month, provide exclusive discount codes; create various hashtags, and give prizes if they disagree…

Under such “indiscriminate bombing”, batches of TikTok girls fell into it, and Shein’s figure can be seen everywhere on TikTok.

Accompanied by rhythmic music, young girls change sets of brightly colored and fashionable clothes from Shein in quick succession. Continuously placing orders, Shein’s users and sales are also rising.

At the same time, for TikTok, Shein’s crazy subsidy and brutal promotion model has also brought more users, traffic and advertising revenue to the platform. According to the data on TikTok, as of now, the page views of the “Shein” and “SheinHaul” tags on TikTok have reached 27.4 billion and 5.2 billion times. Other tags such as Sheincare and SheinFashion also have dozens of views. billion views.

Many users joined TikTok to release their first video, attracted by Shein’s low-threshold subsidies and preferential policies, and some larger bloggers stepped up their promotion on the TikTok platform in order to gain more traffic. A virtuous cycle of traffic and sales.

Today, two brands with Chinese genes have become the apps that understand the preferences of young Americans. They all rely on the huge dividends of the Internet celebrity traffic in the Z era in the United States, and they have risen rapidly and subverted their respective industries.

The sword points to Amazon and gathers “Taobao power” to challenge the throne of e-commerce

When TikTok was calling the shots in the social field, causing the social empire built by Meta for many years to be in turmoil, Shein just surpassed Amazon in the e-commerce track, and he felt that he had to open the gap.

According to a new report from Business Insider, Shein’s app downloads were 13.8 million from January to April 2022, compared to Amazon’s 13.3 million, surpassing Amazon in quarterly downloads for the first time. Previously, data for the full year of 2021 showed that Shein’s 32 million downloads were still behind Amazon’s 40 million downloads.

In terms of growth rate, Shein has left Amazon far behind. In the whole year of 2021, Shein killed Amazon’s -2% growth rate with a year-on-year growth rate of 68%. This year, the momentum has continued. Compared with the same period last year, Shein’s download growth rate has reached 50%, while Amazon’s is only 0.75%.

Previously, Silicon Stars had repeatedly stated in reports about Shein that although Shein started from cheap women’s clothing, its goal is not only limited to the field of women’s clothing, but to be a full-category e-commerce like Amazon.

Various categories such as kitchen supplies, household supplies, pet supplies, children’s supplies, etc. are now almost all available on Shein, and many of the same products are not only cheaper than those sold on Amazon, but even cheaper than those bought directly from Taobao in China .

The reason behind this is that the huge overseas traffic and mature supply chain system accumulated by Shein in recent years have given Shein great bargaining power. At present, many domestic wholesale factories are scrambling to establish cooperation with Shein, and even continue to reduce profit margins just to be able to become Shein’s suppliers.

According to the observations of Silicon Stars, more and more domestic Taobao stores have also begun to cooperate with Shein in recent years, and use Shein’s platform to let brands go overseas. For example, including SimpleRetro, which mainly focuses on French style and has 1.3 million Taobao fans, Unifree, which focuses on girls’ trendy brands and has 1.74 million Taobao fans, etc. In addition, clothing from smaller Taobao stores such as Inflation, Dodc, and Jazzevar also appeared in Shein superior.

The prices of these products are mostly the same as the prices of domestic Taobao stores, and even after stacking platform coupons, the prices are lower than those in China, and the speed of product listing and updating has almost kept pace with that in China.

Although such cross-platform brand cooperation is currently mainly concentrated in women’s clothing. The direct impact is that the things we can see or buy on Taobao in the future can be bought on Shein at almost the same price in the future, but the delivery time is only a few more days.

In addition to gathering the power of Taobao, Shein has been trying various ways of playing recently, trying to get rid of the single “fast fashion” label.

The first is to launch various free-brand branch lines, including mid-to-high-end product lines.

Click on Shein’s “Brand” tab. At present, there are nine branches including women’s clothing, women’s shoes, beauty makeup, pet brands, and electronic products. These branch lines are all Shein’s own brands, with brand positioning ranging from low to high. Silk products similar to the art series recently launched by MOTF have both a sense of design and quality, and are no longer the cheap women’s clothing in everyone’s impression.

In addition, Shein often launches various co-branded products with celebrities, designers or well-known IPs. For example, the recently launched HelloKitty series of co-branded products and monthly co-branding with different young artists have greatly increased the uniqueness and diversity of the products.

A week ago, in response to many people’s doubts about the environmental pollution caused by fast fashion, Shein also launched a new environmentally friendly clothing line evoluSHEIN. These products are all made of recycled polyester, which can effectively reduce the production of raw materials and the consumption of water, energy and other resources. The first 170 products of the evoluSHEIN series were released on the platform on April 29, covering tops, skirts and trousers, and it is expected to expand to at least 1,500 before the second half of this year.

From the various measures Shein has taken recently, we can clearly feel that it attaches great importance to young consumer groups and its passion and action to expand the market, which is also in line with Amazon’s e-commerce business. Middle-aged atmosphere” is a stark contrast.

It is said that the back waves of the Yangtze River push the front waves. Whether the front waves such as Facebook and Amazon, which have been prosperous for more than ten years, will be stunned on the beach by the back waves such as TikTok and Shein, we may have seen from the choices of users. to the direction of some answers.

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