From wedding dress supplier to beating Amazon, how did Shein become the most downloaded clothing app?
Shein is a high street fast fashion brand selling through its own website using artificially intelligent software to track consumer demand and predict trending outfits to fulfill through its vast supplier network in China.
Many fashion chiefs grumble on practices taken up by Shein as it took over nearly 25% of US fast fashion market sales shaking up competitors like H&M and Zara. It is not the AI or an unparalled supply chain capability which makes Shein so successful, rather the aggressive marketing strategies used to appeal to young consumers and make what they would like on on Pinterest or Instagram in a way such digitally native customers like.
Shein was able to create a persona of being more realistic by having influencers and customers test and share their products when competitors would depend on models that would often not really resemble what a normal customer would look like.
TikTok
Having a huge following of 6.2 million people on Tiktok Shein surpases its competitors like H&M who only have 260k followers. They use Tiktok to not only show how outfits will look to make people visualize it better with videos often called (Get ready with me), but also allowing customers and influencers build an online communities around hashtags which make their image more relatable and enforce a herd effect. For example, hashtages like #sheinhaul have gathered 2.6 Billion views on Tiktok alone with people copying similar videos with their own purchases. According to a survey done by YouGov, 62% of people believe influencers more than celebrities and other media which makes it a great tactic to market products through them. An example of this in this video where influencers used TikTok hauls as a way to encourage buyers to join in these trends.
Instragram
With 1.38 billion users daily, 76% of which are Gen Z users, instagram is an incredible source of traffic for Shein. It echoes a very similar social media presence to Tiktok targetting 27.7 million people. The extensive user engagement reflects reinforcement of excellent social media marketing by ensuring frequent posts catering to all time zones. For example, in the past 24 hours Shein has posted 8 different instagram stories within the span of 8 hours, each being posted every 2 hours so they last up to 24 hours along with 13 feed posts within a day that last on their website until deleted. The trick here is to keep even the users with low user engagement interact with atleast one of their posts by frequent posting. While this might not necessarily translate to guaranteed sales for the brand, however it also does not eliminate the chances of attracting more consumers given people engage with multiple social media platforms. Thus serving a sense of reinforcement for any clothing article.
