Age of Awareness

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Here’s Why You Should Never Shop at Shein No Matter What

The fast-fashion company you should avoid at all cost

Jerren Gan
Age of Awareness
Published in
5 min readJul 14, 2021

Photo by Francois Le Nguyen on Unsplash

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Shein is an online clothing retailer that everyone seems to shop at nowadays and their popularity is something no one can ever deny. A simple search on TikTok shows that the hashtag “#shein” has 10.4 billion views.

Marketing itself as “an international B2C [business-to-consumer] fast fashion e-commerce platform” that “prides itself on offering on-trend styles catering to both young women and teens, that won’t break the bank.”, Shein has really set itself apart from other fast fashion retailers.

While fast fashion places like H&M and Zara introduce new pieces by tracking trends and going through a 3 week process to come out with new designs, Shein is able to use real-time data to cut this process to 5–7 days.

This allows them to continually introduce trendy items while removing things that do not sell easily. And this model works. As a matter of fact, Shein had an annual revenue close to 10 billion USD in 2020.

Yet, despite all of the cheap trendy pieces they carry, Shein is a place you shouldn’t be shopping at.

Harming the Environment as a “Real-time” Fashion Company

Like every other fast fashion company, clothes produced by Shein are often lower quality and not made to last.

After all, their clothes are supposed to be trendy. And following the trend means that these clothes do not have to last past their short fashionable lifespan.

Yet, being cheap also means that many of their pieces are made with synthetic fabrics like polyester and nylon. Unlike their short lifespans in our closets, clothing made from these materials do not decay.

This means that every piece of clothing we buy from Shein will likely spend much more time in a landfill than they will ever spend in our wardrobes.

To make things worse, Shein pushes out designs much faster than any other retailers out there. Their own CMO Molly Miao has revealed that the company drops “700–1,000 new styles daily.”. Combined…

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Age of Awareness
Age of Awareness

Published in Age of Awareness

Stories providing creative, innovative, and sustainable changes to the ways we learn | Tune in at aoapodcast.com | Connecting 500k+ monthly readers with 1,500+ authors

Jerren Gan
Jerren Gan

Written by Jerren Gan

Systems Engineer | Writing about the environment, mental health, science, and how all of them come together to create society as we know it.

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