Tech Won't Save Us - How SHEIN Took Over Fast Fashion w/ Nicole Lipman

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Nicole Lipman to discuss SHEIN’s rise to the top of the fast fashion industry and how it exacerbates the sector’s labor and environment problems.Nicole Lipman is a writer and assistant editor at n+1.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Nicole did a deep dive into SHEIN and how it operates for n+1.Paris wrote about the Shut Down Shein campaign.Amazon benefits immensely from the US de minimis rule.Ten years after the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh, many problems remain. Support the show

A lot of things that look very beautiful in real life are going to look very beautiful in a photograph. But a lot of things that look really beautiful in a photograph are going to look like shit in real life. They're made of plastic and they're thin and they're itchy and they hang weird. But if you can pose just so in an Instagram photo, it doesn't matter. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week I have a fantastic episode for you. But before we get into that, an update on last month's membership drive. As you probably heard, if you were listening

to the show last month, Tech Won't Save Us turned four years old. And to celebrate that, we asked you to sign up and help us hit a goal of 200 new supporters in the month of April so that we can make a special series looking at the AI hype, the data centers that power it, and the growing opposition that exists to their construction and the vast resource use that they demand. Now, we did not fully hit our goal last month, but we did really good. About 130 people signed up to become new paid supporters or upgraded their memberships on Patreon. And thank you to all of those people, to all all the people who have been supporting the show for months and years before that. And of course, to all of you who listen as well. We didn't hit our goal, but we do still want to make this series. So our plan now is to connect

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feel free to reach out to us. My email address is on my website, or of course, the show's email address is on techwontsave.us. This show really would not be possible without the support of listeners like you and our supporters on patreon.com. So thank you again for supporting the show last month

as we turned four years old. We have some really fantastic conversations planned for you over the coming months. So keep tuning in. And if you do enjoy those episodes, consider becoming a Patreon supporter to help support the work that goes into making it. With that said, this week's guest is Nicole Lipman. She is a writer and assistant editor at N Plus One and wrote a fantastic piece recently about Shein. Shein, of course, is the Chinese fast fashion company that is really taking over that sector that is incredibly popular on TikTok in particular

and with younger people, but whose market share is growing immensely, not just in the United States and Europe, but really around the world as people are drawn not just to its kind of gamification tactics and the way that its app is set up, but of course, it's low prices, which is what many people are looking for, especially when people are so stretched with rising cost of living and just the general difficulties that come with life these days. And so in this conversation, we dug into what Shein actually is, how its model actually works, how it competes with the other fast fashion companies like Zara and H&M that we're more used to seeing. And of course, how it uses social media in order to gain customers and to get people

interested in the brand. And of course, you know, we also talk about how in the United States and, you know, other countries as well, there's this growing pushback or desire to regulate Shein and how a lot of that is just focused on getting rid of this major competitor to a lot of fast fashion companies instead of putting real regulations on the way that fashion is made in the first place so that the problems with the Shein model aren't present at any other companies as well. As these Chinese companies become increasingly competitive with, in particular, American tech companies that we're used to seeing. We want to be doing more to understand these companies. Of course, we did an episode on TikTok

about a month or so ago. As the prospect of a TikTok ban in the United States look more likely, we now see that that is very likely going to happen. So if you do want to go back and listen to that when you can, in a few weeks, we will also have an episode on BYD, major Chinese auto manufacturers. So stay tuned for that. And of course, if there are other companies that look like we should be doing an episode on them, we will do that in future. And with that said, if you do enjoy the show, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice. You can, of course, share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making the show,

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Nicole, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to chat. I've been wanting to do an episode on Shein for a while because, you know, it is this company that's really like emerged the scene, is a major competitor for our traditional fast fashion companies that we're used to seeing around. But also, I think especially a lot of younger people who are interested in clothes or even look at clothes online will be very familiar with what Shein is because it is all over the place now in a way that me, as I am getting slightly older and like not seeing as much of. So I guess to start, people might be hearing, okay, Shein, you know, they probably heard some

stuff in the news about it. Maybe they're not super certain what it is. So how would you describe Shein to someone who isn't super certain what this company is or does? Sure. So Shein is an online only clothing retailer, or it's a clothing and now sort of other stuff retailer as it's expanding into other products. Shein was founded in China about 10 years ago and is now based in Singapore. But the easiest way to think about it is as a fast fashion company akin to H&M or Forever 21 or Zara. Yeah. And it's just become absolutely huge, right? In the sense that like, obviously we know that these other fast fashion companies that we're used to seeing Zara, H&M, things like that, these are global brands as well, but it seems like Shein has kind of even

eclipsed that to a certain degree in the degree of size that it has and like the global reach and scale that it has. Yeah. It's actually sort of difficult to really understand the sheer scale of Shein until you start looking into numbers. Something I learned in researching the company is that in a period where other traditional fast fashion retailers like Forever 21 and H&M produced a few dozen thousand garments, like 35,000 garments, Shein produced 1.3 million garments. Yeah. It's hard to even like wrap your head around it. It's so massive, but I want to explore the model and how it works a little bit more. But before we do that, I wanted to set the stage for it, right. To talk about a bit of that history, because as you mentioned, there are these fast

fashion brands that we're much more used to hearing about and seeing and, you know, likely shopping at, right? So when did fast fashion really emerge and how was that like a real shift in, you know, how the fashion industry worked and like how people clothed themselves compared to how they used to do it? So before the fast fashion industry became the way that most Americans clothed themselves, clothing production and design was a much smaller industry. A lot of clothing production, especially before the industrial revolution, just took place in the home. And even in the early 20th century, you're seeing a lot less sort of major brands, global or even national chains than you do when the fast fashion industry starts to emerge in the late 60s and early 70s with the brand Zara. Zara was founded in Spain in basically the 70s.

The founder of Zara began working on the brand in 1963. But essentially, Zara developed this new system called quick order fast response that became really the blueprint for how all major fast fashion brands operate today. And essentially in the seventies, when Zara began making its own clothing, most companies that were doing larger scale garment production were outsourcing their labor and materials to Asia, places like China and India and Bangladesh, where labor was really cheap. And the founder of Zara saw this and knew that this was really a way to cut costs, but also realized that outsourcing labor to countries really far away gave the manufacturers a lot less control over the products and over the

speed. And so what he did is brought all of that manufacturing and design into Spain. So he worked with local producers and local transportation and really developed a clothing business that was based exclusively in Spain and very close to A Coruña, which is the city where he grew up. That made clothing more expensive to manufacture, but it also made the company much more nimble. And it allowed Zara to place much smaller orders of clothing than they would had they been outsourcing their labor to China. And so essentially, this is what Zara sort of pioneered what we're now very familiar with in the world of clothing, which is looking at runway collections and sort of like high-end clothing design, and then just duplicating that at a cheaper price, often with much worse materials, but like bringing that sort of high-end fashion, designer fashion down to sort of an average consumer price level. And this is really what Zara did is they were like, we see these fancy designs.

We're going to copy them. We're going to make them cheap. And so they're manufacturing these clothes in Spain and then they're bringing them to their stores in Spain in these really small quantities. And Zara asked store managers and cashiers at these Zara stores to report back to the company and then back to the factories about which garments were selling well, which garments weren't selling, and also things that were more immaterial, like buzz around certain products. What were people gravitating to in the stores? What were they talking about? And then that feedback was used to make future decisions about how the clothing was produced. So a jacket, for instance, that was selling really, really well, they would go back to the factories and be like, we need more of this jacket. But if you have a pair of pants that nobody's interested in, they can go back to the factories and say, hey, stop making these. We don't need them anymore. And that really becomes the sort of

hallmark of fast fashion. It's so fascinating to hear you describe that, right? Because, you know, obviously we have this idea of fast fashion today is something that is always going to be outsourced. And obviously we'll talk about how, you know, a lot of that has been outsourced now, but how the original idea was kind of to bring it back so we have greater control and you can even see that kind of like early rudimentary like data collection of trying to get the hype and the feedback from the stores to like figure out what is going to inform the other things that the manufacturers are going to be making to be sending into the stores so you have like this low inventory and quick turnaround. And so you can, you know, quickly churn out these new styles that to have them in the stores more quickly than like what

you would kind of traditionally have with, I guess, the more luxury fashion brands where, you know, you have these different seasons of clothes, you know, it only happens on a shorter timescale. And with the fast fashion, of course, it's in the name, you kind of get turnaround much more quickly, you get new styles more quickly to try to like, get people into the clothes more commonly. How does that model that is kind of pioneered by Zara, then get picked up by these other fast fashion companies who then integrate it with this outsourcing anyway, because you know, the H&Ms and things are making the clothes in Asia, not, you know, say in Sweden or something like that. How do they take that model and then kind of build on it

and transform it and bring it into these larger kind of global supply chains? So Zara develops what you've really just hinted at, which is that there's this sort of new philosophy of design, which is that instead of designing a collection to last a whole season, you have these super quick design periods where clothes are in store for a really limited amount of time. And then they're coming out of the store, which means that

customers have to go to the store to get those things that are there now. But they also have to come back in two weeks because there's going to be more garments. And so this becomes sort of the ethos of design that most fast fashion companies roll with as this technology and this industry develops into the 21st century. So Zara sets the blueprint for how fast fashion operates globally and how all the major fast fashion brands manufacture and design their clothing. But other companies like H&M or Boohoo, ASOS, Forever 21, they are still doing their manufacturing in Asia where labor is really cheap, but they're building on Zara's design philosophy and this quick order, fast response method to sort of integrate those techniques and that successful

approach to fashion design and fashion marketing with this extremely exploitative labor that they're sourcing in Asia. And these companies sort of have to fight factories at first to get them to accept these smaller orders of clothing. It's just hasn't been standard practice before this, but it becomes this industry standard. So the factories also don't have a ton of wiggle room in whether or not they're willing to accept these orders. If every clothing company just wants to order these slightly smaller numbers of garments, then you sort of have no choice but to accept. But something that does develop in this period is this industry standard of paying factories late. It just becomes the way that this industry

operates becomes normal. And these fast fashion companies are just notorious for not paying their factories on time. Yeah, that was something that really stood out in the piece. Like, you know, you have these factories who are in Asia with these workers being paid not very much money. And you can assume that, you know, obviously the company has gone to Asia so that they can lower the cost of production. So the factories are, you know, not making tons and tons of money if you compare to like what you'd have to pay over in Europe or North America or something. But then these companies that are making some pretty substantial profits, I would imagine, are like stiffing these manufacturers

on the other side of the world and not paying them on time, which is something very basic that like anyone would expect. But what are some of the problems that people have been concerned about for a while when it comes to fast fashion? Because, you know, as you talk about, it really transforms things. It makes it so that people are buying a lot more clothes, but it also changes how the clothes are made and kind of what goes into them. What are some concerns that people have been calling out with that fast fashion model? Yeah, there are a lot of concerns about fast fashion and primarily they fall into two camps. One is labor and one is environmental concerns. In the environmental concerns bucket, you have these fast fashion companies mass

producing plastic materials at this enormous, basically incomprehensible scale. And when you have clothing companies that are using primarily polyester and spandex and other synthetic materials, because those materials are cheap, you're then producing all of these garments that don't decompose. And because of the way fast fashion and especially American patterns of consumption work, you have a lot of discarded clothing. And then this clothing is plastic. And so it's going to landfills and it is just sitting there for thousands or millions of years because your spandex body suit isn't going anywhere into the soil. You also have toxic chemicals used in the production of these plastic clothes. And then of course, all these global brands have this massive shipping

energy that they're using. So there's oil to run the equipment and electricity and all the horrors that you get with global transportation. There's just so much gas and oil and toxins being spewed into the atmosphere. The textile industry is the second largest polluter in the world. And then on the labor side, you have these concerns about labor rights and fair pay. Employees make, it feels generous to even call them poverty wages, a few cents per garment. If that, they often work 18 hour days, seven days a week. Some reports in Sheehan factories show women using their lunch breaks to wash their hair in the company's factories because these

workers basically don't have an opportunity to go home. If they do, they're certainly not spending a lot of time there. And then of course, you have the sort of dovetailing of the environmental and labor concerns, which is that workers in these factories are really being exposed to dangerous situations. You have all of these toxic particles that seamstresses are breathing in. You're also working with machines that are dangerous. Sewing machines have lots of sharp pieces and they move really fast. You've got needles and knives and working in garment manufacturing is not without its risks. I also don't know if you've ever been in a room with even a home sewing machine, but these machines are really loud. So you have these factories that are just working at this really loud volume in these really dense conditions. Everybody's breathing in toxic fumes. nobody's getting paid. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster, which many people are familiar with, didn't change how clothing was manufactured. These conditions still exist all over the world. Yeah. And that was, I guess, an early case in New York. Is that right?

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And then of course, we saw much more recently, I think one of the big stories that really stands out is the factory collapse. I think it was, or maybe it was a fire in Bangladesh a bit over a decade ago now, where there was this initial narrative that like, oh, this is going to change everything. It's going to be so much more ethical now because people have woken up to it. And like, as I understand it, didn't change a whole lot. Yeah. I mean, it seems that people learn about these disasters and don't change their habits. People know about the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013, and they still go to Primark and they buy cheap clothing because that's what they understand in many ways that isn't their fault. That's what

they understand clothing can and should cost. Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense. And this is part of the reason why I wanted to get into that kind of history of fast fashion before digging into Shein itself and the model there, right? Because I think it's important to understand how, you know, this way of thinking about fashion really emerged and the problems that have existed with this model for decades now that are just being kind of built on and, you know, you could say accelerated to a certain degree with Shein. So when we think about that company, you know, this major Chinese company that has emerged over the past few years or whatever that people have become much more familiar with over that time, how does that build on the

model of fast fashion and how is it distinct from how these other companies operate? So Shein is operating with the basic fast fashion model that Zara and these other major fast fashion companies developed in the last few decades. But where Shein really changes the game or develops the game is in its use of technology. And so obviously all these companies are using computers. Zara is not having store managers just report like what jackets people are liking on the floor. It's 2024 and they have access to computers too. But Shein really relies extremely heavily from its earliest stages on algorithms and other pieces of technology to really drive this fast fashion model. The founder of Shein, in fact, wasn't a fashion person. He was an SEO guy.

And so from the very earliest stages of Shein, you have somebody at the helm of the company who just cares about what's going to sell and what's going to work online. More ways the SEO guys are like destroying the world. I hate to hear it. They're everywhere. work online. More ways the SEO guys are like destroying the world. They're everywhere. But yes, when Shein is founded in 2011 as SheInside, that's where the name comes from. The company originally operates like a drop shipping business, which is something that people might be a little bit familiar with. But basically, the dropshipping model for Shein worked where the company selected designs from Guangzhou's local garment wholesale market and posted those designs on the Shein website and then sold those designs to customers outside of China at a small profit. So Shein makes money by making a profit on the price from which they're buying the clothing directly from the wholesalers. And the

wholesalers are making money because they are reaching a much wider audience than they would be without the Shein side website. And so the company works like that for a few years and sort of builds somewhat of a brand. And then in 2014, changes its name to SheIn and begins to design and manufacture its own products instead of just using supplies from the local wholesale markets. SheIn develops its own supply chain in Guangzhou and later in Panyu and transforms basically from an e-commerce website into a brand. And am I right that when it comes to Xi'an, like when I was reading your piece, I was thinking back a bit to Zara, right? And the fact that Xi'an doesn't seem to be producing a lot of its garments in like India and Bangladesh and places

like that. It does seem like it's using a lot of manufacturers that are located close to it in Guangzhou and kind of other nearby parts of China. Would that be right? Yes. So you have this sort of ideal for Xi'an confluence of positives where Zara is manufacturing garments locally in Spain. And so you got to deal with the more expensive labor that comes from that. But Xi'an is based in China. So their you got to deal with the more expensive labor that comes from that. But Shein is based in China. So their local manufacturers are these really cheap factories that have been built up by decades of the fast fashion industry. It also means that Shein has these more direct relationships, these factories, because they're local. And something that Shein does in its very early stages that

really sets it apart from other fast fashion companies, especially companies using these same factories, is that Shein pays on time. And so these companies are much more willing to work with Shein than they might be otherwise, especially because Shein is requesting orders that are even smaller than other fast fashion companies are asking for from these factories. But Shein is going to pay them. They just developed this reputation for being good and fast. And so companies or factories are like, we will take a chance on you. And that really works to Shein's benefit.

It's incredible how such a small change can like make such a huge difference. But when I was reading it, it brought to mind like years ago, I remember reading the story of this like rich dude who bought off a bunch of gas stations in like Northern Europe or something like that, and just started cleaning the bathrooms regularly and like made that part of the brand. And because people knew that if you went to this gas station, the bathrooms would be clean, like just these little things that you can pick up on that can make such a huge difference. And of course, like if a factory or a manufacturer is going to be paid on time,

that's going to be huge to them. And I think this is important for the Shein model as well, because you said that they're designing their own clothes, but they still do operate in that way you were talking about before, where they do still buy a lot of things from like these small independent manufacturers, as I understand it, who kind of design their own things. Is that right? Yes. So Shein works with both original design manufacturers and original equipment manufacturers. So these are basically two kinds of factories for the brand, one of which is producing Shein design clothing, and one of which is basically producing clothing designed by the factory and then is being sold on the Shein website as Shein clothing.

It's all listed exactly the same for the purposes of the consumer. Yes, it's all listed exactly the same for the purposes of the consumer. Yes, it's all listed exactly the same for the purposes of the consumer. Yeah, it's fascinating to read that. And in the piece, you talked about how, you know, Shein really builds on this fast fashion model, but in some ways, or in many ways, it also emulates Amazon a lot more than like these traditional fast fashion retailers. Can you talk about that comparison and, you know, what it seems to have learned from how Amazon operates? So Shein, I think is most similar to Amazon just in its sheer scale. And if you open up even the

Shein homepage, you'll just see so, so many products available. And both companies also feel kind of junky when you're browsing them. Like it feels like they just don't feel very real. They feel kind of shitty. And it seems that this doesn't matter to consumers because Amazon obviously is like this extraordinarily powerful behemoth and so is Shein. These are two companies that also really just come out of a tech ethos and develop their own technologies that then shape sort of the rest of the industry. They become the standard bearers for, I was going to say their respective industries, but ultimately Shein and Amazon are part of the same industry, which is e-commerce. And though Shein historically

has been focused on clothing and particularly women's clothing, the company also now sells tons of products. You can buy like home goods and furniture and like office supplies and small electronics on the Shein website, just like you can Amazon. Fascinating. So like Amazon started with books, you know, Shein built this fast fashion empire and now is using it to get people to buy other things as well. Not wholly surprising, I guess. Obviously part of this discussion is just how quickly Shein has become so popular, right? I feel like a few years ago, it was something that few people in North America at least had heard of or were regularly using. But all of a sudden, it seems

like it's everywhere. And in the piece, you talk a lot about how influencer marketing has been really key to this, right? Like using the social platforms and getting people who are popular on those social platforms to be talking about Shein and buying things from Shein, or at least receiving things from Shein to then kind of show off to the people who follow them. How has social media played in, you know, popularizing Shein to, you know, this whole kind of new generation of consumers? It's a great question. And I think it's really an essential one for understanding Shein and its popularity and power. The company certainly would not be what it is without social media. And I think particularly without TikTok, which has become really a huge traffic

source for the brand. You sort of have this in two ways, one of which is technology based. So you have this whole system of influencer marketing that anyone who spends time online is now familiar with. You have people whose jobs are basically to sell products to their followers and companies benefit from this by sending them product, reaching a larger audience. And those influencers often make commissions on the products that really encourage them to keep up with the system. Shein, for one, has been working with influencers since, I believe, 2012, which is really early for this kind of marketing and very essential for how Shein developed its reputation and scale. It's an obvious thing to think about today, but over a decade ago, it was pretty novel to think about sending free product to basically hot girls on the internet and having them sell it to teenagers. That sort of method of influence wasn't yet proven. And so this whole system of influencer marketing that begins on Instagram and still certainly has a stronghold over the Instagram experience also really takes

off on TikTok, where you just have so much more content, or at least it feels like so much more content when you're using TikTok and just dealing with this endless scroll. And if you fall into, like I did when I joined TikTok, sort of fashion TikTok, you're inevitably interacting with influencers who are making these really short and really compelling videos about why you should buy this garment and why it looks good and how all of your followers are going to think you're so cute when you're wearing this silly skirt. And it's really effective. And it feels like person-to-person marketing. It feels more quote-unquote authentic than just like a traditional ad campaign because an influencer who you've probably developed somewhat of a parasocial relationship to, your friend is telling you to buy this clothing. And so you have this

sort of marketing apparatus that's really impossible to imagine without these social media platforms. But then you also have this sort of cultural shift in fast fashion and the way people think about clothing that really comes from Instagram and TikTok and the sort of short attention span economy, which is that before Instagram and TikTok come into the play, you have a lot of fashion content happening on blogs, like in these WordPress communities. And you have writers and kind of early stage influencers talking about clothing that they're wearing, but it's much less monetized. And for the reader, it feels much more unique and quirky and genuine that these people were making these blogs because

they loved clothing and they wanted to share it. And for many of them, they weren't making any money. It was just sort of a passion project. But then you have the development of these social media platforms. First, Instagram, where a lot of the bloggers move, which makes it easy and sort of imperative to monetize your content. And so people who were previously online, just sharing outfits that they liked are now sharing outfits they liked on a platform that's a for profit company. And they are being encouraged to make money off of their, their outfits and their follower accounts. And of course, this changes the way that those bloggers, those posters get dressed because the algorithm makes it so that they get more likes and more followers if they're posting more frequently and they're posting more new stuff. So you have

this whole sort of attention economy of just like new, new, new all the time. And eventually Instagram develops these like shopping features within the app. So fashion girls can tag a brand in their Instagram posts and you can click on it. You can go directly to the brand later. You can click on the very outfit. You can buy it in the Instagram app. And all of this clothing is really, it's not existing in real life. You're interacting with it on your phone. You're seeing it only on your phone and you're selling clothes that look good on your phone. And, you know, a lot of things that like look very beautiful in real life are going to look very beautiful in a photograph,

but a lot of things that look really beautiful in a photograph are going to look like shit in real life. Like they're made of plastic and they're thin and they're itchy and they hang weird. But if you can pose just so at an Instagram photo, like it doesn't matter. And of course people are sort of becoming on the fashion internet, even like low level content creators or writers or just normal people who like clothes are all kind of culturally encouraged to develop their own brand and, and to act like this and to pose in these cute outfits online. And it's way less about how you're walking around or going to work or being on the subway, what you're wearing then it's about what you're wearing on the internet, because that's what people look at. And that's what lasts.

And you have this just sort of really speed up and intensify as the fashion world moves to TikTok, where you're dealing with even shorter attention spans. You're dealing with what anecdotally seems like a younger audience. The kids are on TikTok, as they say. And that means people with less money to spend on clothing. And, you know, I would think just sort of less awareness of the horrors of fast fashion, because like, even though I have been thinking about this my whole life, like when I was 12 years old, 13, like I didn't really care about how my clothing was made. I wasn't thinking about that. I just wanted something that was going to be cute to wear to school.

And, and that remains even as, you know, the kids get smarter and are involved with leftist politics from an earlier age. But it all kind of comes back to this culture of speed and influence. And it doesn't matter how your clothing feels in real life, as long as it looks good on the computer. And it also means that you're not really encouraged to buy things that last. You're just encouraged to buy things that last. You're just encouraged to buy things that look good, which again, contributes to this culture of waste and makes a company like Shein that is just manufacturing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of garments a year to keep producing at that scale because people just want to buy more and more and more to show on social

media. Yeah, it makes perfect sense, right? Especially when all of these young people, you know, we see these surveys where like young people want to be influencers and stuff like that, but they also just see their friends, you know, posting on social media and they have these parasocial relationships with these influencers and then seek to emulate it. And of course, one of the things with people who are interested in fashion is that of course you need to have a bunch of different outfits. You can't just be wearing the same thing in all of your videos all the time because people will be like, you know, where are the different outfits? Where's the fashion? How are you showing off that you have this like really distinct style?

And so then, of course, unsurprisingly, all of these other young people who are watching this and who want to try to emulate these people who they look up to are trying to have these kind of unique wardrobes and this whole load of different outfits of their own. And I'm sure fast fashion and of course, you know, she and by bringing the prices down and, you know, having so many more possibilities to choose from makes this even easier for them, to kind of get all this extra clothes to fill their closets and whatnot. And sure, you know, it might fall apart much more quickly or get ripped, or it might not look as nice as what it looked like on the website, but you're not going to have it for nearly as long because it's designed to be that way, regardless of like the broader consequences of that. Yeah. And I think it's important to

remember that for a lot of these consumers, especially younger consumers, like the system of consumption isn't their fault. And people who are buying fast fashion at a normal scale, not doing these like massive Shein hauls on TikTok where an influencer dumps out like dozens of garments from a giant shopping bag onto the floor and talks about how little they cost. Like this is just what people think they can buy. And I can know how much like exploitation is involved in the creation of fast fashion clothing, but I also know how nice it is to wear a great new outfit and to look good in a photo. And these desires are so ubiquitous and they're really out of our control as consumers. And I've seen a lot of backlash to backlash against Shein, which is sort of like, all I can afford is fast fashion. And it's classist to be against

fast fashion and especially Shein, which is the cheapest of the major fast fashion companies. And I don't agree with that. I still think it's imperative to take a moral stance against this industry and the system of manufacturing, which is destroying people's lives and destroying the planet. But it is true that most people just don't think about this. And we don't have a culture that's telling them to think about this. And so it's not really their fault. Yeah. And there's also the culture of like the expectation that individuals should be the one who need to act in order to change these things when the fast fashion industry and the expectations that we have all of this clothes and are constantly kind of cycling through all these outfits are expectations that are created by one capitalism, because, you know,

you have this kind of quicker turnover of products. So it works for these companies, but also from media, right? To create this expectation that you need to look a particular way that the way that you look needs to be changing frequently with ever more quickly changing styles and trends and things like that, right? So all these things are manufactured and then individuals and especially younger people are subject to them and feel like they need to kind of keep up with it. So, you know, you can't just place the blame all on them for living within a system that, you know, has been handed to them and that they have very little power to control. I also just wanted to mention before we get away from the influencer side of this, that,

you know, if people want to go back to an episode I did last year in June of 2023 with Emily Hun, we talked a lot about kind of the influencer industry and especially it's, you know, history and fashion and things like that. One of the things you mentioned there is that TikTok has been really key for Shein and for the promotion of Shein. Would I be right in saying that Shein is basically everywhere now on all of these social media platforms because it's so popular, but what is the relationship to TikTok in particular? And is this like kind of a special relationship that exists or is it simply the case that because TikTok is so popular with young people, of course, you know, Shein is going to be very popular there because

that is where it reaches its customers. I think the sort of particulars of that relationship or what would be unique about the relationship between Shein and TikTok is less direct and more sort of amorphous or qualitative rather than quantitative in that both TikTok and Shein encourage these patterns of consumption, whether it's of clothing or of content at a similar scale and with a similar kind of low level attention, like not really thinking that hard about what's going on. Shein works on TikTok because when you're on TikTok, you're just scrolling through so much content and so many people and everything's just coming at you so fast. And so most of the time, unmemorable and unremarkable. And the Shein website basically works in the same way.

There's thousands and thousands and thousands of dresses. And you can just scroll through them. You can buy them because they're cheap. And then they show up and you're not really thinking about them in the same way that maybe you spend a minute and a half watching a TikTok and 45 minutes later, you couldn't, you know, describe any part of that video. That makes perfect sense, unfortunately. gamifies the kind of consumption of this clothing through Shein points, which customers can receive not just from buying things, but also from particular interactions through the website. And that also promotes like a ton of kind of fake reviewing or positive reviewing that is just

designed to allow people to get points. Can you talk about how that works and how, you know, makes the site even less reliable if you're trying to look for something of quality? Yeah. Something I found extremely fascinating and often extremely funny when I was just spending a lot of time on the Shein website are these customer reviews of products that are so junky and nonsense and And sometimes it's very difficult to tell if like an 11 year old wrote this or a computer did. And there's just this like whole economy of the Shein review section. And I think that becomes a really important part of the shopping experience because of the just sheer mass of products available. There's this real camaraderie that emerges in

the reviews of people telling each other, like, you should buy this. You're going to look good in this. Like I wore this to prom and like everybody thought it was amazing. And it's kind of nice people saying like, this piece is actually good. And you see a lot less of like, don't buy this. This piece is actually shitty because it seems like Shein removes negative customer reviews. I found a hard time finding official information about this. Shein is sort of notoriously secretive about a lot of the ways that the business's algorithms operate. But you go on Reddit and you just see all these girls like Shein deleted my reviews. So it certainly seems like anecdotally, the company is eliminating the

negative reviews. But yes, another reason why these reviews are so essential and so popular is that they help customers earn Shein points. So posting a review earns Shein points. It earns five Shein points. If you post a review with pictures, that earns 10 Shein points. And if you post your size information attached to the review, that gets you an additional two points. And every dollar you spend on Shein also earns a point. And every 100 Shein points turns back into a dollar. So customers on the site are encouraged to just keep buying stuff, but also to interact with it, to review and comment and respond to other reviews and include as much information and selfies in their reviews as they can. Because the more they do that, the more points they get and the more money they can spend on Shein.com. And you can also get points just by opening the Shein app or watching Shein

live streams. Occasionally, Shein also has mini games on its website that also earn you points. There's just all these purposefully addictive ways for customers and especially kids to really keep coming back to Shein. It's designed like a game. What I was surprised to see was in some of the reviews, like people begging for other customers to like their review because that would get them more points, right? Yes. It seems like at a certain point, Shein was giving out more points to comments that got more reviews, but it also seems like the points system is kind of amorphous. I've found I had a

difficult time figuring out by the time the piece was published, if that system was still in place or if reviewers were just under the impression that it was in place because they were reading it in other reviews. But yeah, you have a lot of people just begging each other to like their reviews for points. Please like I'm broke, lol. My favorite review that I found concluded with this plea for likes on the comment, but also the disclaimer that sorry, I can't post pics wearing the items broke shoulder. Thank you for understanding. It's so wild. And again, like to me, when I was reading that, I was like, yeah, the comparison with Amazon holds here too. Like sure. It doesn't have the degree of gamification, but you know, you can't rely on their reviews either because so many of them are fake and AI

generated and stuff like that. Yeah. You have a ton of bots in the Sheehan review section. You also have customers who are sort of working like bots, like just copying reviews that are like Justin Bieber song lyrics into the box and posting fake size information. And it's because that gets you points. Like who cares what the review actually says? It doesn't seem like anyone at Shein is being paid to do any kind of moderating of the comment section. Unless it's to take off the bad ones, of course. Unless it's to take off the bad ones, of course. Unless it's to take off the bad ones, of course. You know, obviously, earlier, we talked about the issues that exist with fast fashion more broadly, right? The environmental issues, the labor conditions. When we look at

Shein and how Shein accelerates how fast fashion works, what do we see with the downsides of this model? The acceleration of fast fashion is just going to accelerate global environmental and labor catastrophes. I mean, in the way that sort of the existence of these companies and these social media platforms just encourage this kind of consumption to become the baseline and for customers to understand like, oh, a shirt can cost $5. And so a shirt should cost $5 as this extremely small order, fast response model driven by technology that Shein has really taken to new extremes becomes the dominant mode as companies like Shein and Amazon and AliExpress and Timu become the sort of standard ways for people, especially North Americans, to

buy stuff on the internet. You're just going to have these practices, these environmental practices, these labor practices also become the standard that it's increasingly difficult to challenge. Yeah, that's disappointing to hear, but not unsurprising. You know, one of the stats that really stood out to me from your piece was that only 4% of sheen clothes that are sold in the US are even made of cotton, right? The rest of this is kind of these plastic and artificial fibers. And, you know, I had Darna Noor on the show a few weeks ago, and we talked about the problem of the lack of proper recycling of plastic and how difficult that is to even do. And, you know, you've already talked about how so much of fast fashion is plastic,

but it's not nearly as high as the percentage of Shein clothes, which is kind of plastic on this kind of new level. What are the issues there? Because it must be immense, especially as you talk about where this clothes is, you know, falling apart even faster than, you know, what we're used to with traditional fast fashion. Yeah, absolutely. I think the predominance of plastic in clothing and sort of the increasing predominance of plastic in clothing is a really huge problem. Yeah, you have all these environmental issues that plastic clothing doesn't degrade the same way that wool clothing or linen clothing does. But also plastic clothing just feels bad.

If you've ever gone to a thrift store and touched these like really thick polyester dresses from the 60s, like they just feel terrible and they're like itchy and sweaty. And that's sort of an unusual style for garments today. A lot of plastic is soft and it's stretchy and it like feels what we think of as comfortable, but it also just doesn't really last as a piece of trash out in the world. But these plastic clothes, they lose their shape and elastic gets stretched out and doesn't recover. And because it's so cheap, there's no sort of imperative to repair this clothing or to hold onto it because you can just buy new clothing. And if you buy stuff that's really cheap and it doesn't work, you're more likely to throw it out than you are to donate it even to a Goodwill just because it doesn't seem worth the time and energy to deal with something that was so cheap. And the cheapness epidemic and the plastic epidemic go hand in hand.

Plastic is cheap to manufacture. It's much cheaper than natural and organic materials. That's a really important point. And, you know, just feeds into this broader conversation we've been talking about where there's this encouragement for people to buy more stuff instead of, you know, quality stuff that's actually going to last a while because of the way that these business models work. You know, people might be familiar with the fact that there is a growing campaign or an on and off campaign in the United States to ban Shein. You know, especially last year, there was kind of

a big push when the prospect of a TikTok ban was, you know, around. Of course, the TikTok ban has returned. I'm not sure if I've heard so much about a Shein ban lately. But what do you feel is driving that? Is that about really taking on these issues that we've been talking about in the fast fashion industry? Or is it more about just kind of taking out a competitor to our traditional fast fashion companies that we're used to seeing around the main shopping streets and shopping malls and things like that? Yeah, I think the backlash to Shein in America is really interesting because you have sort of two opposite ends of the political spectrum opposing Shein. So you have people like me who are coming to the company and are like,

plastic, you know, massive manufacturing is bad. Like we shouldn't be encouraging this kind of consumption. Like social media is dangerous in these ways. But there are many less of those voices and are also much quieter than this kind of ultra right wing response to Xi'an and other Chinese companies that is just rooted in this like deep, deep anti-Chinese American sentiment and this really rampant xenophobia. And you have this company, Xi'an, that one way to look at Xi'an is as a major innovator and as this like extraordinarily successful story, this extraordinarily successful company. But right-wing lawmakers in America see that as a threat because any company that was founded in China, they see as connected to the Chinese Communist Party and they worry about the Chinese

government harvesting American data. There's a website I found in researching the piece that I actually tried to pull up this morning and seems to maybe have been removed from the internet, shutdownshian.com, which is this really insane website that basically says things like TikTok is the needle, Shian is the drug, like America's children are being poisoned by communism, and that's coming through their like spandex bandeau tops. Yeah, there's just this real American interest in denigrating China's success. And a very legible way to do that for the American consumer right now is to attack Xi'an. Yeah, I remember that shutdown Xi'an

campaign as well. And I'm surprised to hear the website is gone. I'll have to look it up after this interview. But yeah, like, I think you're absolutely right that there is this group of voices that saying we should be taking on these problems at their root in the sense of if there's problems with the fast fashion industry, let's regulate it, let's address those things. But it feels like so much or like the power behind the campaign against Xi'an is more just like we need to get this Chinese company out of here so that the other American and other companies that have been doing this for a while can just keep doing what they're doing. Something that is worth noting sort of in this vein is that Xi'an moved its operations from China to Singapore, I believe in 2022. Many journalists

and academics see this as sort of a means of circumventing this anti-Chinese sentiment in the US, especially as Xi'an has been eyeing a IPO in the United States over the last few years. They're now able to present themselves as an Asian company or a Singaporean company instead of as a Chinese company. And this is not an uncommon practice for originally Chinese companies to move their operations out of China. It's also notable that Shein has never sold and does not currently sell its products in China. It's all for a Western audience. Fascinating. I wasn't aware of that. But it reminds me of like TikTok as well, which is based in Singapore, as I understand.

And its CEO is also Singaporean and the American Congress does not seem to buy that because to them, he looks Chinese. So he's Chinese, but it's fascinating to me. And a lot of the arguments against Sheehan, you know, they'll bring up the kind of broader issues with fast fashion, but act like it is a Sheehan problem and not an industry wide problem. And also there's a big focus in the United States on this thing called the de minimis rule, which basically allows it to avoid taxes when it's importing goods that are, you know, basically have a low value. And they act like, again, that this is a Shein thing when Amazon is also, I think, the biggest beneficiary of that, if not, you know, one of the major ones. So again, that this is a Shein thing when Amazon is also, I think, the biggest beneficiary of that, if not one of the major ones.

So again, it shows this kind of hypocritical double standard where Shein has to be targeted for something that every other company is doing. And it reminds you of the TikTok thing as well, right? Where they act like TikTok is the source of all these problems, not just echoing what so many of the other social media platforms are doing. But the attempt at regulation is ban TikTok, not regulate the entire social media industry. Absolutely. And it's a funny thing to look at as a person on the left, because ultimately, I think Sheehan is dangerous, but not for these reasons that these right-wing lawmakers are claiming. And I think Sheehan is dangerous, but not for these reasons that these right wing lawmakers are claiming.

And I think Sheehan probably should be shut down. But it's difficult to argue that and not come across as sort of a conservative nut job. Like Sheehan is, to my understanding, the worst violator of human rights in the fast fashion industry. And because of its scale, it's also the worst polluter and the most flagrant IP thief. And these things are worth confronting, but not because they're Chinese, but because we have a moral imperative to produce garments in a different way. Exactly. And like we've been talking about where Sheehan kind of takes this model and accelerates it.

Of course, you can see how it then accelerates all of those problems as well. But addressing those problems doesn't just mean saying Shein bad, but it means regulating those problems when every other company does it as well. Nicole, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. Nicole Lippman is a writer and assistant editor at N Plus One. Thank you so much for having me. hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.