In order to strengthen its position in a sector that is becoming more and more competitive, Chinese fast-fashion platform SHEIN intends to treble the number of releases in India and shorten its design-to-launch period by a third, according to a top official.
Having re-entered India through a partnership with Reliance Retail in February this year, the company said that it is overhauling its supply chain to enable faster turnaround times. Moving ahead to attain this goal, the company has shifted from large-scale manufacturing hubs to smaller production lines with each line focused on developing a single new design every day.
Vineeth Nair, Chief Executive of Reliance’s fashion platform Ajio that runs SHEIN in India stated, “Our current timelines, measured from ‘thought to site’, stand at 46 days. We are targeting 30 days.” He further said that at present, they are delivering 320 styles per day which is about 10,000 a month and plan to scale the same to over 30,000 styles monthly in the coming months.
In 2018, SHEIN made its debut in India with its own e-commerce platform. But along with TikTok, WeChat and more than 55 other Chinese apps, the app was prohibited by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
The usage of customer data by the Chinese clothing retailer was one of the main problems with regard to SHEIN’s activities in India.
Reliance Retail operates SHEIN under a licensing agreement under the present partnership model, which guarantees full consumer data ownership in accordance with the business.
Products of SHEIN India are manufactured in India, as opposed to foreign markets.
“It’s still early days – just about three months since we introduced SHEIN to the Indian Gen Z,” Vineeth stated. He further added, “And we are still in the process of adding multiple products, which we intend to do in the next few months.”
According to him, the business sees two million average users per day, with women aged 21 making up 62% of the traffic.
According to Devangshu Dutta, Head of the Retail Consulting Business – Third Eyesight, SHEIN, the largest e-commerce-focused fashion store in the world, would have trouble replicating its worldwide success in India.
He noted, “SHEIN’s edge internationally has been its speed of dropping its products and the width of its product category. The India model is not the same. The India model of fashion is slower and the product category width is not as large.” He therefore said that the brand might end up competing with the already established market like Myntra, Zudio and the likes.
