Shein: The Cost of Fast Fashion

 by Juliette Franks

Shein is the fastest growing online fast fashion company, valued at $100 billion in 2022. They supply clothes to over 150 countries from thousands of factories in Guangzhou, China. Despite criticisms over their sustainability and working conditions, they are still extremely successful. 

Fast fashion involves poor quality clothing for cheap prices. Companies like Shein produce new styles regularly to create new fashion trends, meaning clothes are worn only a few times before becoming unfashionable. Consumers wear most items less than 10 times on average, either because of poor quality, or because they are updating their wardrobes. The fashion industry causes 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions, more than air travel and shipping combined. Furthermore, the cheap prices mean people view the clothing as disposable, however most of the clothing cannot be easily disposed of. Vast amounts of textiles are burned or landfilled. Each year up to 92 million tonnes of clothing ends up in landfill. It then releases methane gas during decomposition and leaches toxic chemicals and dyes into the groundwater and soil. These staggering statistics show the terrible consequences of the fast fashion industry, and Shein is the main culprit.

Shein produces far more clothes than any other fashion businesses, due to an extremely short production cycle. The total production time, from concept to final project takes two to three weeks. They produce clothes in small amounts, then once they become popular they are mass produced. This means that Shein can have an astounding number of clothes available on their website. They are selling 314,887 new styles on their US website alone each year to date:

The short production cycle causes the workers to have to work inhumane hours, as they are not allowed to leave until all the orders that need to be shipped that night are finished. Many workers work from 8am to past midnight, which is very clearly against Chinese labour laws that stipulates that workers can only work 8 hour days. Despite this, the suppliers seem to get away with it, because even after an investigation in 2021 that led to the conclusion that 83% of suppliers required corrective action, undercover reporters found that the workers at a suppliers factory were still not being treated fairly in 2022.

Despite a growing awareness as to the dangers of fast fashion and the dreadful working conditions in Shein’s factories, people continue to regularly buy products from Shein. Many manage to justify buying from Shein due to the extremely cheap prices. If it saves them the extra £15, then why not buy it, even if it was made by an exploited worker at 1am? This perspective is one that Shein utilises by often copying popular products that are far more expensive. For example, Shein sold an identical pastel pink and orange Zara shirt costing £24.86 on Zara, but only £3.73 on Shein. They are able to reproduce popular fashion within a week due to their short production cycle. 

Furthermore, Shein uses marketing very effectively to boost sales. They employ influencers as a relatively cheap way to advertise their products to their target audience. In India alone, Shein worked with around 2,000 influencers in 2018. Specifically on Tiktok, Shein hauls became very popular, videos accumulating approximately 4.8 billion views when using the hashtag #sheinhaul. Therefore, billions are exposed to Shein products and encouraged to go buy more products. Once people are on the website, their senses are bombarded with the infinite scroll of products, the countdowns, and the ‘hot products’. These create a feeling of jeopardy on the website, as if the buyer needs to immediately buy products before they sell out, or the sale ends. Like many other websites, Shein uses an algorithm to manipulate users into seeing products they are more likely to buy. All of this results in people buying products in a rush, often without considering the ethics behind them, and leading to the justification of buying from Shein.

In 2022, Shein announced it was donating $50 million to clean up fashion waste, however many critics have said this is an extreme example of greenwashing. Despite what seems to be very generous, Shein is doing nothing to tackle the root of the problem. They are still producing huge amounts of textiles, and continue to encourage fast fashion by creating poor quality items. Whilst this donation will be helpful in clearing up the vast amount of textiles in landfills, more and more are still being produced and thrown away at the same time. Meaning Shein is still making money, and the problem of fashion waste is not being resolved.