Ultra-fast Fashion Rot Spreads to Amazon
Amazon wants to one-up Temu and Shein.
In today’s issue of Back Row:
A look at Amazon’s plan to copy Shein and Temu.
How fast fashion gave way to ultra-fast fashion.
Loose Threads, including reported cuts at Burberry, Margot Robbie’s bump watch, and more.
Shein and competitors like Temu have grown so big that Amazon may be the only retailer that can compete with them.
And that’s exactly what it plans to do with a new discount marketplace that would allow the same suppliers who make goods for the ultra-fast fashion titans to sell their stuff through Amazon. Unbranded items would cost less than $20 each and ship directly to consumers from China in nine to eleven days, the thinking being that U.S. shoppers would wait longer than Amazon’s usual shipment speed for a lower price. The marketplace will focus on fashion, home, and other lifestyle items, and launch in the fall.
The marketplace was announced in a closed-door meeting with Chinese sellers in Shenzen. According to Jianlong Hu, founder of Brands Factory, which researches Chinese sellers and e-commerce platforms, Amazon requested the sellers keep the meeting confidential, but word of it quickly spread. “This shows Amazon is taking competition from Temu and Shein seriously,” Hu wrote on LinkedIn.
If the idea of Amazon — which has a dismal record when it comes to treatment of its own workers — getting into a mud fight with Shein and Temu scares you, it should. The ultra-fast fashion industry is associated with abhorrent worker conditions and environmental harms that impact all of us, particularly those in the global south. While it’s unclear how Amazon entering ultra-fast fashion will affect the market, it’s one of the few companies set up to capitalize on the business model.
“Amazon is one of the companies that can actually compete, because they have, obviously, the balance sheet, they have the systems, they have relationships with factories, and they have customers,” said Ken Pucker, professor of practice at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and the former COO of Timberland.
It feels like ages since fast fashion first became a concern, but it wasn’t really that long ago that it all started. People were calling for Forever 21 boycotts back in 2009, when the company appeared to be knocking off designers both large and small. It’s really, really hard to win a copyright claim for clothing design, so going after fast fashion for that wasn’t going to slow the industry down. Reports also emerged that Forever 21 was contracting suppliers who were paying workers $6 an hour — less than $7.25 federal minimum wage. From the Los Angeles Times in 2017:
A knee-length Forever 21 dress made in one of the Los Angeles factories investigated by the government came with a price tag of $24.90. But it would have cost $30.43 to make that dress with workers earning the $7.25 federal minimum wage and even more to pay the $12 Los Angeles minimum, according to previously unpublished investigative results from the Labor Department.
As Forever 21 faded (Shein rescued it from bankruptcy last year), Zara became dominant in the 2010s, building on the same strategy of knocking off the runways and iterating on trends, all while doing it cheaply and more efficiently.
Founded in 2008, Shein took the Zara model and improved it. With the help of algorithms that scan social media and e-commerce sites, Shein employs in-house designers and independent factories to gin up trendy clothes. It produces test runs of 100 to 200 products, then decides how many of each item to make based on sell-through rates on its site. The result is that Shein can go from design to product in 10 days with very little leftover inventory.
Shein entered the U.S. around 2017, and has experienced staggering growth, becoming the world’s largest fashion retailer in 2022. Today, the company sells everything from clothes to kitchen supplies to sporting goods. It was valued at $66 billion last year, with sales north of $30 billion and a sales target of $60 billion for 2025.
“It's staggering how big they've become in a very short period of time,” said Pucker. “It's bad for the planet, and it's terrible socially, but it is a more potent business model.”
Shein’s clothes average $14 an item, according to a report by Business of Fashion and McKinsey. However, many items on the site cost less, like this $5.40 boho maxi dress, this $6.69 bikini, and this $5.30 kids’ shirt and shorts set.
Just as we saw with Forever 21, these prices are made possible by paying sewers horrendously low wages, according to several reports. The U.K.’s Channel 4 investigated Shein factories for a 2022 documentary, and found that some workers were earning as little as four cents per garment and putting in 18-hour days, with one day off per month; workers were also fined two-thirds their daily pay for making a single mistake. Also in 2022, a Bloomberg investigation found that Shein items shipped to the U.S. contained cotton from China’s Xinjiang region, which the U.S. has linked to forced labor. (These reports hindered Shein’s IPO. The company gave up the effort in the U.S. after the SEC required it to make a public filing. It’s making another attempt in London, where it made a confidential filing in early June.)
On its site, Shein claims it conducted 3,990 audits using third-party auditors in 2023, which would fail to account for a good chunk of its total estimated 5,400 factories. (I should note that fashion supply chain auditing is also a deeply flawed system, in part because factories hide labor violations.) A recent Public Eye investigation found that some factory employees were still working 12-hour days without lunch and dinner breaks, at least six days a week if not seven. Additionally, investigators observed children in the factories:
Teenagers, who were 14 or 15 years old according to the investigators’ estimates, performed simple tasks, such as packaging, or sat at the sewing machines themselves, instructed by their parents, presumably to learn their trade. Whether they were paid for this remained unclear.
Shein also imperils the environment. Zara sells around 35,000 new styles each year, while Shein sells 1.3 million in the same period. It’s not just the pace of production that’s concerning, but also what the clothes are made of. Here’s Pucker writing on Shein for Business of Fashion:
Almost two thirds of Shein’s products are made from microplastic-shedding polyester, more than double the proportion found in H&M and Zara’s collections. A recent Greenpeace investigation found that 15 percent of the company’s products contain concentrations of hazardous chemicals that breach EU regulatory limits. (Shein has said it works with third-party testing agencies to ensure its suppliers meet chemical control standards aligned with European regulations).
Consumer warnings abound on the internet about chemicals in ultra-fast fashion products. At least one woman went viral on TikTok after saying she experienced chemical poisoning from Shein nail foils. Remember: these are the same factories that Amazon will be contracting.
All of that said, I don’t blame consumers for shopping on Temu and Shein, and I won’t blame them for buying the same stuff from Amazon. A lot of people are struggling to meet their basic daily needs and can’t afford to spend much money on clothing or anything else.
Let’s say you’re in a position to spend more to purchase things that are ethically made. As you likely know, our system for that is deeply flawed. If you care about purchasing ethically made, low-carbon-footprint clothing, you — the consumer — have to figure out if it meets a certain standard.
“What's better — a cotton T-shirt, an organic cotton T-shirt, or a nylon T-shirt? The answer is, it depends. It depends on where it was made. It depends on the thread gauge. It depends on if you care about water or carbon. If you have to answer that to a customer — ‘it depends’ — and go through a long explanation, you've already lost them,” said Pucker. He pointed out that, to many consumers, a “sustainable” T-shirt seems the same as one that’s not. “To a consumer, there's no real functional benefit of sustainable fashion. Just perhaps a psychic benefit that they’re helping the planet,” he added. “Unfortunately, I think it's pretty compelling to buy a $7 pair of jeans if you're not rich.”
The data backs this up: 57 percent of U.S. shoppers have bought something on Temu in the last year, according to a survey by ecommerce marketing firm Omnisend, even though only 7 percent of Americans say they trust it.
Amazon, where an estimated 230 million Americans shop, getting into this market only seems to make the need for regulation that much more urgent. The onus should not be on consumers to figure out how things are made, the onus should be on companies to tell consumers how they make things.
Pucker has been supporting the Fashion Act in New York, which would force large companies like Shein to make disclosures about their supply chains, which would likely lead to many companies cleaning up their acts. But lawmakers are yet to pass it.
Amazon has been trying for many years to gain dominance in fashion. More than a decade ago, it was salivating over the high margins of luxury fashion. But, despite efforts like the Covid store it made at Anna Wintour’s behest to save Vogue’s favored brands, it never got a luxury fashion business off the ground. Some analysts have argued it will be difficult for Amazon to compete in ultra-fast fashion. But, as a store Americans already associate with low prices, it probably has a much better chance of competing in ultra-fast fashion than any other kind.
Loose Threads (Lots of Celebs Because Fashion News Is So Dead Right Now, Enjoy!)
Seems Succession’s ludicrously capacious bag moment didn’t do Burberry any favors. Burberry, whose stock price has been dropping, plans to cut hundreds of jobs, reported the Telegraph. Employees think that up to 400 positions could be eliminated.
Margot Robbie is pregnant with her first child with husband Tom Ackerly, a director who worked with her at her production company, LuckyChap. Do you think this means she has to wear Chanel maternity?
Per Page Six, Justin Bieber was reportedly paid $10 million to perform at the pre-wedding ceremony of Anant Ambani, whose dad is worth $123.4 billion. This is the same wedding that had another event in March where Rihanna performed for a reported $6 million. And in May, some guests went on a three-day cruise from Italy to France where Katy Perry, Pitbull, and David Guetta performed, and I’m dying to know if that means guests were stuck on a boat with all of them at once.
I almost forgot about Kylie Jenner’s clothing line Khy. Harper’s Bazaar noticed that she’s shilling all-new bathing suits from that very brand on Instagram.
Jennifer Lopez has been in the Hamptons and the internet (raises hand) is really into her clothes.
I have never been to Shein or Temu websites and I never will. Your story, though, underscores a big problem IMHO. Consumers need access to clothes that are somewhere between luxury and ultra fast fashion. Affordably priced, that are ethically made and well constructed. It's the old saying, "you can have it fast, good or cheap, pick two." Le sigh.
I wish there was more consumer education on clothing - what higher quality cotton feels like, what a seam allowance is, what a French seam is, heck - how to look at seams as a way to see how well the clothing is made! H&M had good quality basics when it launched and was a staple of my wardrobe in my 20s. I wish there were better quality options in that mid-level price point for consumers!