Specialist
Executive at Shein Supply Chain Management Co Ltd
Agenda
- Shein – business model, evolution of merchandising model and changes in supply chain
- Product design principles, primary customer groups and consumer scenarios
- Requirements for suppliers’ hard capabilities and soft capabilities, supplier profiles and production capacity changes
- Scale and depth of SKUs and SPUs (standard product units), plus control of production cost and production quality
- Stability of cooperation with suppliers, supplier elimination rate, plus suppliers’ dependence on Shein
Questions
1.
Shein’s customers are mainly middle- and low-income people in western countries. Can you introduce to us Shein’s products and product positioning? What are its consumers’ consumption scenarios and psychology?
2.
What are the proportions of Shein’s apparel and non-apparel products? If we subdivide apparel into men’s, women’s and children’s wear and non-apparel products into footwear, bags, accessories and household goods. What about the sales revenues and proportions of these products on Shein?
3.
What are the sizes of Shein’s designer and buyer teams? What about its annual new product launches and product lifecycle?
4.
What are Shein’s new product development KPI and incentive mechanisms for its designers and buyers?
5.
What are the scale and depth of Shein’s SKUs, SKCs (stock keeping colours) and SPUs (standard product units) in recent years? What about the order volumes of these products?
6.
How does Shein help its designer and buyer teams with product development and design with information or internet technologies? How do its designer and buyer teams collect, acquire and analyse market data and integrate the analysis results into their product development and design? What are the roles of Shein’s related systems and technological instruments?
7.
Shein mainly cooperates with small and medium-sized factories. What quantities does Shein order from its cooperative factories for a single SKU? How does the order quantity affect the production or procurement cost?
8.
What data does Shein’s design and development department mainly analyse? How does it create some hot-selling products into best-selling ones?
9.
Which products does Shein define as average-selling products, hot-selling products and products to be removed off the shelves? In what dimensions does it divide products?
10.
How does Shein name and use SKUs at different stages? How does it collaborate with suppliers in this regard?
11.
What systems and software does Shein use internally in different links?
12.
Are these systems developed by Shein itself? Does it also use software of third-party suppliers such as Hangzhou Zhiyi Technology?
13.
Its suppliers mainly include small and medium-sized factories. What is the level of Shein’s production cost compared with that of big factories? What are its indicators for assessing the cost of making a piece of clothing? Is there a difference between Shein and SPA (specialty retailers of private label apparel) brands or other large-scale apparel brands? How big is the difference?
14.
Shein works with small and medium-sized factories to achieve the best cost performance. Its cost includes the wastage cost of fabric and supporting materials, the material selection cost, the secondary processing cost and the workshop cost. How does it control costs in different links? How does the quantified data show that it may not be able to further reduce its cost?
15.
What have been the changes to the number of factories that Shein works with over the past few years? What are its considerations when it assesses and chooses factories to work with?
16.
What have been the changes over the past few years? Among the factories working with Shein, how many have been eliminated? How many of them maintain stable cooperation with Shein? How many of them cooperate with Shein on a larger scale? What about the soft and hard capabilities of these factories?
17.
How many suppliers are there at each level from S to D? How big is the difference between suppliers at different levels in terms of production capacities or soft and hard capabilities?
18.
How many suppliers does each tier have?
19.
Why does the suppliers’ reliance on Shein’s system or business logic increase as the business grows? What are the main aspects of such reliance?
20.
Alibaba and ByteDance tried Shein’s model but failed. What are the reasons? What do you think are the main barriers?
21.
Some domestic cross-border e-commerce platforms are imitating Shein, including Chic Me which conducts overseas business and Cider which mainly offers women’s fashion products. What’s their performance in copying Shein’s supply chain system? Can they establish the same supply chain as Shein does?
22.
What kind of system does Shein use for product planning? It has established a dedicated product planning department. What’s its performance in inventory management?
23.
Based on its inventory management, operations and supply chain, Shein defines its safety inventory as 15-20 days. What’s the reason behind this? How does it balance the customer experience and inventory?
24.
How does Shein define the sell-through rate? What’s its discount strategy? What’s the sell-through rate of its full-price products?
25.
What’s the inventory replenishment or reorder mechanism of Shein? How does it place orders in batches? What’s its dynamic adjustment mechanism?
26.
What’s the order assignment logic of Shein? How does it estimate the sales volume and the order volume given to factories and arrange the first order and reorders?
