A week ago, Bytedance closed Dmonstudio, an independent cross-border women’s clothing station that was only 100 days old.
What really piques everyone’s curiosity is that many people didn’t know the existence of Dmonstudio until it was shut down. ByteDance’s low-key launch of this website may be to benchmark SHEIN and develop cross-border women’s clothing. Even among the team of more than 400 people, nearly half were recruited from SHEIN.
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Chinese fast fashion brands are being sought after by foreign consumers
SHEIN is already the favorite fast fashion brand among Europeans and Americans, ranking first in the world in mobile fast fashion downloads.
After the latest round of financing, SHEIN’s valuation has reached 100 billion US dollars, and it is also reported that the controlling entity has been changed to a Singapore company, paving the way for listing in the United States.
Whether the store is closed or launched, the core behind it is: clothes and money. According to the “2021 China Cross-border E-commerce Development Report” jointly released by Deloitte and Google, clothing and fashion brands have become an opportunity for cross-border e-commerce companies to go overseas.
Among the many financing events, fast fashion brands are particularly popular in 2020-2021. Not only are brands financing frequently and with large financing amounts, but they also have large sources of capital.
Quanqianquan, Cider, Xingke Technology, Urbanic, Starlink, Cupshe, fashion brand clothing company TAKA Original, plus-size women’s clothing Bloomchic, etc. have all completed more than two rounds of financing. Among them, Cider, which was just established in 2020, has completed four rounds of financing and is currently valued at over 1 billion.
The investment institutions behind it include IDG, Vertex Investment, Sequoia China, Tencent Investment, GGV Capital, Dexun Investment, Fengrui Capital, Chuxin Capital, etc.
An interesting point of view is that China’s fast fashion is gradually leading the global fashion trend.
Interestingly, the concept of fast fashion was originally introduced from abroad, but now it has become an excellent way for domestic entrepreneurs to make money.
Even Dmonstudio was said to have had millions of users before it was shut down, with consumers coming from the United States, Europe, North America, the Middle East and other regions.
If we include the brands that have just been established or completed financing in the past year, it can further illustrate the fact that Chinese fast fashion brands are being sought after by foreign consumers, especially those in Europe and the United States.
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Giants are entering the game and they all want to copy another SHEIN
What’s more exciting than the frequent financing of new brands is that Internet giants are also coming to “buy”. Among them, Bytedance has the most actions.
On November 3, 2021, ByteDance quietly launched the independent women’s fashion shopping website Dmonstudio, hoping to get a share of the cross-border fast fashion track. In order to do this well, Dmonstudio has been preparing internally for a long time, and it is an S-level project.
In addition, in the first half of last year, Bytedance also participated twice in Feiliu Technology, a flexible clothing supply chain company. The latter’s business covers all clothing categories, of which women’s clothing accounts for as much as 80%. In June of the same year, ByteDance also invested in the global fast fashion overseas brand Xin Chao Infinite.
After the ByteDance system, there is the Alibaba system.
In the first half of last year, Alibaba launched the independent retail station allyLikes e-commerce, deploying the European and American fast fashion market, imitating SHEIN’s approach to selling fashionable women’s clothing. So far, the independent website traffic has exceeded 230,000.
In June of the same year, Two Hydrogen and One Oxygen (Hangzhou) Digital Technology Co., Ltd. was officially established. The founder was Chen Hang, who had joined Alibaba for nearly ten years and led DingTalk single-handedly. His entrepreneurial direction was in the field of cross-border overseas development. After establishing a A few months later, he successfully obtained angel investment from Yuanjing Capital.
According to industry sources, the company also intends to build a cross-border brand similar to SHEIN.
Compared with ByteDance, Alibaba’s cross-border e-commerce genes are deeper and it was the first to enter the cross-border e-commerce market. For example, Alibaba International Station was founded in 1999; in April 2010, AliExpress, its first cross-border export B2C platform, was launched.
Tencent is also indispensable in the list of major Internet companies entering the fast fashion industry.
In April last year, Tencent led the Series B financing of US$50 million in the fast fashion overseas apparel brand Xike Technology. The latter was founded in 2014 and is a leader in the domestic cross-border e-commerce apparel field.
Filling in the gaps in cross-border fast fashion and finding “potential stocks” to become the next SHEIN may be Tencent’s starting point for reaching this deal. Qichacha data shows that Tencent has reached a total of 10 e-commerce investment projects in 2021.
“SHEIN has brought about a chain reaction. The domestic clothing market is highly competitive, allowing many companies to see overseas opportunities.” Xu Yang, an investor from an organization, said, “Currently, there is only one SHEIN giant on the cross-border fast fashion track. Both investors and entrepreneurs want to copy another ‘SHEIN’.”
SHEIN’s successful journey of creating beauty tells all entrepreneurs and investors an irrefutable fact: Chinese manufacturing is transforming from the world’s factory to a brand overseas, and the era of Chinese factories purely taking orders is coming to an end.
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