Shein, a juggernaut in the world of fast-fashion and e-commerce, is opening a new office in downtown Bellevue, Wash., that will serve as a U.S. fulfillment and logistics hub for the Singapore-based company.
The 10,000-square-foot space at Key Center is expected to employ more than 50 people by the end of 2024, according to a Shein news release Thursday. The company is hiring for a variety of positions to support logistics and distribution efforts across the U.S., such as this last mile operations manager role.
“The U.S. is an important market for Shein, and we are thrilled to establish a presence in the Seattle area as we continue enhancing our fulfillment process and improving the customer experience,” Andy Huang, Shein’s head of U.S. fulfillment and logistics, said in a statement.
Huang, a former senior manager at Amazon, joined Shein in November and is based in Bellevue. “We are striving to make the beauty of fashion accessible to everyone everywhere, in [an] extremely innovative and efficient way,” Huang wrote in a LinkedIn post late last year.
As it plants its flag in Amazon’s backyard, Shein has grown to become one of the leading online destinations for trendy, low-priced fashion items favored by young shoppers. TikTok parent ByteDance — which is also competing with Amazon for online shoppers — has also grabbed a large office presence in Key Center.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday on the move by Shein and TikTok into Amazon’s territory, calling the bargain retailers one of Amazon’s “greatest retail threats.”
Pronounced “she-in,” the company was founded in China in 2008 as ZZKKO by Chris Xu, a U.S.-born entrepreneur and search engine optimization specialist. Business Insider reported in December on the company’s rise from relative obscurity.
Shein was valued at around $66 billion when it filed to go public last fall. But that valuation has recently slipped to as low as $45 billion, according to Bloomberg, and The Wall Street Journal reported last month that a new “IPO hitch” has emerged as China conducts a cybersecurity review of Shein’s data handling and sharing practices.
“The business model works like Amazon,” Time magazine reported in January. “A sprawling online marketplace brings together about 6,000 clothing factories in China under Shein’s label, while internal management software collects near-instant data about which items are selling and which aren’t to visibly boost the popular items.”
Time’s report also shed light on how Shein’s mass production is impacting the environment and pointed at a Wired story on the company’s worker conditions inside Chinese factories.
Shein’s growing presence in the U.S. includes more than 1,500 corporate and warehouse employees in Los Angeles, San Diego, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
