Back in 2022, Shein was cool. At the time, the Chinese ultra-fast fashion e-tailer was all over social media, valued at US$100 billion and considered by some to be the most popular fashion brand in the world. The New York Times even ran a feature with the headline “The People’s Republic of Shein.” Influencers on Instagram and TikTok racked up tens of thousands of likes on videos of them trying on a variety of clothing ordered from Shein – since you can buy three shirts from Shein for the price of an iced coffee, these 'hauls' often featured dozens of items. Overconsumption chic was all the rage.
This week, Shein made its debut on the Hong Kong stock exchange, pricing its IPO at US$1.74 billion; the company is valued at approximately US$26 billion – just over a quarter of its peak valuation from the good ol' days of 2022. Why has Shein’s value tanked so hard over the last four years?
Well, that's kind of like asking why American democracy has broken down: there are so many possible answers that it’s hard to pick just one. There are the Greenpeace reports about clothing being made with dangerous chemicals. The scandals around selling offensive products. The terrible environmental track record. The company's reputation for copying independent designers. Or maybe you prefer the widely-reported slew of flagrant workers’s rights violations.
In some ways, the lacklustre IPO feels like a bit of poetic justice for a brand that has never played by the rules. But I think it's more like a reflection of a culture increasingly disillusioned with screen time – and all the consumer behaviours that come with it.
Shein’s business model is tailor-made for the online world. As the Harvard Business Review puts it, Shein “monitors what trendsetters wear on social media. When the company spots a design that looks as if it has potential, it commissions a small order from one of its factories, often just a few dozen pieces, which it floats on its channels to see if consumers are interested.” By manufacturing such a small number of pieces (in extremely exploitative working conditions), Shein can sell an unfathomably large number of designs – swooping in on every microtrend that flashes across your Instagram feed.
That approach helped skyrocket the brand to success, but if it’s not working anymore, that might be because we’re all starting to 'touch grass' a little bit more.
Freaky news about AI seems to break all the time, and it can be easy to view our day-to-day existence as a tech-fuelled downward spiral to the end of the world. But a sprawling 2025 Financial Times study concluded that “time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline.” In the last couple of years, headlines have begun popping up about Gen Z’s obsession with all things analog – newspapers, film cameras, even “grandma hobbies” like bird watching and crocheting. As a twentysomething who’s been getting really into vinyl records and jigsaw puzzles lately, I've got to agree that “analog is back,” as one Guardian columnist recently put it. Under those circumstances, no wonder Shein's popularity is down.
Okay, maybe I’m being too optimistic about what Shein’s decline means for society. After all, 2022 – the year Shein and our social media hours peaked – was also the year that ChatGPT launched to the public. Maybe we haven't collectively decided analog is better, and we’ve just swapped online friends for chatbots. And 2022 was also the year that Temu, another Chinese-owned e-retailer that sells cheap products en masse, opened in the US. So it’s difficult to know whether the public is really cooling on ultra-fast fashion, or just flirting with Shein’s competitors.
Still, I can’t help but think that the decline of Shein’s empire is the start of something, or at least the end of something else. Sure, Shein popup stores still attract crowds in cities like Toronto and Montreal, but recently, they’ve been attracting protesters as well. And, just this week, France implemented a fee on ultra-fast fashion items, in an attempt to regulate brands like Shein.
When social media ruled the world, it was easy to see how Shein did too. But without the constant mini dopamine hits of infinite scroll, a $2.80 T-shirt that says “Pickleball” in the 'Live, Laugh, Love' script suddenly looks like exactly what it is: cheap.
