Shein, or how a factory fashion giant is destroying third world industries

In the span of a few short years, Shein has gone from an obscure online retailer to a global fashion behemoth. With no physical stores, no traditional advertising, and no fashion shows, it has completely redefined what “fast fashion” means. If brands like Zara and H&M turned the seasonal fashion calendar into a monthly one, Shein turned it into a daily algorithmic cycle — launching thousands of new products every single day, tailored to real-time social media trends.

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This “ultra-fast fashion” model is powered by scale, surveillance, and staggering speed. And it's resonating, especially among Gen Z consumers looking for cheap, trendy clothes that arrive in days and cost less than lunch.

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But behind the viral TikTok hauls and influencer discount codes lies a much more troubling story. As Shein expands its reach into emerging markets across Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, it’s doing more than shipping T-shirts and crop tops. 

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It’s reshaping local fashion industries, undercutting domestic production, and accelerating a global race to the bottom in price, in quality, and in accountability.

Fast Fashion 2.0: How Shein Changed the Game

Fast fashion isn’t new. Brands like Zara, H&M, and Forever 21 spent the 2000s perfecting the model: 

• Quick turnaround
• Low cost
• Constant newness

But Shein is moving ever forward: it joined the race just to break the track and built a new one.

While traditional fast fashion brands operate on weekly or bi-weekly drops, Shein adds up to 6,000 new items to its site every day. This isn’t seasonal design but something else: real-time trend mining. A viral aesthetic on TikTok today can be turned into a wearable product and shipped globally within days.

This speed isn’t just about logistics. It’s about data. Shein’s engine runs on digital surveillance: scraping Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and even search trends to detect microtrends before they peak. The design process isn’t led by designers but by algorithms. Once a design is validated by early demand, Shein scales it instantly, minimizing unsold inventory and maximizing profit.

At the other end of the pipe, the prices are so low they’re almost surreal: dresses for $5, full outfits under $15, endless choice with one-click gratification. It’s volume over value, and it’s designed to create a constant scroll-shop-repeat behavior.

But this model has consequences:

• It normalizes disposability,  encouraging consumers to treat clothes like content: consumed once and discarded.
• It erases fashion cycles, making style hyper-temporal and entirely trend-driven.
•  And most critically, it crushes competition, not just from big retailers, but from small, local brands that cannot keep up with the speed or the margins.

What Shein offers isn’t just fast fashion. It’s platformized fashion, where virality, data harvesting, and low-cost manufacturing converge to dominate the global market, including those least equipped to resist it.

From Workshops to Markets: How the Global South got Caught in the Crossfire

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As Shein expands into Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, it's tapping into new markets and destabilizing existing ones. In many of these regions, clothing production, retail, and even tailoring are key components of local economies. But in the face of ultra-fast fashion, entire ecosystems are struggling to compete.

Shein’s prices are so low and its catalog so vast that for many consumers in countries like Argentina, Nigeria, Indonesia, or Morocco, local fashion can’t come close in price, variety, or even trend relevance. Shein offers the same styles seen on global influencers delivered to your door, often cheaper than buying fabric locally. 

A made-in-country garment costs more, takes longer to produce, and might not match the aesthetics flooding users' social feeds. The result? An import flood.

Local retailers are increasingly becoming resellers of Shein stock, either officially or through gray markets. Small designers and independent brands are priced out of relevance. Domestic textile industries, already weakened by years of trade imbalance, lose their last competitive edges.

Shein flattens style into a scrollable global aesthetic dominated by Western (and often whitewashed) trends. In doing so, it accelerates the erosion of local design languages, traditions, and identities, especially among younger generations eager to participate in global fashion culture. For many, style is now filtered through an algorithm trained in China, shaped by U.S. influencers, and optimized for worldwide sameness.

And Shein’s production strategy is constantly focusing on these vulnerable markets. Brazil and Mexico are key points in Shein’s predicted growth, and Shein is attempting to reach the Indian market via a partnership with Reliance Industries, the biggest company in India. Thus, these markets, which were once just manufacturers for Shein, are being turned into a new frontier of consumption.

There’s a painful irony here: the very markets Shein is flooding are often the same ones whose own garment workers, fabric mills, or designers struggle under precarious conditions, if they can survive at all.

In short, Shein doesn’t just compete with fast fashion. It overwhelms it and, in the process, undermines the already fragile fashion ecosystems of the Global South.

The Labor Irony: Shein Workshops and Consumism

Garment manufacturing is a major economic pillar in countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, and parts of Latin America. Workers (often underpaid, often women) produce clothes for Western brands under brutal conditions. Yet now, Shein’s aggressive digital marketing and “borderless” logistics are targeting these same regions, transforming low-wage producers into low-budget consumers.

That means a garment could be sewn in one factory in Asia under exploitative conditions, shipped to China for finishing or branding, and then sold back into the same region  where it undercuts local brands and tailors on price. It’s a closed loop of disempowerment, where countries are exploited at both ends of the supply chain.

Worse still, Shein’s rise puts pressure on local labor standards. As price expectations fall, even local factories are forced to cut costs further, risking worker protections, safety measures, and wage stability. The logic of ultra-fast fashion seeps downstream: more output, faster turnover, and lower pay.

Meanwhile, in urban centers across the Global South, Shein becomes aspirational. It’s cheap, trendy, and “global” a shortcut to belonging in a culture dominated by TikTok aesthetics and Western fashion cues. But that sense of belonging comes at a hidden cost: workers in those same regions are often trapped in informal, unstable labor markets, unable to compete or demand better conditions.

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The Environmental Wake of Shein Factories

It’s painfully clear that Shein’s business model is built on speed, scale, and disposability. That formula may be good for margins and engagement, but it’s catastrophic for the environment. And, as always, it’s the Global South that shoulders the heaviest burden.

Ultra-fast fashion is designed not to last. The clothes are often made from cheap, synthetic materials like polyester, dyed with toxic chemicals, and assembled with minimal quality control. This means most Shein garments are worn just a few times (or never) before being discarded.

But where do they go?

Much of the world’s fashion waste ends up in landfills or is exported as “donations” to countries in Africa and Latin America. In reality, this secondhand clothing, including large volumes of unsold or discarded fast fashion, drowns local markets, overwhelms waste systems, and often ends up dumped in open air or burned.

Take Ghana’s Kantamanto Market, where hundreds of tons of used clothing arrive every week, much of it from fast fashion giants. The result is a veritable tsunami of textile waste, polluting waterways, clogging city infrastructure, and creating environmental hazards for communities that had no part in producing the problem.

Or look at the Atacama Desert in Chile, where discarded fast fashion now forms mountains of clothing waste visible from space.

And while Shein has made vague commitments to sustainability, its entire model contradicts environmental responsibility:

• Mass overproduction
• Lack of transparency in materials and sourcing
• No repairability or resale ecosystem
• Incentivized overconsumption through flash sales and influencer culture
  
  

Even worse, regulatory protections and environmental oversight are weakest in the very regions that absorb the fallout. This makes the Global South not just a dumping ground for waste but a buffer zone shielding wealthier nations from the visible impact of their consumption habits.

And so, the carbon footprint doesn’t stay in China. The landfill doesn’t stay in the West. The environmental bill lands squarely on the shoulders of those least responsible.

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