Another SHEIN? This hot-selling brand has become a top brand in the past two years

As brands go overseas to seek profits, some Chinese fast fashion brands have seized the opportunity and made a name for themselves in the cross-border e-commerce circle. Urbanic , as a fast fashion brand in emerging markets, has expanded rapidly after going overseas.

Urbanic has been selling millions of units a month for half a year, and is now expanding overseas

As a new wave of Chinese fast fashion brands, Urbanic was founded in 2019 and is affiliated to Hangzhou Meifeier Technology Co., Ltd. It mainly sells high-quality products such as clothing, accessories, and home furnishings to emerging regions such as India and Brazil through its official website. It has now become a hot fast fashion brand in the Indian market.

With the dividends of cross-border e-commerce going global and the mature business model in China, Urbanic expanded rapidly. Six months after its launch , it achieved monthly sales of millions of dollars; two years later, it became one of the top brands of Chinese fast fashion going global.

One of the key factors that helped Urbanic succeed was its pricing. As its main customer base is middle-class women aged 20-44, Urbanic set its product prices at around 1,200 rupees (RMB 110), with some items priced at only one-third of Zara’s . This approach is in line with the consumption habits and spending power of its main customer base, and has captured the shopping psychology of local people.

On Urbanic , there are more than 100,000 fashionable women's clothing for customers to choose from. These women's clothing covers a wide range of sizes and is updated quickly. With its advantages such as high cost-effectiveness, wide variety and fast update speed, it has rapidly risen in the Indian market.

At the same time, Urbanic focuses on traffic through social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Currently, the above three social platforms bring it 39.07%, 42.56%, and 12.66% of traffic respectively. According to the data, the monthly traffic of Urbanic's official website reached 9.6 million, ranking fourth in the category ranking in India, and the number of application downloads exceeded 15 million times.

Urbanic 's success is also inseparable from the deployment of its professional team. It is reported that it has gathered a group of talents with e-commerce operations and supply chain technology. Founder Xue Chi once worked at Google and ClubFactory, engaged in data science and business analysis related work; co-founder Deng Qiulin once worked in Alibaba's strategy department, focusing on overseas-related businesses; other team members are mostly from large companies such as Flipkart, SHEIN, and Zhiyu.

Different from traditional cross-border e-commerce smart retail companies, Urbanic localizes international fashion designs through AI, data accumulation-driven operations and supply chain management. Its co-founder Xue Chi also said, "We use a human-machine combination selection model to efficiently combine the data system of buyer experience and automated machines to quickly screen out the best products. In addition, the team conducted C2M data modeling and adjusted the clothing pattern based on the body shape and dressing habits of local people, making our product return rate much lower than the industry average."

Urbanic, which has achieved such outstanding results , is also attracting the attention of investors. It is understood that it has received a multi-million-dollar A+ round of financing led by Fosun Ruizheng. Earlier, Urbanic also received multiple rounds of financing from Sequoia Capital and CDH Investments.

After this round of financing, Urbanic will develop new products such as beauty and skin care products, maternal and child products, and new sub-brands based on its original sales categories , in order to focus on more customer groups.

At present, the global market size of the fast fashion industry is huge, and the global apparel market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 3.9% in 2025, with a market value of US$300 billion. There is no doubt that in the highly saturated women's clothing market in China, domestic giants are naturally unwilling to miss out on the cross-border pie.

With a repurchase rate of 42%, Chinese fashion brands are popular overseas

As a major clothing consumer country, China attracts many well-known fashion brands to enter. However, it is precisely in this highly competitive industry environment that many Chinese companies choose to embark on an overseas journey and have achieved remarkable results.

SHEIN: The vane of fast fashion

When it comes to fast fashion, SHEIN is undoubtedly a well-deserved trendsetting brand. With the advantages of China's supply chain and strong marketing capabilities, SHEIN has taken fashionable women's clothing to the extreme while expanding its sales categories. After the new round of financing, its valuation will reach $100 billion.

At least half of the desktop traffic on the SHEIN website is organic traffic. According to the data, the direct access traffic to the SHEIN website reached 37.34%, the search traffic reached 45.2%, and the organic search for the brand word "shein" accounted for the largest proportion. In addition, in 2021, it has replaced Amazon and become the most downloaded shopping app on iOS and Android platforms in the United States.

Zaful : repurchase rate is as high as 42%

Zaful was founded in 2014, starting with swimwear products. After four years of development, it became the No. 1 brand in China's swimwear export category. As the swimwear market continued to expand, it chose to expand its product category to women's fashion, and attracted millions of fans through social media, making marketing a breeze.

As the second largest Chinese e-commerce brand to go global after SHEIN, Zaful has a repurchase rate of 42% within 90 days. With China's strong supply chain advantages and its own logistics system, Zaful's average time from design to shelf launch is 1-2 weeks, and 50-100 new products are updated every day.

Cider : Received 3 rounds of financing within one year of establishment

As a fast fashion brand going global, Cider also has some similarities to SHEIN. Continuing SHEIN's strong digitalization and supply chain integration capabilities, and deeply tied to factories, Cider's new product launch speed is extremely fast, basically reaching the point of daily launch.

On social media, Cider has deployed Instagram, TikTok and Facebook platforms, and has also established a global community called #cidergang to collect user feedback and suggestions on product design to increase the popularity of products. Currently, Cider has accumulated nearly 2 million fans on global social media and users from more than 100 countries.

Cupshe: A leader in fashion brands going global

Founded in 2015, Cupshe did not initially focus on swimsuit brands and its sales categories were relatively diverse. It was not until 2016 that it began to focus on swimsuit series. Seizing the TikTok video craze, it began to focus on promoting the confident side of women in swimsuits.

In 2019, Cupshe discovered the increase in global obesity rates and began to enter the large-size swimwear market. On the basis of its main swimwear series, it continued to enrich its swimwear categories, and its men's and children's swimwear product lines are also growing continuously. At present, it has become the world's largest cross-border e-commerce brand focusing on beach scenes.

Full speed online : China's version of Zara

Founded in June 2020, Quansu Online is a sports and leisure clothing brand with extremely high cost-effectiveness, with the lowest selling price being less than US$5. It was initially positioned as the "Chinese version of Zara", forming a business and data closed loop from clothing production design, placement, trading and supply chain to improve its inventory turnover rate. Its completion of US$30 million in financing within a month has attracted the attention of many people.

Times are constantly changing, and standing still means falling behind. Under the stimulation of the global environment, in the past year, offline fast fashion brands such as Zara and H&M have gradually stepped down from the stage of the times, while cross-border e-commerce relying on "Internet +" is at the forefront , and new fast fashion brands going overseas are constantly emerging. Chinese brands need a deep foundation to successfully go overseas.

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