The former big-brand OEM factory is taking back lost orders through the SHEIN platform

Entering 2025, the "going overseas" trend of industrial belt factories is no longer a new topic, but more like an unspoken choice of factory owners. If we go back five or ten years, they would still be busy competing for who would take orders from international brands, but now choosing a business that is suitable for long-term development and can produce stable orders seems to have become the premise of everything.

Zeng Chaofan, a handkerchief seller in Huzhou, did this multiple-choice question three years ago. As he has been engaged in the foreign trade business of fashion textiles for a long time, it was natural for him to join the fashion e-commerce platform SHEIN on the recommendation of a friend. In the following years, SHEIN's platform business continued to expand globally. A data report from Semrush, a leading global online analysis platform, shows that as of January 2025, SHEIN (shein.com) is the world's most visited clothing and fashion shopping website, followed by mercari.com and zara.com in second and third place respectively, and the monthly visits to SHEIN's website are as high as twice that of ZARA. The analysis data also pointed out that more than 63% of consumers visited SHEIN's website directly. The massive and growing base of active users has also injected momentum into the good business of platform sellers.

When the former source factories of H&M and Zara decided to leverage the power of cross-border e-commerce platforms, a new change that may alter the international trade landscape is taking place.

"It is easy for the villagers who weave silk to make money"

For the people of Huzhou, trading in textiles is a way to make money that has been passed down from generation to generation. In the "Shuanglin Town Chronicles" of Huzhou, Zhejiang, there was a record that "people in the nearby villages who weave silk can make money easily", which is enough to show the market competitiveness and deep industrial foundation of local textile products.

However, in recent years, the users of fabrics have long since changed from the royal family in ancient times to the general public who discerning about the goods.

Zeng Chaofan, a native of Huzhou, worked as a salesman in a foreign trade company in Wenzhou for ten years after graduating from university. When foreign trade orders were growing rapidly, he returned to his hometown Huzhou and set up a small factory with a dozen people. Relying on the advantages of a complete upstream and downstream industrial chain, it only took one or two years for the factory to expand to a scale of hundreds of people during the heyday when overseas brand orders were pouring in.

"When I first returned to my hometown to set up a factory, there were not so many people doing foreign trade and there was little competition. We have done OEM for ZARA, H&M, and Tom Tailor," Zeng Chaofan recalled. A square scarf with a unit price of several yuan instantly increased in value by nearly 20 times when placed on the shelves of international brands, but Zeng Chaofan's factory did not receive a corresponding return: within just a few years, the orders for OEM from overseas brands shrank and the quotations were lowered. "For example, for the same style, by the end of the year the other party would start sending emails saying that the price would be reduced by one or two yuan. There was no profit for us anymore, so I would rather not take these orders and do cross-border e-commerce myself."

A printed square scarf that sold 100,000 units has helped new cross-border merchants to “walk the flower road” when going overseas

It was not until early 2025 that Zeng Chaofan saw that the SHEIN platform was stepping up its efforts to promote the "Hot-Selling Plan" to use large traffic to help sellers create hot products. He couldn't help but sigh that this transformation was "the right choice."

In fact, Zeng Chaofan's SHEIN store opened in 2022. In the first month, he tasted the joy of "explosive orders": more than 10,000 square scarves with retro prints were sold in a single month, and dozens of pieces are still sold every day after the event until now.

Recalling this square scarf, Zeng Chaofan mentioned three key points. First, based on past experience in cooperation with overseas brands, the design team has a basic understanding of the style preferences of Europe, America, the Middle East and other places, so it is not difficult to make products that meet local aesthetic needs; second, the users of the SHEIN platform are young, curious and keen to try new things. The cold start threshold for new stores is lower, and there is almost no additional investment in marketing to support the conversion funnel from "interest-click-browse details-order" with thousands of visitors, thereby achieving rapid transactions; the third reason is that the timing of opening the store coincides with the "Ramadan" promotion season in the Middle East, and the site is at its peak traffic period. SHEIN category buyers gave a lot of targeted suggestions on how to submit activities and incubate hot products. Spring is also the peak season for demand for square scarves and silk scarves, so the possibility of running out of hot products is greatly increased.

Consumers interpret the various silk scarves and shawls purchased on SHEIN

Accurate product positioning, user groups with strong purchasing power, and effective operational strategies provide a boost for new businesses and new products, and also allow sellers to feel more secure in long-term investments. Zeng Chaofan said: "To be honest, if it weren't for some hot-selling products, it would be difficult for us to realize how big the imagination space for cross-border e-commerce is."

Three years ago, if Zeng Chaofan’s hit experience was due to a certain amount of luck, then now SHEIN has found some more certain methodologies for success in its innovative exploration of platform models.

In February 2025, SHEIN officially launched the "Explosive Order Plan" for domestic sellers. It will provide sellers with seasonal market trends, target high-potential products in various categories, create year-round promotional activities, increase marketing resources on and off the site, and other multiple benefits. Even inexperienced novice sellers are expected to see a sales explosion.

It is worth mentioning that SHEIN, with its first-mover advantage and years of experience, has a keen insight into the consumer markets in more than 150 countries and regions overseas. It combines the New Year in January, Valentine's Day in February, Ramadan and Easter from March to May, graduation season in June, holiday season from July to August, school season in September, Day of the Dead and Halloween from October to November, and then the "Black Friday" year-end promotion and gift-giving season... It arranges and combines the consumption nodes, consumption habits, and aesthetic elements of different markets, and passes them to sellers through its own professional buyer team. In this way, sellers can develop, manufacture and stock products in line with market demand, make the right products at the right time, and "resonate" with the global consumer market. At present, Zeng Chaofan's store has signed up for many new activities in the "explosive order plan", and many in-store products have been labeled with new labels such as "Valentine's Day" and "flash sale".

Discover the beauty of "small single quick response", the seller commented on SHEIN: more fashionable, more flexible, and safer

For experts in each category , the sales feedback of the same category of products in different markets will be fundamentally different. For example, compared with the festive and brand-name feeling that the domestic market likes, the European and American markets prefer elegant and retro prints. In the words of Zeng Chaofan, "If you put two pallets in front of me, I can tell whether you are selling domestically or overseas at a glance. I can't tell the difference, but I can tell it by looking at it."

The SHEIN team refined this set of "intuitive but inexpressible" style guides for different countries and regions, from style and color matching, popular elements, layout methods, to analysis and trend insights of popular items. For example, even on Valentine's Day, the SHEIN buyer team can provide dozens of different products, elements, and color matching references to help sellers without cross-border experience easily identify opportunity products and quickly launch new products based on different consumer themes.

Take the production process of square scarves as an example. After the raw materials are made into a whole cloth, patterns need to be printed. After the front-end processing is completed, the materials need to be cut, rolled, quality inspected and shipped. The development cost is mainly concentrated on the color matching of the new style. If a style has more than ten or twenty sets of colors, the complexity and cost of single-color or two-color patterns will increase rapidly compared to single-color or two-color ones.

But in Zeng Chaofan's SHEIN store, it is rare to see styles with less than 5 colors. Sales volume is the basis for Zeng Chaofan's continued investment in new styles. Relying on more accurate style development direction and style guidance, Zeng Chaofan can more accurately adapt to market demand, which also provides better guarantees for his transition from the order model to cross-border e-commerce: "In the past, when we did OEM orders, it was generally divided into SS (Spring and Summer) and AW (Autumn and Winter) in a year. At least 50,000 styles were given for each season. So at the beginning, the 'small order and fast response' model of cross-border business was quite uncomfortable, but now I find that this method is more stable."

When Zeng Chaofan's colleagues were doing other orders, they once encountered brands asking factories to stock up tens of thousands of pieces in advance. Once this style didn't sell well, the factory would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in payment and have to find other sales channels. "The previous profits were all lost, and no money was made in a year. However, for cross-border sales, we can sell as much as we can, with less risk, and we have to be smart and judge by the trends provided by SHEIN, and then the stock will be almost right," Zeng Chaofan said.

After two years of running-in, Zeng Chaofan has adapted to the production and operation mode of cross-border e-commerce. The original decline in foreign trade orders has been completely filled by cross-border orders, and the size of the team has continued to grow. For him, one of the pleasures of opening his own store is to read consumers' discussions and comments on the platform. More than 80,000 positive reviews have also accumulated a high store score of 4.94 for him.

One comment that impressed Zeng Chaofan said: "SHEIN can achieve the same quality as the physical store, but with better styles and better prices." Zeng Chaofan smiled and said: "We are the most original industrial belt. Products of many brands are shipped from here (Huzhou factory). The quality and design of our own stores are continuously improving. They are more flexible than offline retail brands. This is why I am more optimistic about the future of cross-border e-commerce."

Zeng Chaofan graduated from university with a major in "Foreign Trade English" in 2001. Looking back at the more than 20 years of foreign trade he has been engaged in since graduation, from a foreign trade salesman to a factory manager to a cross-border e-commerce entrepreneur, Zeng Chaofan's most obvious feeling is that industrial belt enterprises are shortening the distance to the international market through platforms like SHEIN. He has seen foreign young girls use his products to make five or six different ways of dressing more than once: as hairbands, bag hangers, belts, suspenders, and even bras, which opened his eyes to him who deals with square scarves every day: "We really need to go further in our understanding of consumers and the market, and there is still a lot of room for innovation."

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