After switching to cross-border business, she became the leader in the category in 4 years!

As the saying goes, the waves behind push the waves ahead . After SHEIN rose from the ground, a group of emerging brands have gradually entered the vision of overseas consumers, such as Cider, a unicorn specializing in swimwear, and Urbanic, a fast fashion brand. They have carved out a niche overseas with their own advantages, leaving many of their peers far behind.

What we are going to talk about today is Halara, a DTC clothing brand that ranks second only to SHIEN in the "China Cross-border E-commerce Brand Influence List". In just 4 years, it has become a hot seller overseas and has conquered countless foreigners, but the brand itself has rarely been exposed.

Car company executives switch to cross-border business and create a category leader

Recently, Halara, which has been selling like hot cakes on TikTok and achieving continuous success, has become a hot search term in the cross-border circle, and has been constantly given titles such as "top of the category", "No. 1 in TikTok US", "financing giant", "hit-making machine", and "Tsinghua talent selling clothes".

In response to this, many colleagues envied and began to dig deeper into Halara.

It is understood that Halara has opened four stores in the US region of TikTok. Among them, the sales of Halara US have accumulated more than 1.42 million since its launch, and the total historical sales have reached 46.19 million US dollars. In the sports and outdoor categories, Halara US has been ranked first in the popular small store list for four consecutive months.

It is precisely because of the hot sales of its products that Halara has topped the sales list of casual women's clothing in the US region of TikTok. In the independent station channel, Halara's traffic even exceeds that of ZAFUL, which has been deeply involved in the cross-border circle for many years.

So, how did such a popular sports and leisure clothing brand come into being?

Halara, a rising star in the fashion industry, was founded in July 2020 and is affiliated to Quanliang Quansu Technology Co., Ltd. Its founder, Zhang Xiaopei, is a technical expert who graduated from the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University in his early years. He was the founder of Chehaoduo Group. After realizing the gap in sportswear in the European and American markets, Zhang Xiaopei launched Halara.

A sports and leisure brand that focuses on products with prices below $20, or even less than $5, targeting young consumers and using the mature domestic supply chain to promote Halara abroad. To this end, Zhang Xiaopei also formed a core team, most of whose members came from Fortune 500 companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

Perhaps due to the strong background of the brand itself, Halara has attracted the attention of many investors since its inception. Less than a year after its establishment, it quickly completed two rounds of financing, totaling US$130 million, with investors including IDG Capital, Gaorong Capital, Sequoia China and other leading institutions.

Halara continues to create hits, becoming a big hit in Europe and America

Halara can be said to have been born with a "golden spoon" in its mouth, but affected by Amazon's reduction of commissions in the clothing category, Halara did not choose to make a big splash on Amazon, but instead focused on independent sites and the now popular TikTok.

In the early days of its establishment, Halara chose to enter the European and American markets with an independent website. Now its independent website traffic has reached the 206th place in the fashion industry, surpassing the well-known Lilysilk and Zaful. Data shows that its total traffic in the past three months has exceeded 13 million.

Like SHEIN, Halara regards the United States as its main base, and more than 80% of its independent site visitors come from the United States. However, its traffic mainly comes from paid search, accounting for nearly 35%, which also means that Halara's sales are mainly supported by burning money for marketing.

It is understood that Halara uses TikTok as its main marketing platform, laying out a large number of SKUs on it and cooperating with thousands of content creators to share reviews of its leggings and other products, successfully shaping its brand image while gaining hundreds of millions of views. Google Trends data shows that since the establishment of the Halara brand, the global search volume for "halara" has steadily increased, reaching a historical peak in 2024.

A large amount of traffic has achieved a viral effect, which has a significant impact on sales. On TikTok, the main store Halara US has an estimated advertising expenditure of US$490,000 to US$1 million in the last 90 days, while its sales in 90 days are close to 800,000 orders.

Among TikTok stores , Halara has repeatedly topped the list with its hit products, and is called a "hit-making machine" by its peers in the industry. Data from February showed that Halara's casual pants and yoga pants were far ahead of its peers, with total sales of 216,000 and 144,500 , respectively .

The jumpsuits were put on the shelves in February, and the total sales reached 7,476 pieces in April, with total sales of $241,500. In some cases, the sales in a single day were close to 1,000 pieces.

In April, a pair of high-waisted workwear wide-leg pants helped Halara Shop reach the top of sales. It is understood that this pair of wide-leg pants is priced between US$18 and US$30 and contributed more than 2 million in sales. However, looking back at the time of the product, it can be found that its popularity was mainly due to the promotion of short videos by influencers. On January 10, its daily sales increased from less than 3,000 to nearly 9,000, and remained at a high level for many days.

Judging from the comprehensive data, a large number of Halara's orders are mostly due to the conversion of advertising traffic. It can be said that Halara is still in the stage of burning money.

After SHEIN, a large number of Chinese brands are emerging

Like Halara, a number of leading companies in the clothing category have also successfully expanded overseas, but most of them have taken a different approach, either breaking out of fast fashion or the European and American markets. In the end, they successfully found their own market and achieved good growth performance.

In the previously released data of "China's Top 100 Cross-border Brand Influence List" ( January-February), SHEIN still leads with the first place, and after SHEIN, in addition to Halara, there are many clothing brands.

Urbanic, a subsidiary of Hangzhou Meifeier Technology Co., Ltd., was founded in 2019 and achieved millions of dollars in sales in just half a year. It focuses not on the large-scale markets in Europe and the United States, but on India and Mexico. It is currently the number one DTC brand in India. In the past six years, Urbanic has received four rounds of financing, totaling more than 200 million US dollars, and has achieved annual global sales of 2 billion yuan.

It was once hailed as the next SHEIN. In order to attract more young audiences of Generation Z, it expanded its product categories to include clothing and jewelry accessories. It recently launched a new brand Savana. Recently, Urbanic also wants to become a platform and has officially started recruiting third-party sellers.

Aelfric Eden is a clothing brand that caters to niche cultural groups and focuses on street wear. Due to its novel and fashionable designs, it is highly sought after by young people.

Similarweb data shows that from March to May 2024, aelfriceden.com had a total of 2.295 million global visits and 765,200 monthly visits, with traffic mainly coming from direct searches. On Amazon, the sales of a T-shirt in Aelfric Eden's Amazon store reached 1,333 pieces in July.

Not only that, there are also BloomChic, which focuses on the plus-size women's clothing segment , and David Archy, which focuses on men's underwear. They all entered the segmented track and grew into an overseas brand with high sales and popularity.

Halara

clothing

brand