Sellers sell millions of dollars a month on the SHEIN platform by making high-value stationery popular overseas

When it comes to stationery, most people think of a small grocery store of less than five square meters located next to the primary school gate.

The walls are covered with the latest stickers and posters, the counters are filled with colorful notebooks of different sizes, and even the outer shells of ballpoint pens have dozens of different combinations, ready to set off a fashion trend that students on campus are eager to follow. However, with the popularity of digital products in recent years, people often say that "writing with a pen" no longer seems to be a habit of modern people, and they can't even remember the last time they went to a stationery store to buy something.

Compared with the relatively flat domestic stationery consumption market, overseas authoritative research   andMarkets released the latest survey statistics in October 2023 , and the global stationery market size reached US$24.2 billion in 2022, and is expected to reach US$34.7 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 4.6%. The improvement of education level has kept the global stationery market on the rise. In fact, the topic of stationery consumption is still hot in overseas markets.

On TikTok, the topic #Stationery has been viewed 650 million times . The creation of hand journals has made the beautiful stationery shine, with a total of 10.34 million posts shared on Instagram. Boys and girls overseas not only like to show off their handwork and handwriting, but also regard a series of stylish and tasteful stationery such as water-based pens, colored pens, highlighters, notebooks, stickers, etc. as fashion items. For them, stationery is not only practical, but also a personal collection with great visual impact and healing.

Behind this wave of fashion stationery that has influenced the world, there has never been a lack of Chinese stationery wave makers. Especially this year, S HEIN , a fashion giant that has become famous for its own brand , announced the deepening of the platform model and began to recruit investors for all categories. Many stationery manufacturers and brands have joined the S HEIN platform, opening a new journey of selling Chinese stationery to overseas markets.

How to develop the stationery market abroad ?

Stationery usually refers to various tools related to office and study, from student supplies, office supplies to teaching tools. Although a single stationery product is small, each sub-category always has vigorous vitality due to its wide application, high repurchase rate and consumers' emphasis on "appearance". Even an inconspicuous pen, under the different habits and aesthetics of the global market, it is possible to come up with thousands of new creative ideas just for the pen cap.

Ten years ago, Wang Qihuaming started working in a stationery factory, and the first product he made was a pen. He did not receive much school education at first, but he firmly believed that stationery was a "consumable product with great global demand."

In 2022, Wang Qihua observed that more and more of his peers were starting to run cross-border e-commerce platforms. What they were discussing was not how to make money in China, but how to do business overseas. Among them, the SHEIN platform became the first choice for many people, and everyone said: "Many people made their first pot of gold in the foreign market on it."

At the beginning of the cooperation, Wang Qihua did not know what the overseas market was like. He first put a batch of simple basic stationery that was popular in China on the SHEIN platform, but it did not get the favor of the market. When Wang Qihua could not find a clue, the SHEIN team sent suggestions on styles. From the color, pattern and style of the selected products to the important overseas festival nodes, Wang Qihua began to establish a basic concept of the overseas market.

He replaced the products with more colorful and lively cartoons, promoted popular products in the "back to school season" activities from August to September , added distinctive style elements during events such as Halloween and Christmas, and gradually kept up with the user preferences and rhythm of overseas platforms: "We now have the most American customers on the platform. Many of them are young students or recent graduates. They have their own rich aesthetic sense for stationery. They want good-looking things, but not too expensive."

Lin Song, who is also a stationery seller, mainly sells notebooks, sticky notes and other products. Unlike many suppliers, his company registered its own brand in 2017. They believe that only by building a brand can they have their own presence in a large market.

Although they registered the brand, they did not really open up the situation on domestic e-commerce platforms in the early days, and the results were not very optimistic: "The platform experience is not very good, mainly because of the high competition pressure and low prices." Lin Song's team finally took the first step in trying a cross-border platform for the first time through SHEIN's "agent operation" cooperation model. He participated in SHEIN's platform empowerment many times, maintained close communication with category buyers, and thoroughly understood the links such as new products, rules, and operations.

He also summarized a set of secrets to increase the success rate of products: First, SHEIN buyers and merchandisers will have a weekly training on category trends, sharing with sellers the opportunities for hot-selling products and how to select new products. Based on the trends and hot-selling categories provided by buyers, Lin Song immediately communicates with the design department and designs products in combination with changes in the aesthetic trends of overseas consumers.

Lin Song observed: "At present, it seems that our consumers are mainly female students who are in college. European and American consumers prefer cartoon and colorful notebooks, while the Middle East prefers simple sticky notes, which should be related to their writing habits."

Responding to the opportunity of "explosive orders" with flexible supply

The basic understanding of overseas markets makes novice sellers feel that they have finally “got the hang of it”.

After determining the product direction, Wang Qihua began to test models more specifically on the SHEIN platform. He followed the trend of buyers to select products, and then returned orders and effectively prepared stocks based on the sales trend feedback of the platform. This flexible supply chain model has not only been developed and applied in the SHEIN self-operated clothing supply chain sector, but also through SHEIN's empowerment, it has taken root in more industries touched by the platform model. Wang Qihua , who owns his own factory, has maximized the advantages of the flexible supply chain. Less than half a year after joining the SHEIN platform, Wang Qihua's products were able to achieve a daily sales volume of 1,000-2,000 orders on the platform.

Especially during the "back to school season" and the "Black Friday" shopping carnival, the surge in order volume further highlights the necessity of flexible supply based on market demand.

Wang Qihua, who participated in Black Friday for the first time, was both excited and nervous. "We attended every training last year and watched SHEIN's live broadcasts on the computer to learn." SHEIN will give sellers suggestions on stocking, hot selling trends, shipping instructions, photo shooting capabilities, etc. Wang Qihua only prepared two weeks of stock at the beginning, and then gradually increased the stock to 4-6 weeks. He sold all the goods with trepidation: "I don't have a clue when I try to figure it out myself. If I prepare too little, I will be too late. If I prepare too much, I am afraid of backlogs. It is much more reassuring to have someone to help me."

Like Wang Qihua, Lin Song also encountered the stationery peak seasons of "back to school season" and "Black Friday" at SHEIN. When facing Black Friday in the first year, the company had just started to cooperate with SHEIN. At that time, product sales soared, reaching more than double the usual order volume. A small amount of goods could not keep up with the needs of the front end. Although Lin Song felt the excitement of the increase in orders, he was more flustered. By the second year, Lin Song and the SHEIN platform had a very tacit rhythm. He started to prepare goods two months in advance, and product sales increased to more than twice the usual time. Now they have more surplus space and the calmness of managers.

Lin Song believes that the reason behind this leisurely growth is that SHEIN has empowered its team with a flexible supply chain. It takes about 20 days from design to production for a stationery product. If a large number of products are produced at one time without understanding the market sales situation at the front end, the original productivity will not be spent on creating profits, but will cause unsalable and waste. In addition, if the busy production cannot make up for the demand gap of the hot product in a short period of time, it will also cause a shortage of stock at the front end, resulting in the loss of orders that could have been taken and profits that could have been earned.

The benefits of a flexible supply chain go beyond this, and it also has the potential to further expand production capacity and product categories. Lin Song has begun to gradually expand from notebooks, books and pens to more stationery-related department store products, such as storage, stationery bags, etc., to provide a better product portfolio for the brand and serve more consumer needs.

Stationery export is not limited to online "stores"

"The SHEIN team focuses on three dimensions: product selection, delivery time and product quality, especially quality control. SHEIN has taken our products to a new level," said Wang Qihua. He believes that competitive companies should not fight for a small piece of the pie, but work with the platform to continuously expand the pie through good products and word of mouth: "We can improve the design on the basis of stable quality to ensure that customers can receive high-quality and low-priced stationery."

Currently, Wang Qihua is selling more than 400 products on the SHEIN platform, with monthly sales reaching US$900,000 at its peak, nearly 100 times more than when he first entered the platform.

It is generally believed in the industry that S HEIN , as a cross-border e-commerce platform, is not only significant for the industry in terms of its rising sales performance . Its more far-reaching significance lies in providing a model for transformation for more industrial belts, tearing off the label of "cheap manufacturing" and moving towards real brand and industrial strength, allowing "Made in China" to steadily expand from simple manufacturing processes to R&D, design, brand marketing, industrial supply chain innovation and other aspects, exploring new growth momentum.

Just as Lin Song is trying, in addition to providing products, he further refines user positioning and brand vision. For example, he develops a series of products based on popular styles and elements, and uses gradient colors and complementary colors to enrich the overall effect of the set, so that customers will not only want to buy one piece, but also want to buy a set, and even establish a "photographic" good impression of the brand.

In terms of visual presentation, Lin Song uses the product as the visual center, and uses keyboards, wooden blocks, stickers and other props for shooting stationery products to magnify the characteristics and functions of the stationery itself. For example, in a series of illustration notebooks, the cover of each book must be exposed to a certain extent to let consumers know that they can choose from a variety of combinations. The characteristic of the stationery category is that the size of small products greatly affects the user experience. The size of a notebook, the length of a pen, and the thickness of a sticky note may be different from the consumer's expectations, which will affect his use. SHEIN will require stationery sellers to provide precise sizes and present them on the details page to ensure the consistency between the products received by consumers and the displayed pictures.

With the combination of sets, rich elements and "Ins-style" visual presentation, Lin Song's store on the SHEIN platform has more than 200 products on sale, with a score of 4.95 points. Many products have long been locked in the Top 10 Best Sellers list : "What you see is what you get", "The best quality stationery I have ever bought", "It's so exquisite and special, my colleagues and sisters like it very much". From the initial monthly sales of 20,000 US dollars to the current monthly sales of 600,000 US dollars, Lin Song has finally realized his original wish to expand the brand overseas.

This "starting stage" number is beyond imagination for colleagues who opened stationery shops in front of schools five years ago. With SHEIN announcing the deepening of the platform model, Wang Qihua and Lin Song will not be the only ones who choose to transform in the stationery industry. In May 2023, SHEIN launched the "Xiyou Gravity" million sellers plan, which will help 10,000 merchants around the world, including China, to exceed US$1 million in annual sales in the next three years, and help 100,000 small and medium-sized merchants reach annual sales of US$100,000. SHEIN will also launch a national 500-city industrial belt plan to help industrial belts across the country find new growth routes in the international market with the help of cross-border e-commerce .

In the foreseeable future, more "small commodities" like stationery will start from S HEIN , achieve industrial transformation and gain vitality for sustained growth through professionalization, branding and internationalization.

SHEIN

Stationery