Shein will open temporary stores in 5 cities in Brazil in 2023

Chinese retail chain Shein has announced plans to open five temporary stores in Brazil in 2023. The first will be in Belo Horizonte at the beginning of the year. The other four cities have not been confirmed, nor the exact opening dates.

The information was anticipated by UOL and confirmed by Sheet🇧🇷

Founded in China, Shein is headquartered in Singapore and is one of the most accessed clothing sites in Brazil. The business was born in 2008 as a website selling wedding dresses, but saw its popularity skyrocket in the pandemic by offering a catalog of clothes at low prices.

In November, a temporary store opened in São Paulo, but there was confusion. The space, in the Vila Olímpia mall, did not cope with the demand. A queue of about 7,000 people was formed at the opening of the store, which caused an uproar in the mall.

“There are reports of people who arrived at 3 am, and some even camped out, with a tent, in line,” he told the Sheet, at the time, Felipe Feistler, managing director of Shein in Brazil. “Of course, those who have been waiting so long can be frustrated, at 9 am, having to give up space for a preferential queue, as required by law.”

The store opened in São Paulo operated for just five days. Shein did not disclose how long the new temporary locations are expected to be open.

The pop-up unit in São Paulo was the first to have sales in Brazil. In March, the company had opened a temporary store in Rio, which operated only as a show room, without selling products. In ten days, the Rio point received 5,000 visitors – the same number of consumers who managed to enter the São Paulo store in five days.

The company has no factory. It is present in around 150 countries and has 10,000 employees, including its own and third parties. The company’s differential, according to Feistler, is the “on-demand production technology”. “We do tests with 100 to 200 pieces in the application. Once the demand is confirmed, we scale production. Everything is very fast, in real time”, he says.

The retailer estimates that this business model avoids a 20% loss in the production chain. “That way we can offer prices that are more affordable than the market average”, says the general director. “Instead of producing 10,000 products only to find out later if there will be sales or not, we produce from 100 to 200 and confirm the demand.”

Shein was the focus of a British documentary, “Untold: inside the Shein Machine”, which denounced working hours of up to 18 hours a day for low wages. Feistler defends the retailer’s modus operandi.

“We work with many suppliers from China, mainly. They have to follow ILO rules [Organização Internacional do Trabalho]🇧🇷 We do audits. If any supplier does not pass the audits, it is investigated and we stop working with it”, says the director.