Author / Xue Yongwei

Get on deck

On an ordinary Saturday, in order to choose the material of a sweater, huazixing ran for four or five hours at Zhongda cloth Market in Haizhu, Guangzhou. “Hey, this place is really too big.”

In early April, the average temperature in Guangzhou had soared to more than 25 degrees Celsius. Huazixing was so busy that his back was soaked with sweat.

Due to the temporary closure of many roads due to the epidemic, huazixing has gone further and screened in different stores. Compared with the weight and feel of fabrics, the cost performance must also be considered. This is the basic operation of huazixing as a clothing supplier. After selecting the materials, he will upload the information on the computer and send it to the sheen buyer in charge of managing them for review.

Two days later, huazixing came to the factory as soon as possible, began to make sample clothes, and began to put metal accessories on this sweater. When this kind of clothes are mass produced, it will be his busiest link - intensive labeling and order making. These clothes will eventually be sent to the designated warehouse of sheen not far from the factory.

Nowadays, the life of huazixing is closely bound with this platform called sheen. Sheen is mainly for overseas consumers and sells clothes for tens of dollars.

Also this month, a big news came from Beijing’s venture capital circle. Sheen, positioned as “fast fashion cross-border e-commerce”, is carrying out the latest round of financing of at least US $1 billion. This round of financing is led by Pan Pacific Capital, followed by Sequoia China and tiger Global Fund, with a valuation of US $100 billion. Xu Yangtian, the founder of sheen, also made the first list of Hurun’s 100 richest people with a wealth of 40 billion in March this year. In the industry, people jokingly call sheen “the most mysterious enterprise in China”.

But none of this seems to have much to do with huazi. He is only 23 years old this year. His family has been doing clothing business in Guangzhou for half of their life and has a small clothing factory that has been operating for 20 years. Many people in his hometown do clothing business in Guangzhou. In 2018, huazixing also dropped out of a university in his hometown of Wuhan and went to the stall of Guangzhou ShiSanHang wholesale market to help his parents.

“I’m very tired every day and earn hard money. Although it’s a 500 square meter factory, the running water in a month is only hundreds of thousands of yuan.” Hua Zixing told Caijing Tianxia weekly.

Guangzhou is the headquarters of domestic garment factories, with nearly 200 wholesale markets alone. However, huazixing’s parents have never been in contact with e-commerce, let alone cross-border e-commerce. The business of the garment factory has always continued. “People in their 50s didn’t have that far vision. They didn’t even know Taobao at that time.”

Guangzhou clothing wholesale market. Figure / visual China

In contrast, other young people who started Amazon in their hometown in Wuhan have made a lot of money around 2015. Huazixing’s sister is 9 years older than him. She also opened a Taobao store two years ago, but missed the tuyere and closed the store soon.

The turnaround took place in 2019. Through the introduction of relatives at home, Huajia contacted the investment manager of sheen, a local enterprise, and the four words of cross-border e-commerce began to break into the family’s life. In 2021, the monthly flow of Huajia factory finally reached more than 10 million yuan, becoming a class a supplier of sheen. Huazixing can now get 200000 yuan of living expenses from his father a month, “more than I earn when I graduate and go out to find a job”.

Yang Xiaohui is also engaged in cross-border e-commerce business.

Yang Xiaohui, 35, returned to her hometown of Jinhua, Zhejiang Province after completing her master’s degree in the United States in 2012. She took over her own company specializing in traditional import and export industry and trade from her parents. Since 1998, more than 20 years ago, the main customers of this company are American supermarket chains and theme parks. Among them, the Universal Studios in the United States are the most important customers.

Yang Xiaohui, who doesn’t worry about the source of customers, didn’t start Amazon until 2016, and was “dumped to a third party for custody”. In fact, since then, her family’s offline order business has been impacted by e-commerce and has been sharply reduced year after year. “According to the statistics of the supermarket, the annual order volume should be reduced by about 5%.”. The epidemic in 2020 caused the closure of supermarkets and the closure of parks. All the big customers who used to look stable and huge suddenly flew away.

After the event of “Amazon banning 50000 Chinese sellers”, an investment manager who once worked in Amazon suddenly sent a new invitation to Yang Xiaohui: I went to tiktok. Are you coming? This is another new platform shining in the field of cross-border e-commerce.

Yang Xiaohui is eager to go ashore. In June 2021, Yang Xiaohui settled in tiktok UK store and started live broadcasting and delivery in July. It was also at that time that she started working day and night upside down. But in a sense, she can’t miss it any more. The success of the domestic tremble has given many people confidence. She knows that TikTok has her own traffic. Maybe she will be able to tiktok a game early this time.

“Now the number of online orders has exceeded that of offline orders. It used to be 1:920, 4:6 in 20, and now it has been reversed, 6:4,” said Yang Xiaohui. The overseas market is still a vast blue ocean.

News is still coming from afar. Domestic Internet giants are holding high on platform based cross-border e-commerce. Since last year, Ali has set up a sea plate to restart cross-border business again. The byte beating is a market for TikTok electricity suppliers to catch up with the market. The Jingdong tiktok has chosen to cooperate with Shopify to build its own overseas assets.

Everything seems to have just begun.

Get involved

The reality is that sheen suppliers like Hua Zixing still have many garment processing bases in Nancun Town, Panyu, Guangzhou.

In 2015, sheen announced that it had invested in four factories in Panyu, Guangzhou. However, with the continuous expansion of Sheen’s business, some media reported in August 2021 that in addition to 300 to 400 core suppliers, more than 1000 garment suppliers in Panyu, Guangzhou are serving sheen. At the beginning of 2022, sheen continued to invest 15 billion yuan to build a new supply chain headquarters in Guangzhou.

Sheen wrote on its official website that it currently serves consumers in 150 countries and regions, selling 60 goods every day