SHEIN, a Chinese fast fashion e-commerce brand, get more downloads than H&M and Zara in September.

SHEIN App achieved 10.3 million downloads from App Store and Google Play worldwide in September, according to the latest data from Sensor Tower, quoted by Reuters. By contrast, the mobile app of H&M has been downloaded only 2.5 million times, compared with 2 million for ZARA.

The data show that so far, 229.4 million downloads have been made for SHEIN, compared with 123.5 million for H&M and 90.6 million for ZARA.

SHEIN was the most downloaded shopping app on iPhone in the week from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, according to analytics platform App Annie. It ranks in the top ten in the United States, Brazil, Australia, the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia.

Shein, a Chinese cross-border e-commerce company founded in 2008, aims to help consumers in Europe, the United States and the Middle East buy affordable women’s wear directly from Chinese garment factories. It launched its own brand in 2012 and pushed prices down further through cooperation with manufacturers.

It is worth noting that Shein is only for foreign consumers, and this brand does not exist in China’s local market.

In addition to its low price, another advantage of Shein is that it is faster than previous fast fashion brands. According to previous media reports, Shein’s design-to-production process takes only seven days, which is seven days shorter than fast fashion giant Zara.

With no offline stores and no storage costs, Shein can conduct style testing on a larger scale than traditional fast fashion brands. It can mass produce 100 pieces of clothing, which means producing 3000 pieces of clothing, and Shein can test 30 styles to determine which one consumers like. Zara can only test six styles in the production of about 3000 pieces of clothing.

In 2020, both Zara and HM, hit by the epidemic, issued their own store closure plans, and consumers quarantined by the epidemic were unable to go to the mall to buy clothes. This is probably the main reason for the rapid growth of Shein this year.