Milan Kundera once lamented in "Slow": Slow is an art that has been lost.
But SHEIN, the fast fashion cross-border e-commerce giant that punches ZARA and kicks H&M with "super fast fashion", may disagree with this, after all, "faster than fast" is its creed.
In the past many years, fast is the survival strategy of Internet companies, and under the "fast" formula of "the world is hard, only fast is not broken", Internet companies have become twisted.
Rao is so, SHEIN's "fast" has opened the eyes of the fast fashion industry: the flexible ** chain solution adopted by ZARA is powerful enough, but people in the "testing" link is to start with the production of 1000 pieces, but SHEIN's small orders are faster and more absolute, relying on the agility of the online platform and DTC (direct-to-consumer) model, it directly pressed the small order to about 100 pieces.
SHEIN has played the small single fast reflex mode to the extreme.
Facts have proved that SHEIN has achieved great success with the ultimate "fast" - small orders are quick to abandon the heavy capital and high inventory model of "** market demand, stock up in large quantities in advance", and solve the financial pressure and unsalable losses that may be caused by a large number of stocks in advance by quickly testing the market response with small orders, rapid mass production when there is a hit, and timely distribution to the store.
"Fast" is a double-edged sword, which can be both the way to success and the source of hidden dangers for SHEIN. Shein is "fast", but also disqualified from "fast" - "fast" exposes its striking shortcomings in intellectual property rights.
If it is said that the current Shein is playing an open adventure game based on the fantasy world of "IPO to the United States", which is about to be its trump card, then the issue of intellectual property rights is its lifeline.
In other words, the growth myth is its A side, and the copyright loophole is its B side.
It is said that SHEIN is "fast" because its small single fast reverse model maximizes the use of the first-class chain efficiency and logistics speed supported by China's manufacturing and logistics, which is used to solve the problem of excess inventory and improve the efficiency of goods circulation.
Thanks to this, SHEIN's sales will reach $30 billion in 2022, more than H&M and ZARA combined, and it will take just a few years to become the world's largest fast fashion company.
Said that shein lost "fast", because its small single fast reflex mode will be "design-production-shelf-circulation" cycle is infinitely compressed, according to ** report, its entire process can be as short as only one week, so that the time for style design is highly squeezed.
In order to form a positive cycle of "rapid new - rapid sales - rapid iteration", SHEIN, which has a faster pace than ZARA, has more styles for "testing" than ZARA.
Sheng Lu, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies the global textile and apparel industry, said, "Fast fashion is known for its frequent products**......."But shein is completely different". According to its research, in 2021, SHEIN offered more than 20 times more new products than ZAR and H&M.
According to the Zhongtai ** research report, ZARA launches 12,000 new products every year, which is less than 1 4
The data is back up to this: from July to December 2021, SHEIN can add 2,000 to 10,000 SKUs per day to the app, order only one small batch of each garment, and then decide whether to stop production immediately or increase production depending on the buyer's reaction.
In this context, "there are too many new products, not enough designers" is almost inevitable. "Changsha Evening News" reported not long ago that after SHEIN was frequently defended by the designer group, in January this year, it released the "Designer Empowerment Project" in the official ***, claiming to provide support for 3000 designers around the world, the problem is that it took 2000 years for 3000 designers around the world to design 25000 original works, which is not enough to cover SHEIN's new needs for three days.
On the one hand, the speed of the new is too fast, there are too many styles required, on the other hand, the number of designers is not enough, and the design time is squeezed, which will inevitably lead to the problem of fast but not optimal design links, and even more, there are frequent pixel-level copying and take-it-or-leave-it.
FamilyMart has previously accused SHEIN of plagiarizing the visual elements on its own ice cream.
In addition, in order to eliminate the problem of low accuracy of the front-end to a greater extent, SHEIN often uses web crawlers to scrape best-selling styles from e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, what is good to sell and "learn" what, in order to "more", "faster" and "save".
But in many cases, people can't "want and want again", you want to be more fast and save, then don't expect "good" - copying homework "can indeed save the time, energy and capital cost of original design, but it can be accompanied by frequent copyright infringement disputes.
In October last year, there was a hot topic of "Zara vs Shein" on foreign social **, and many bloggers showed the clothes styles of the two fast fashion companies with high similarity in the unbox**, and the comparison will find two points: 1, Shein** is much cheaper;2. One is "imitating" the other.
Because of "copying homework", in the past few years, SHEIN has been deeply involved in infringement lawsuits. 2018, Levi'S once sued SHEIN for infringement of a T-shirt - this T-shirt not only "borrowed" from Levi'The graphics lining of the S trademark also imitate the English font, and the degree of similarity is so high that even Lei Bi and Kang Shuaifu have to call them experts when they see it.
Levi on the left'The T-shirt graphic of S, the t-shirt graphic of SHEIN on the right.
levi'S is not alone, including brands such as ZARA, H&M, UGG, LEVI STRAUSS, STUSSY, OAKLEY SUNGLASSES, TRIBE TROPICAL and ** retailer Dolls Kill, etc., have all accused SHEIN of stealing its product design, and even FamilyMart has accused SHEIN of plagiarizing the visual elements of its own ice cream brand.
According to statistics, in 2021 alone, there were at least 40 lawsuits against SHEIN infringement in the United States.
After falling into the sea of global brand rights protection, SHEIN also raised the banner of intellectual property protection in January this year, and the landmark event was the launch of the "Designer Empowerment Project".
But many designers don't buy it. Since May this year, many designers around the world have sued SHEIN for plagiarism again, causing widespread concern.
The famous illustrator Maggie Stephenson pointed out in the lawsuit that SHEIN mass-produces inferior "replicas" of high-end and high-quality designer products, and floods the entire market with cheap imitations of "designer goods".
Some artists accused SHEIN of plagiarizing the artwork he created for commercial use.
In June, three graphic designers filed a 52-page complaint in federal court in California, alleging that SHEIN had stolen and stole "exact copies" of their creative works without consent and had also engaged in "systematic" and "criminal" copyright infringement, in serious violation of the Fraudulent Impact and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). This is the most serious accusation SHEIN has ever encountered.
Due to the rapid expansion of SHEIN's clothing category, the workload of the design team has increased geometrically, and SHEIN's internal software only contains simple design specifications, and the extremely short design time limit requirements and extremely low design level requirements will inevitably lead to far more programmatic operations in the design process than artistic originality, and the use of external design elements is not uncommon.
Although SHEIN has made use of the gray space of intellectual property rights in the field of fast fashion, and has also partially avoided liability and passed on risks with a complex corporate structure formed by multiple scattered entities, SHEIN has also taken some countermeasures under the pressure of the first momentum and response to the lawsuit, and in the context of the infamy brought by copyright infringement becoming a stumbling block to its own IPO.
At the beginning of 2021, SHEIN launched the "SHEIN X Designer" campaign. In one year, it has established cooperation with 1,442 original designers around the world.
LatePost previously revealed that in October this year, SHEIN acquired Missguided, a fast fashion brand owned by the British fashion retail group Frasers Group, including all its intellectual property rightsPushing back 2 months, SHEIN also acquired the equity of SPARC Group1 3, the parent company of the fast fashion ** brand Forever 21.
However, under the low-cost strategy, it is difficult to solve the contradiction between its low design capability and huge design needs.
According to the data, SHEIN X designers are mainly young designers who need to be "incubated", and their design capabilities can only support SHEIN to incubate trendy brand product lines similar to FILA Fusion to FILA, but cannot support a wide range of product design needs. Over the course of a year, SHEIN paid about $1.5 million to these designers for their copyrights, with an average of only about $1,000 per designer. With such investment, it is difficult to cultivate a mature IP innovation ecosystem.
Bringing overseas brands under its command is only a drop in the bucket in the face of SHEIN's growing demand for original design, and its role is more to reduce the risk of being sued by veteran nobles.
Under pressure, it is said that SHEIN has adopted a more radical approach - passing on the design cost to the OEM company, and taking away the product along with its copyright after placing an order.
It is understood that there are usually two cooperation models between SHEIN and the ecological partner companies on the ** chain:
1. OEM (commissioned processing) mode, SHEIN buyers or contracted designers give money, and the cooperative manufacturer is only responsible for production.
2. ODM (original design and manufacturing) mode, SHEIN buyer selection, layout design and production and shipment are all completed by the manufacturers and merchants themselves.
According to public data, as of this year, there are more than thousands of companies (especially manufacturers) that have in-depth cooperation with SHEIN in the ecosystem.
In this, a large number of manufacturers in the ODM mode are product designers, but the copyright rights and interests may not be in them - SHEIN controls the size data, style modification data, consignment, delivery, order, refund and other data of all production links and commodities of manufacturers and merchants through the "MES process management system" in the background. This makes the relationship between SHEIN and ** enterprises delicate.
Under the asymmetric game, although many manufacturers and merchants are designers, their intellectual property rights have been taken away, and they have lost the opportunity to sell online on other platforms.
Screenshot of the ** report on the copyright issue of the merchant's design.
In this way, manufacturers and merchants are the direct losers: due to the rapid iteration of SHEIN products, the products they design may have been passed after the test and become the denominator of SHEIN's product pool. In the face of such a situation, they could have "destocked" through other platforms, but because the copyright rights and interests have been 100% owned by SHEIN, their selling of their own goods has also become "infringement".
There are also some manufacturers and merchants, at first, who regarded SHEIN as a testing platform for full-platform operation, but as the copyright design rights and interests were packaged and taken away, they also lost the opportunity for multi-platform supply or full-platform operation.
This has exacerbated the tension between SHEIN and some ** businessmen, after all, this kind of "tricky" solution to intellectual property problems is a problem in itself.
For many apparel manufacturers, design rights are one of their core assets – and for those who are building their own brands, the value of intellectual property will become more prominent.
When they, as the designers, have the ownership of the product design, they can fully enjoy the copyright benefits.
However, SHEIN's "big shift" trick on copyright ownership is equivalent to turning some ecological partners into another relationship.
It can be said that SHEIN originally only paid for the purchase of "labor", but asked ecological partners to take the "soul".
This does allow SHEIN to alleviate the pain point of insufficient original design capabilities, but the price is indeed borne by the manufacturers and merchants in the upstream of the ** chain: when they realize copyright income, they could have realized it through more channels, but with the transfer of copyright, the diversified realization space is blocked.
In a way, this is even more outrageous than the copyright buyout storm that caused an uproar in the online literature industry a few years ago.
In the turmoil of that year, the platform bought out the author's copyright at a low level, which was accused of taking advantage of the platform's strong position to make the author sign a "deed of sale", which was an "obviously unfair" plot at the legal level.
And fast fashion companies take away the design copyright of manufacturers and merchants for free, which is tantamount to not even giving the "right of authorship" to the "original author".
This kind of practice is obviously contrary to the current normal form of industrial cooperation: today, it is the consensus of the industry that a good industrial chain collaboration ecology should be built on the basis of win-win cooperation. In order to promote the transformation of the first chain into a "win-win chain", many chain owners will find ways to empower ecological partners and let them benefit more from cooperation.
Taking Huawei as an example, Huawei has many ecological partners, but it does not take the intellectual property rights of "Hualian Enterprises" as its own, nor does it limit them to supply only for itself, but provides various digital intelligence support.
In contrast, fast fashion companies are not "Internet" to seize the design copyright of some first-chain manufacturers to fill the shortcomings of intellectual property rights.
In essence, this is an attempt to tear down the east wall and make up for the west wall - the copyright interests of some ecological partners are the "east wall", and the original design ability under the infringement lawsuit is the "west wall". In the long run, demolishing the east wall and making up the west wall is not the fundamental solution to the problem, but increasing investment in original design. If the east wall is demolished, the east wall will also collapse.
Maybe shein, who has enjoyed the dividend of the "fast" word, doesn't care about this, but time will tell it sooner or later: using a solution that seems to be a trick but is actually a bunch of problems to solve another problem may create more problems.
*: Northeast Net.