Shein jumps on the third-party brand bandwagon with Alibaba veteran • businessroundups.org

Shein, the ultra-fast fashion giant that has taken the world by storm, has brought on another heavyweight executive to help helm his ship. It recently came on board Jessica Liuformer co-president of Southeast Asian e-commerce giant Lazada, as vice president of Global Brand Operations.

Liu will be responsible for global brand partnerships, Shein’s said after on LinkedIn. This is an intriguing development, as the platform has mainly focused on its private labels Shein, Romwe and Sheglam. businessroundups.org has reached out to Shein to learn more about its plans for global partnerships.

There are already signs that Shein is looking to evolve into an all-encompassing e-commerce platform with its horizontal expansion into home appliances, pet products and its most ambitious push since fashion — cosmetics, which ranks among the Sheglam Brand.

Shein is expected to generate $30 billion in gross trade value in 2022, better than expected, according to Chinese news site 36kr. H&M sold 199 billion Swedish kronor By comparison, ($19.3 billion) worth of products in 2021. But Shein’s large, low-margin sales are increasingly threatened by its Chinese counterpart Temu, Pinduoduo’s foreign brother. In the span of a few months, Temu has soared through US app stores and topped all free apps for weeks.

Partnering with outside brands allows Shein to scale faster across product categories rather than relying on in-house development. Shein has become a master at managing a huge network of contract manufacturers, but it’s probably an unknown in the shiny world of brands. Shoppers can already find Aukey, the electronics giant that was hit hard last year by Amazon’s crackdown on Chinese sellers, on Shein.

Liu seems like the right candidate to build Shein’s outside business, given her extensive experience with brands. Her e-commerce career began nearly two decades ago at Amazon China, before running the fashion and luxury arm of Tmall, Alibaba’s online department store for major brands. Her stint with Lazada, a member of Rocket Internet acquired by Alibaba, lasted less than two years.

Liu is just one of a handful of industry veterans recently hired by Shein to grow its talent pool as the company seeks new areas of growth and is under pressure to address environmental, social and governance or ESG challenges . Donald Tang, a former Bear Sterns investment banker, joined as executive vice chairman as the company gears up for the IPO process. Leonard Lin, who spent nearly a decade with Singapore’s Temasek sovereign wealth fund, is now Shein’s global head of government relations. In the US, Shein recently hired its first lobbyists and Disney veteran Adam Winston as its global head of ESG.