Shein’s head of strategy Peter Pernot-Day on how the e-commerce app is trying to get ahead of its own marketing narrative

Shein has been around for nearly a decade, but we're just beginning to learn more about the brand now.

Over the last two years, the e-commerce platform has taken the world by storm. In 2021, it caught most people by surprise when it became the most downloaded U.S. iPhone shopping app. Today, it is the number three top app on App Store.

But with this rise to fame has come a lot of questions. For one, Shein is largely known as a seller of fast-fashion apparel. Its products are cheap, and it sells thousands of them -- which to many, seems like a model that's both wasteful and reliant on cheap labor whenever possible. But after years of seeming silence, Shein is now talking and trying to give a sense of how the company works.

"We like to call [our model] on-demand production," said Peter Pernot-Day, Shein's global head of strategy and corporate affairs. "The way it works is: we will identify potential products, we'll work with one of our small-batch production partners, and we'll make between 10 to 100 copies of that garment -- we'll then offer it for sale," he said. If the garment resonates, Shein goes back and finds a partner who can manufacture it at scale. "That's allowed us to operate profitably -- it's also allowed us to dramatically reduce excess inventory waste."

Pernot-Day joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about the company's overall direction, its strategic growth in both the U.S. and countries like Brazil as well as why it's attempting such a big marketing push now after years of relative press silence. He started as Shein's general counsel in 2021 and took this more front-facing role last year

For the past year, Shein has been facilitating a marketing spree to try and tell its story on its own terms. This has included pop-ups around the U.S., as well as work with influencers. One recent influencer promotion sent TikTok personalities to factories in China, who then posted about their experiences on social media. This was met with criticism far and wide of influencers describing a paid press trip as a journalistic endeavor.

But Pernot-Day felt the entire ordeal was misconstrued. "I think that those influencers spoke honestly about what they saw," he said. "And I think it's a shame that they were attacked for it on social media. I don't think that they bear any responsibility for reporting honestly about what they saw on their trip."

Despite the perceived blowback, Shein remains a popular e-commerce platform that seems to be growing by the day. One of its big efforts to maintain this growth is a third-party marketplace. The company is trying to find local brands to sell their goods on the platform. The marketplace is currently running in both the U.S. and Brazil.

As Pernot-Day described it, this push is part of Shein's focus on localization. "The final piece [of this strategy] is finding both suppliers who make and manufacture Shein clothing, but also third-party sellers who are interested in coming alongside us and reaching our customer base in these local geographies," he said