Behind Shein’s new campaign as Gen Z favorite prepares for holiday season

Nearly a decade since it first began selling in the U.S., Shein has quickly become a Gen Z favorite as the cohort clamors for the brand’s low-price fashion products. A recent survey from eMarketer found that 44% of Gen Z shoppers make at least one purchase at Shein each month, slightly more than the 41% who make monthly purchases at the brand’s Chinese rival Temu. As Temu, which blitzed its way into the U.S. in 2023 with a pricey Super Bowl ad campaign, continues to gain ground here, Shein is stepping up its marketing, though it’s had some pitfalls along the way. The fast fashion brand is debuting a new digital campaign spotlighting its real customers, including a small business owner, teacher and fashion retail manager. The campaign comes ahead of Shein’s expected IPO in the U.K., where the company, which was founded in China in 2012, recently revealed it generated $2 billion in 2023 revenue. Ad Age caught up with Angela Tucciarone, a Pepsi alum who joined Shein as VP and head of corporate communications three years ago, to talk about the new campaign and what marketing Shein is planning for the holiday season. This conversation was lightly edited for length and clarity. NextGen Marketing Summit Join us for a crash course on Gen Z, DTC marketing and the creator economy Register today Most of our readers are familiar with Shein by now, but it might surprise them to know that there are other brands in the portfolio. Can you talk a little bit about those? If you poke around the site, we have quite a few sub brands. One is Motf, a slightly more premium professional business casual look. We’ve expanded a lot of these lines in concert with what customers wanted—the early Shein customer who was looking for ‘going out shirts’ has now graduated to the office and has a need for different types of clothes. Glowmode is athletic and leisure. Petsin is where you can find matching outfits with your pet. We’re an on-demand retailer, so we’re slightly different from a traditional retailer in that we don’t have storefronts. We don’t have excess inventory— if you see something, we produce it in small batches of 100 or 200 pieces. If there is demand, we reorder. That has helped our ability to keep prices low. Shein has been one of the fastest growing brands in the U.S., but a lot of that growth is driven by Gen Z. Why does the brand resonate so much with that cohort in particular? Shein has been around for just over a decade and our core demographic is that 18 to 34. We’re a completely digital online-only brand and we have grown together with our Gen Z customers across all of these channels. A lot of it has to do with our marketing strategies—partnering with influencers and campaigns we’ve launched digitally. That core demographic has expanded quite a bit, whether through category expansion within Shein or outreach to different customers. [Also read: How to market to Gen Z] How are you taking that Gen Z appeal into account when putting together your marketing messaging and strategy? We are a very young company not only in age but in staff and critical to reaching this audience is building a team. We have a wonderful marketing team in LA that’s growing tremendously. They are Gen Z, they are hosting livestreams, building content, the social teams are crafting videos. A year ago, we built a livestream studio in our Los Angeles office pushing out maybe two times a week livestream videos. Those videos are reaching upwards of 200,000 views each time they run. Having a team that understands the audience has been critical. The brand has faced some allegations of poor labor conditions, and an unsustainable supply chain—how are you taking those criticisms into account when putting together your marketing? We have zero tolerance for forced labor and we take visibility across the supply chain extremely seriously. We launched a website a few years ago in an effort to be more transparent with customers who we know are asking for this. We issued our third sustainability report and we will continue to do good and do right and provide the information that our customers ask for. You just launched your first campaign featuring real customers. Tell us about this push. These videos aim to spotlight the diverse range of uses of everyday life that people have for Shein products. They were all found organically. We have an inbox for fan mail—it’s for press inquiries, but we get a little bit of everything. Dexter [the barber from Peoria, Illinois] wrote in. He wears Shein every day and he said he’d love to explore a partnership. The three different stories really personify the different reasons why different people come to Shein, whether for your wedding, your small business or your classroom. We worked with Green Buzz Agency, they did the production for us. The videos will be on YouTube. Were the customers paid to appear? They were not paid, but we made sure they have some Shein outfits to wear over the next few months. What else is Shein planning for holiday marketing? We have been trying a lot of new approaches on marketing over the last few years. Last October, we launched our first out of home, a billboard in Times Square where we’re still running content. The holidays are the Super Bowl of retail and it starts sooner and sooner. This year, our promotions will start in a week or two, by the end of October we’ll have Shein Black Friday with deals that will increase up until actual Black Friday. Our tried and true campaign is #SheinBlackFriday. We know it’s something customers look for. Trend-wise, what do you expect customers to be shopping for this year? We launched a survey of our U.S. customers in August to get a pulse check of how they’re thinking about holiday shopping. The first big trend is ‘cozy chic.’ Gone are the days of people wearing sparkly dresses and heels—some still are—but when we asked folks the dominating category of their holiday style, cozy chic was at the top. They’re wearing sweaters and slippers to holiday parties. We’ve seen a shift since the pandemic in cozy wear. We asked folks when shopping holiday season a fairly large percentage said when sales kick off, but 45% said a few weeks before the holiday season. Is physical retail on your radar at all? Pop-ups have been a great channel for us, especially in the U.S. over the last three to four years. We had quite a few this year and I expect that we’ll have some more next year. Our last one in New York was a year ago in October with Forever 21 at their giant flagship in Times Square but we don’t have anything planned for the rest of this year. What else can we expect to see from the brand in 2025? We’ll continue our digital-first approach. We’ll continue to try out new avenues, whether out-of-home, digital and potentially linear TV.

Behind Shein’s new campaign as Gen Z favorite prepares for holiday season

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