7 ms·

Crazy how fast they can pump out products when they have free slave labor and use the absolute lowest quality materials

powerapple 3y ago
part of the reason that shein and temu is gaining is that some manufactures are moving away from China. This leaves huge capacity in manufacture to be filled, which means it is cheaper and faster for shein and temu.
solardev 3y ago
Isn't that pretty much all of clothing manufacturing?
- snakeyjake 3y ago
  100% of everything on my body right now and ~80% of everything in my wardrobe is made of the highest quality materials I can afford by US or EU labor, often by a unionized workforce. Shoes: New Balance 990v4 (USA). Socks: Darn Tough (USA). Jeans: Texas Jeans (USA). Undershirt: Sloane (USA). Underpants: Duckworth (USA). Shirt: Gitman (USA). The only non-US things I own tend to be shoes (Italy, Spain) and jackets (UK). Or gifts. YES it does cost more. But here's the thing: I have fewer, nicer, things that last longer and I almost certainly spend way less annually than someone buying $7 shirts from Shein or Walmart clothes. So, buying trash made of the worst possible materials by slave labor is a choice unless you are the poorest of the poor in which case you, and only you, get a pass.
  - m2mdas2 3y ago
    Ah the exceptionalism, the trait suits to the privileged ones. Try doing it living with a minimum wage and you have my respect.
    - snakeyjake 3y ago
      Very few people make minimum wage. A single digit percentage of Americans. Keep on making excuses. If everyone who didn't make minimum wage spent more consciously instead of just gulping down cheap Chinese goods like a hungry hungry hippo eats marbles and shopped locally economies of scale would make higher quality products available to everyone. I don't participate in races to the bottom.
      - m2mdas2 3y ago
        I won't argue with you, just stating that minimum wage of SF is half of minimum wage set by govt. Your comment just proved my point.
        m2mdas2 3y ago
        Oops it should be double instead of half.
      - pests 3y ago
        Your original comment was interesting, now this is just pretentious.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  Even relative to other manufacturers in the same areas, Shein's quality (I don't pretend to be specifically informed re labor) of materials is "utter garbage".
  - robocat 3y ago
    > "utter garbage" That feels like a rude stereotyping that is dismissive of the buyers. Maybe not your thing but no need to get judgy about it. The buyers know what they are getting. They choose to buy Shein for their own reasons - a good practice is to assume people have good reasons (maybe other reasons than the quality or reasons that you don't understand).
    - FireBeyond 3y ago
      Oh! That was actually not intended to be dismissive of the buyers. It isn't my thing, as it happens, but I more mean that "even relative to other textile companies in China, Shein has a reputation for the lowest quality raw material/workmanship". As you say, "people know what they are getting", and that's fine.
      - robocat 3y ago
        Yeah, it interests me to know why people buy the things they do for reasons subconscious or influenced. I really don't understand some people's choices, but that's why it's interesting!
  - herbst 3y ago
    This isn't really true tho. Shein ads over 10k of items every day, appearantly, and other than most shops they have many reviews on most popular items. It's kinda easy to pick the exact quality you are looking for as you have more or less unlimited choice. Saying it's just 'utter garbage' is to simple.
- neom 3y ago
  I'd imagine over 70% of ssense.com is either hand made in Europe or Japan/South Korea, most of it will be quality materials. https://en.adererror.com/product/sig-trs-tag-hoodie-zip-up-02/11518/category/1195/display/1/ https://en.adererror.com/product/sig-trs-tag-hoodie-zip-up-0... A hoodie like this could last you 10 years easily if you took care of it, made in South Korea, tripe weight cotton.
  - deathanatos 3y ago
    … it's nearly $300. Pants on that site are $400–$500. That's expensive. A cheap Temu hoodie, by comparison, would need to make it a single year, maybe only 6–8 months, to have equivalent lifespan / $. (If priced at $25, or like $15.)
dangus 3y ago
This is the kind of take that is all too dismissive of China's textile industry. Would you accuse the Seattle coffee industry that can roast and drop ship a custom bag of coffee in under 3 days of running on slave labor? Would you accuse the California software industry that can produce an MVP web app over the weekend of slave labor? No, of course you wouldn't. But we do that for China because we assume that it's still the world's sweat shop rather than the world's most sophisticated manufacturing hub. China is the Silicon Valley of textiles (and it's the Silicon Valley of many other manufacturing industries). Chinese factories that generally pay better wages that afford much better conditions than other textile hubs and can pump out high quality products very quickly. Luxury clothing brands depend on China and generally not a lot of other textile-producing countries for their best quality items. What Shein, Temu, and AliExpress are actually doing in the market is streamlining the overseas shipping process to cut down delivery times that used to be unreliable and take months with poor tracking and changing that to a generally reliable 8-12 business day shipping infrastructure. Making the assumption that these websites only sell landfill-bound junk is an assumption that a competing business will make at their own peril. The way I see it, canceling my Amazon Prime subscription and moving most of those purchases to AliExpress has resulted in lower costs with equal quality. I'm not saying that Shein's quality specifically is any good, but if you haven't been paying attention, clothing quality at mainstream Western stores like Walmart, Target, TJ Maxx, Ross, Zara, H&M, etc, isn't really much if any better than the low end no-brand stuff you find from China.
- NSMutableSet 3y ago
  >Would you accuse the Seattle coffee industry that can roast and drop ship a custom bag of coffee in under 3 days of running on slave labor? https://humantraffickingsearch.org/there-could-be-labor-exploitation-in-your-coffee-cup-heres-how-it-got-there/ https://humantraffickingsearch.org/there-could-be-labor-expl... https://www.seattletimes.com/business/starbucks-illegally-kept-wages-benefits-from-union-workers/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/starbucks-illegally-ke... >Would you accuse the California software industry that can produce an MVP web app over the weekend of slave labor? https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2013-mar-20-la-fi-tn-seacode-was-first-to-try-to-put-foreign-workers-on-a-cruise-ship-20130319-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2013-mar-20-la-fi-tn...

part of the reason that shein and temu is gaining is that some manufactures are moving away from China. This leaves huge capacity in manufacture to be filled, which means it is cheaper and faster for shein and temu.

solardev 3y ago

Isn't that pretty much all of clothing manufacturing?

snakeyjake 3y ago
100% of everything on my body right now and ~80% of everything in my wardrobe is made of the highest quality materials I can afford by US or EU labor, often by a unionized workforce. Shoes: New Balance 990v4 (USA). Socks: Darn Tough (USA). Jeans: Texas Jeans (USA). Undershirt: Sloane (USA). Underpants: Duckworth (USA). Shirt: Gitman (USA). The only non-US things I own tend to be shoes (Italy, Spain) and jackets (UK). Or gifts. YES it does cost more. But here's the thing: I have fewer, nicer, things that last longer and I almost certainly spend way less annually than someone buying $7 shirts from Shein or Walmart clothes. So, buying trash made of the worst possible materials by slave labor is a choice unless you are the poorest of the poor in which case you, and only you, get a pass.
- m2mdas2 3y ago
  Ah the exceptionalism, the trait suits to the privileged ones. Try doing it living with a minimum wage and you have my respect.
  - snakeyjake 3y ago
    Very few people make minimum wage. A single digit percentage of Americans. Keep on making excuses. If everyone who didn't make minimum wage spent more consciously instead of just gulping down cheap Chinese goods like a hungry hungry hippo eats marbles and shopped locally economies of scale would make higher quality products available to everyone. I don't participate in races to the bottom.
    - m2mdas2 3y ago
      I won't argue with you, just stating that minimum wage of SF is half of minimum wage set by govt. Your comment just proved my point.
      - m2mdas2 3y ago
        Oops it should be double instead of half.
    - pests 3y ago
      Your original comment was interesting, now this is just pretentious.
FireBeyond 3y ago
Even relative to other manufacturers in the same areas, Shein's quality (I don't pretend to be specifically informed re labor) of materials is "utter garbage".
- robocat 3y ago
  > "utter garbage" That feels like a rude stereotyping that is dismissive of the buyers. Maybe not your thing but no need to get judgy about it. The buyers know what they are getting. They choose to buy Shein for their own reasons - a good practice is to assume people have good reasons (maybe other reasons than the quality or reasons that you don't understand).
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    Oh! That was actually not intended to be dismissive of the buyers. It isn't my thing, as it happens, but I more mean that "even relative to other textile companies in China, Shein has a reputation for the lowest quality raw material/workmanship". As you say, "people know what they are getting", and that's fine.
    - robocat 3y ago
      Yeah, it interests me to know why people buy the things they do for reasons subconscious or influenced. I really don't understand some people's choices, but that's why it's interesting!
- herbst 3y ago
  This isn't really true tho. Shein ads over 10k of items every day, appearantly, and other than most shops they have many reviews on most popular items. It's kinda easy to pick the exact quality you are looking for as you have more or less unlimited choice. Saying it's just 'utter garbage' is to simple.
neom 3y ago
I'd imagine over 70% of ssense.com is either hand made in Europe or Japan/South Korea, most of it will be quality materials. https://en.adererror.com/product/sig-trs-tag-hoodie-zip-up-02/11518/category/1195/display/1/ https://en.adererror.com/product/sig-trs-tag-hoodie-zip-up-0... A hoodie like this could last you 10 years easily if you took care of it, made in South Korea, tripe weight cotton.
- deathanatos 3y ago
  … it's nearly $300. Pants on that site are $400–$500. That's expensive. A cheap Temu hoodie, by comparison, would need to make it a single year, maybe only 6–8 months, to have equivalent lifespan / $. (If priced at $25, or like $15.)

dangus 3y ago

This is the kind of take that is all too dismissive of China's textile industry. Would you accuse the Seattle coffee industry that can roast and drop ship a custom bag of coffee in under 3 days of running on slave labor? Would you accuse the California software industry that can produce an MVP web app over the weekend of slave labor? No, of course you wouldn't. But we do that for China because we assume that it's still the world's sweat shop rather than the world's most sophisticated manufacturing hub. China is the Silicon Valley of textiles (and it's the Silicon Valley of many other manufacturing industries). Chinese factories that generally pay better wages that afford much better conditions than other textile hubs and can pump out high quality products very quickly. Luxury clothing brands depend on China and generally not a lot of other textile-producing countries for their best quality items. What Shein, Temu, and AliExpress are actually doing in the market is streamlining the overseas shipping process to cut down delivery times that used to be unreliable and take months with poor tracking and changing that to a generally reliable 8-12 business day shipping infrastructure. Making the assumption that these websites only sell landfill-bound junk is an assumption that a competing business will make at their own peril. The way I see it, canceling my Amazon Prime subscription and moving most of those purchases to AliExpress has resulted in lower costs with equal quality. I'm not saying that Shein's quality specifically is any good, but if you haven't been paying attention, clothing quality at mainstream Western stores like Walmart, Target, TJ Maxx, Ross, Zara, H&M, etc, isn't really much if any better than the low end no-brand stuff you find from China.

NSMutableSet 3y ago
>Would you accuse the Seattle coffee industry that can roast and drop ship a custom bag of coffee in under 3 days of running on slave labor? https://humantraffickingsearch.org/there-could-be-labor-exploitation-in-your-coffee-cup-heres-how-it-got-there/ https://humantraffickingsearch.org/there-could-be-labor-expl... https://www.seattletimes.com/business/starbucks-illegally-kept-wages-benefits-from-union-workers/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/starbucks-illegally-ke... >Would you accuse the California software industry that can produce an MVP web app over the weekend of slave labor? https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2013-mar-20-la-fi-tn-seacode-was-first-to-try-to-put-foreign-workers-on-a-cruise-ship-20130319-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2013-mar-20-la-fi-tn...