- Manchester is at the sharp end of the fashion industry
Manchester has given birth to two Premier League football titans, Britpop’s most famous band Oasis and the suffragette movement’s leader Emmeline Pankhurst – but it is the rag trade that really put the city on the map.
Known as ‘Cottonopolis’ in the 19th Century for its dominance in textiles, by the 1990s it was dubbed ‘Madchester’ as many mills became party venues. It has since become the fast fashion hub of the world.
Home to Boohoo, PrettyLittleThing and Missguided, Manchester is at the sharp end of the fashion industry – selling glamorous clingy dresses for as little as £10.
Hub: Home to Boohoo, PrettyLittleThing and Missguided, Manchester is at the sharp end of the fashion industry
And now controversial Chinese giant Shein is about to enter the fray, opening a hub in the city’s hip Northern Quarter – teeming with coffee shops, bars, workspaces and young fashionistas.
Shein will take an office minutes from Boohoo’s headquarters on Dale Street.
The area is full of Grade-II listed buildings, including converted warehouses and Victorian mills, and is renowned for its hurly-burly of buyers and sellers.
The move pitches Chris Xu – the mysterious billionaire founder of Shein – against Boohoo’s Kamani family, the dominant fashion clan in the city.
For Shein, currently based in Salford, moving to the centre of Manchester is another signal that it has joined ‘the Establishment’ as it moves towards a £50billion stock market float in London, possibly as early as this Autumn.
While the Boohoo building looks behind the times, builders down the road are putting together a chic fashion hub for Shein.
Parts of the 14,000sq ft HQ may still be covered in tarpaulin, but it will soon be a bright, minimalist space, housing 75 staff by the end of this year. And it will have facilities for video and content creation for social media sites like TikTok.
The Shein Manchester team is the first outside China to have total control over creating products with the busy ensemble of creatives putting together moodboards, designing garments and then sourcing fabrics.
A new brand, Musera, was launched earlier this year. Within a month, there were 200 Musera styles on offer, with new collections launched every week.
Though the garments are designed in the UK, they are still made in Chinese factories at startling speed. If a product is selling well, it will be replicated in several new colours and lengths.
It is this speed, coupled with low prices, that has seen Shein steal market share from Boohoo, Asos and PrettyLittleThing. And it is confident it can dominate the industry for years to come.
Analysts predict the company will become the UK’s sixth largest clothes seller in 2027, up from the 11th in 2023, according to data firm Global Data.
Shein: Though the garments are designed in the UK, they are still made in Chinese factories
Shein made £1.5billion of profits on £34billion of sales – by gross merchandise value – last year, serving younger, budget-conscious shoppers in 150 countries.
On a tour of the building, chief product officer Gemma Dunne, formerly buying director at PrettyLittleThing, is brimming with confidence about the move.
She told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I don’t think there’s really anybody that could match us, Shein is leaving everyone in the dust.
‘Setting up in Manchester, the home of fast fashion, was probably one of the best moves that Shein could make in terms of placement in the industry.’
But Shein’s business model is not without controversy. There have been reports that some of Shein’s suppliers use the forced labour of China’s minority Muslim Uyghur population, allowing the firm to sell clothes at knockdown prices. A shirt can cost just £4.
The company has also admitted that it discovered two instances of child labour last year after an audit of its thousands of suppliers.
The firm says it has a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to child labour.
Dunne defends the business model, saying: ‘When you grow at the speed that Shein has grown, you are automatically setting yourself up for more press and more negative feedback. That’s just natural human instinct.’
There has also been criticism in the fashion press about the quality of clothes, but Dunne says: ‘We are quite precious about making sure that, just because it’s £15, doesn’t mean you wear it once. You can wear it as many times as you want and it’s going to last. Cheap doesn’t have to mean it’s not good.’
With a London stock market debut in its sights, Shein has hired bankers at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, and joined the British Retail Consortium in a bid to win over the City.
This came after the British Fashion Council (BFC) warned that the planned flotation is a ‘significant concern’ to the industry.
Some High Street retailers are also understood to be unhappy with the Labour Government’s reported support for the listing.
Stuart Trevor, founder of All Saints, is the latest to take a swipe. He said: ‘Shein is making as much noise as possible, desperately trying to make out it has some sort of respectable business practice in the hope that the British Government is stupid enough to allow its listing to go through, which is ridiculous and cannot be allowed,’ he said two weeks ago.
Shein has filed papers with the Financial Conduct Authority – the first step to a listing. But The Mail on Sunday revealed this summer that Chinese officials are unhappy with the level of criticism Shein has faced since revealing its plans.
No doubt the Kamani family and the rest of the Manchester fashion establishment will have a beady eye on developments.
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