Four-and-a-half years after the Indian Government banned the Chinese quick fashion brand SHEIN, Reliance Retail has begun a backdoor test launch of the brand, beginning with its fashion and lifestyle website Ajio.
“SHEIN has begun using Ajio to test and catalogue their casual women’s western clothing, with plans to gradually expand to additional platforms,” a person with direct knowledge of the plans stated.
In the fast fashion, affordable space, SHEIN, a prominent global fashion brand now headquartered in Singapore, will face off against Flipkart-owned Myntra in India and Tata Group’s value fashion chain Zudio. SHEIN and Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd. partnered last year to market SHEIN’s quick fashion line on its platforms in India.
After the conflict between India and China escalated, the Indian Government banned the SHEIN app in June 2020. SHEIN was one of more than fifty Chinese apps that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had prohibited at the time.
In a written response to the Lok Sabha last week, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal stated that SHEIN will always have its own retail platform hosted on Indian infrastructure, with SHEIN having no access to or control over such data. In the response, he also stated that the Ministry of Textiles had “no objection” to Reliance Retail’s proposal following consultation with MeitY and the Ministry of Home Affairs.
Goyal went on to say that Roadget Business Pte Ltd and Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd had inked a technology agreement to create a domestic e-commerce retail platform. He added that the platform plans to establish a network of regional suppliers and manufacturers to produce and market goods under the SHEIN brand.
A Reuters report from October claims that SHEIN’s sales growth dropped to 23 per cent in the first half of this year from 40 per cent the year before, ahead of a London stock market offering.
By FY ’31, the Indian fast fashion business is predicted to generate over US $ 50 billion in revenues, according to a forecast by consulting firm Redseer Strategy Consultants. According to the estimate, by FY ’31, fast fashion in India would account for 25–30 per cent of the country’s total fashion retail sales. However, there are hundreds of unorganised players vying for market share in this crowded sector.
