AMANCIO ORTEGA, founder of the Zara fast-fashion empire, got his start selling bathrobes in northern Spain. Erling Persson of H&M peddled women’s clothing in a small-town shop in Sweden for decades before going global. Xu Yangtian had none of their tailoring experience when he founded Shein (pronounced she-in) in 2008. Instead, the creator of the fashion world’s latest sensation was a specialist in search-engine optimisation.
This expertise helped Mr Xu gain an understanding of how to draw shoppers’ attention in the digital world. And he has understood this very well indeed, bringing to an audience of rapt Western fashionistas a Chinese style of “social commerce”, which combines social media with
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