A western company would try to imitate this through securing long term contracts along the supply chain, and utilising high tech workshops that can be reconfigured for different garments. Shein’s approach is to highly automate the process of commissioning thousands of workshops for small batches of orders and scaling to meet demand afterwards. The existing productive forces are untouched, but nonetheless extracted and organised into a single organism.

The video skims the exploitation and environmental impact of this industry, which we are well aware of, and instead argues that as long as there is western demand for low priced garmentd at the cost of all else, Chinese powerhouses like Shein will eventually dominate in meeting that demand.