Fast Fashion SHEIN Wants to IPO

Fast fashion retailer SHEIN had an amazing 2023 in terms of revenue and that's making some think it will be going public soon. And you can tell demand is on the rise because it's getting more popular on the App Store and Google Play.

Right now, SHEIN is the 8th most downloaded app in the US App Store and 4th on Google Play - higher than Instagram, YouTube, and even TikTok!

This rank is a result of downloads growing consistently over time, and this January the growth was massive. Downloads in January of this year rose 48% from 2022's downloads to 17.5M, according to our estimates. February, March, and all other months this year have been higher than last year!

That's not all. Downloads hit a new all-time high in May with 20M new downloads from the App Store and Google Play, according to our estimates.

The majority of downloads are coming from Google Play, where Brazil, Mexico, and the US are the largest markets for SHEIN, contributing 48% of all downloads. On the App Store, downloads are mainly coming from the US, Brazil, and Japan which contributed 42% of all downloads this year.

In the first half of 2023, SHEIN's app was downloaded 106M times from the App Store and Google Play. That's the same as the populations of Australia, Greece, and Portugal, combined!

And that's also 22% higher than the first half of 2022. A good time to go public.

Another thing I found interesting while digging into SHEIN was the number of keywords across its Apple Search Ads campaigns. According to our ASA Intelligence, SHEIN is paying for more than 10K keywords on the App Store which span brands they sell, competitors, a slew of generic words (like "she") and a variety of ways to describe a shopping app (including "shopping mall").

That's to say, this growth isn't free or cheap.

But SHEIN has to hurry up because TikTok is getting into the shopping business next month.