Shein Marketplace has recruited The Children’s Place as its latest U.S. partner.
The two have teamed up to bring the children’s clothing brand to Shein Marketplace, which allows third-party sellers and brands to offer their products to Shein shoppers on the platform. As part of the agreement—and as is standard for Shein Marketplace sellers—The Children’s Place (TCP) will choose which items to offer on its storefront, set the prices for those items and fulfill the items.
Jessica Liu, Shein’s vice president of global brand operations, said the partnership began because consumers already sought out the brand through Shein’s search function.
“The consumer already searches for very famous brand names, including The Children’s Place, so that’s why we would like to offer a variety of brands to our consumer,” Liu said, noting that the Singapore-based company approached TCP about the partnership because of that demand.
Shein Marketplace does not give consumers access to all of TCP’s products. The brand’s preliminary offerings on Shein include a variety of holiday-themed pajamas, winter boots, sweaters, flannel shirts, velvet dresses and more.
Photo courtesy of The Children’s Place.
Claudia Lima-Guinehut, brand president of The Children’s Place, said starting with products that felt familiar to existing consumers and represented the brand’s ethos was top of mind for TCP’s initial assortment selection.
“We started with what we believe are some of our very strong seasonal offerings. Holidays are very important for us; they’re very important for our families, and we wanted to make sure that as they went on the Shein site, they felt that they had a good representation of The Children’s Place brand, particularly in key areas of business that they have come to expect from us and love from us,” she said.
While Shein’s own offerings often come at a rock bottom price tag, TCP’s marketplace offerings may reflect prices closer to those on its own site. For the company’s introductory period to Shein Marketplace, it is offering steep discounts on some products.
For TCP, the partnership means it has another way to meet potential consumers where they already shop; Shein’s primary shoppers are young women—primarily Millennials and Gen Zers, who may need a reintroduction to the brand as they become parents or caretakers to young children.
Lima-Guinehut said she thinks about Shein as “a smaller Google,” because of the breadth of products consumers can discover on the platform—from low-priced shoes, to holiday novelty items and more.
“I like to think about [Shein] as [being] almost like a search engine, where you have a captive audience that has the intent to purchase—so even better than a Google, because, on Google, sometimes you have an intent to purchase, sometimes you don’t. With Shein, you have a captive audience with an intent to purchase, and now they have visibility to your brand, to your product,” she said.
But with that reach may come some risk; Shein has been criticized and probed by global regulators, consumers and organizations over product safety concerns, potential forced labor infractions and data questions. Nonetheless, Lima-Guinehut believes that TCP’s reputation among parents and other consumers can speak for itself, even when selling through Shein.
She explained that pairing the brand trust TCP wields with the broad reach Shein has, particularly over Gen Z and Millennial consumers, makes the two companies a good match. The brand intends to help consumers understand that, at present, the products sold through Shein do not differ at all from those sold in a TCP store.
“For us, it’s all about the transparency of the fact that everything is coming directly from The Children’s Place. It’s produced in the same factories as our owned and operated [channels]. We follow the same social—as well as safety—standards that we do with all of the products that we produce. That’s why, to me, this is such a great partnership,” she said.
Liu said The Children’s Place will fulfill its Shein Marketplace orders out of a warehouse in Alabama. That may provide shoppers with faster shipping than some direct-from-China sellers offering up low-priced goods on the marketplace.
It also benefits both companies, she said, noting that the model ensures TCP won’t have to split its inventory, mitigating the risk of lost sales through other channels.
“This is a very good business model for us and also for our sellers, because they do not need to separate their inventory in our warehouse and their warehouse,” Liu said. “We collaborate on the business on Marketplace, so TCP can fulfill from their warehouse, [which means] they can share the inventory with other platforms, [and] with their brick-and-mortar stores.”
Lima-Guinehut said the company has aspirations to make shipping times for consumers faster, both for transactions occurring directly on the company’s site and for orders coming from Shein Marketplace.
Consumers in the U.S. can already access The Children’s Place’s storefront on Shein. While the items have not yet been made available in other countries, the two companies plan to focus on bringing The Children’s Place to consumers in other locations as the partnership progresses. Liu said Shein does not have a concrete timeline for when consumers in other countries will have access to TCP’s storefront.
Lima-Guinehut said at the moment, TCP has not decided which international countries it plans to target for expansion on Shein, but noted that she looks forward to evaluating where it makes most sense for the brand to play in the future.
“We’re able to provide this full look, head-to toe-assortment [in kidswear], which not many other brands can. It’s always been our strength, and it continues to be our strength, to deliver great fashion at fantastic prices, and that white space opportunity exists in many international markets. We’ll continue to look at where it makes sense based on where our customers need us,” she explained.
When TCP thinks about expanding the partnership—which both executives said is based on a one-year contract that they expect will be continually renewed—multiple areas for further growth have cropped up. While international expansion is one opportunity, another is linking multi-channel strategy more closely.
TCP has a loyalty program it calls My Place Rewards, which provides repeat customers with promotions and discounts based on their history with the brand. At the moment, consumers cannot earn points toward their My Place account by purchasing TCP-branded products from Shein Marketplace, but that may change in the future.
Throughout the partnership, TCP will receive data-focused insights on how Shein shoppers interact with its products, as well as about the type of goods they are searching for over time.
Liu said that, going forward, Shein has the ability to produce smaller batches of garments on TCP’s behalf through a separate supply chain program it offers, which allows designers and brands to share product specifications and have garments produced by Shein’s on-demand technology in its owned facilities.
According to Liu, the benefit of that would be the ability to test and learn with 100 to 200 units, rather than producing thousands of units, as is standard for many large companies in the fashion and apparel industries.
But Lima-Guinehut said, as she looks forward, that strategy isn’t in the playbook for TCP at the moment.
“We have an extremely strong sourcing and production footprint, so at this time, for us, that’s not a need,” she said. “We are a super trusted brand. Our quality is phenomenal, and that’s the way that we’ll continue to go forward.”
