The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
FTX Was a Wall Street Failure, Not a Software Failure
“The thing that strikes me, and it's a kind of a general thesis that someone told me the other day, I bore on about too much, but I bore on about it because I think it's fascinating, is that there's no software questions here. That this is like, you know, as fo…”
Evans: Shein's $3 prices stem from scale and manufacturing, not slave labor
“And it's not that everyone's slaves. It's just that it's, you know, it's made at massive scale in a different manufacturing model. And it's, you know, it's a certain level of quality.”
Evans: US De Minimis Rule Gives Temu a Massive Tax Advantage
“There is a rule in the US that for orders of a value of less than 800 dollars, there's no import taxes or different, much less, or different import taxes. And so if you were running a store in the U.S. And shipping a shipping container full of garments to Amer…”
Evans: Temu and Shein Accounted for $4 Billion of Meta's Revenue
“10% of revenue, five percent of revenue growth. And so that's about four billion dollars, and so apparently half of that was Temu, and well, presumably quite a lot of the rest was Shein.”
Evans: Shein surpassed Zara and H&M combined in US sales
“No, Ernest, which is this company that does credit card, aggregates credit card bills, sort of said it's now the same size as Zara and H&M, and now, at the end of last year, it's bigger than Zara and H&M combined in US purchasing”
Cowan-Brown: Shein turns around fashion production in two to three days
“Unlike Zara or Asus, and most people have gotten familiar with their e-commerce model and being able to turn things around in two or three weeks. Shein is turning things around in two or three days, which is absolutely insane.”
Evans: Shein applies the Netflix operating paradigm to fast fashion
“Shein, which is a sort of, you know, would be the Netflix paradigm in the clothing fast fashion. It's the hero. They are using this new channel to create the product basically close, but in a new way at a new volume with a new model, just as Netflix is creatin…”
Evans: Shein is the biggest US fast-fashion brand without physical stores
“Obviously, Shein at the Extreme doesn't have any stores, and it's the biggest fast fashion brand in the USA.”
Evans: Online retailers redirect store rent savings into shipping and advertising
“Another big piece of it, of course, is that instead of spending the money on advertising, they spend the money, instead of spending the money on rent, they spend the money on advertising. So, you know, there's no, there's, you know, it's like a law of thermody…”
Evans: Shein adds more SKUs every day than Zara carries in total
“Whereas Sheehan added something over 50,000 in the last seven days alone. And they add sort of seven, 8000 every single day. So they add more every day than Zara has in total.”
Evans: TikTok, Shein, and Instagram users act as a giant Mechanical Turk
“And what you have in TikTok and what you have in Shein is you've got enough people looking at it that you've actually got that feedback loop. So basically the Shein user base or the TikTok user base is almost like a giant mechanical turk. Telling the system wh…”
Brown: Shein excels at localizing regional fashion catalog styles
“Shein has been very good at localizing its content and giving people exactly the type of styles, whether you're based in America, whether you're in Europe, etc. So if it doesn't, I think they've done very well in not making people feel like they're buying some…”
Evans: Shein and TikTok differ from Zara and Netflix via rapid feedback loops
“But it's also the feedback loop, and I think that's the change from ASOS, and certainly from Zara and H&M, and in some ways the change from Netflix, but it's what you have on TikTok, and what you have on on Shein is, is you have that very quick feedback cycle.”
Brown: Shein tests 2,000 items daily with 100-unit production runs
“The Shein inventory is like something like 2000 new pieces of clothing every day. And I hadn't realized that the way their process was done was very much like work on demand, that they produce a hundred of every item, and the moment the item does well, then th…”
Evans: Shein's US sales likely eclipse Zara and H&M combined
“And, you know, so it's not a tech company in that sense, but this is a company that nobody had heard of two or three years ago that, you know, is probably bigger than Zara and H&M combined in the USA now.”
Evans: Shein only exists because of TikTok and Instagram
“It's also, of course, Shein only exists because TikTok and Instagram came first.”
Evans: In March 2023, four of the top five iOS apps were Chinese.
“Somebody pointed out a couple of, a week or two ago that like four of the top five free apps on the iOS app store were Chinese, and so it's TikTok, but it's also Shein and Temu and CapCut from memory”
Evans: 'Shein Haul' hashtag has 5.3 billion views on TikTok
“So if it goes into TikTok hashtags, Sheehan Hall has 5.3 billion views, which it sounds like a lot to me.”
Evans: Shein ranks second only to Amazon in US teen brand survey
“Piper Sander does this study of US teenagers, and so what's the favorite brand, and for the last, like, four quarters, Shein, you could see it marching up every quarter, or every, every, every six months, it's a six-monthly survey, and the last two or three su…”
Cowan-Brown: Tech reporters missed Shein for months by ignoring TikTok
“Because the tech reporters writing about technology in Shein weren't actually on TikTok, and so they weren't experiencing this. And so it took five or six months for that to go from TikTok users talking about it to the tech reporters going, ah, there's a huge …”