One of many firms finest identified for cranking out ultracheap items is going through a severe investigation in Europe over considerations about unlawful merchandise and predatory enterprise practices.
The EU’s European Fee mentioned Tuesday that it has opened “formal proceedings” towards Shein below the Digital Companies Act, which units floor guidelines for on-line companies that Europeans use. Within the announcement, the fee says it’s focusing on Shein over worries that the buying platform is addictive by design, powered by opaque algorithms, and engages within the sale of unlawful items, together with weapons and youngster sexual abuse materials within the type of “child-like intercourse dolls.”
Late final 12 months, French watchdog company the Directorate Common for Competitors, Shopper Affairs and Fraud Management flagged the Chinese language on-line retailer to authorities after discovering “intercourse dolls constituting youngster sexual abuse materials” on the market together with different “pornographic content material” not restricted by an age gate. “These acts fall throughout the scope of great prison offences below French legislation,” the regulator wrote on the time, noting that the violations may very well be punishable by imprisonment and a €100,000 fantastic below the nation’s prison code.
Primarily based on the findings, French authorities initiated a prison investigation into Shein over the sale and distribution of kid sexual abuse materials and kicked off a coordinated European investigation below the Digital Companies Act. The French shopper safety company discovered childlike intercourse dolls on the market on Chinese language e-commerce web site AliExpress, owned by Alibaba Group.
In a parallel investigation, French customs brokers inspected 200,000 Shein packages for compliance with French legal guidelines and located that eight out of 10 merchandise it examined doubtlessly ran afoul of the legislation, together with cosmetics containing banned elements and unsafe kids’s toys.
In response, Shein mentioned that it could prohibit the sale of intercourse dolls and completely ban “all vendor accounts linked to unlawful or non-compliant sex-doll merchandise” on its platform. “The combat towards youngster exploitation is non-negotiable for Shein,” Shein Government Chairman Donald Tang mentioned in an announcement addressing the controversy. “These had been market listings from third-party sellers—however I take this personally.”
Regulators catch as much as quick trend
Quick trend retailers like Shein and Temu, which ship lightning quick from China and provide a whole lot of 1000’s of designs, have exploded in recent times. Regulators are solely starting to catch as much as the controversial enterprise mannequin, which has seen Shein sprint toward $2 billion in income in 2025, despite the corporate’s many headwinds.
The net buying frenzy over fashionable, ultracheap garments took off throughout the pandemic and obtained an enormous enhance from TikTok, the place Gen Z influencers reveal and evaluate their clothes shipments in haul movies.
Shein and different quick trend retailers depend on a “take a look at and repeat” mannequin that throws many 1000’s of clothes designs on the wall to see what sticks, producing small batches of fifty to 100 objects. Designs that flop are swiftly retired and if a design takes off, its manufacturing scales as much as meet demand.
Whereas the quick trend pattern retains TikTok creators well-stocked with recent content material, the phenomenon’s main gamers have confronted an array of great considerations throughout their rise. The quick trend world’s fast cycles and frequent returns create vast amounts of waste destined for the landfill, to not point out the emissions penalties of transport so many small packages across the globe on quick discover.
Past the steep environmental worth of low cost items, investigations have discovered that the laborers consistently stitching new designs for Shein and its ilk usually work grueling shifts in difficult conditions—and typically these employees aren’t even old enough to legally be there.
Shein additionally obtained wrapped up in Trump’s tariff wars final 12 months, when the president ended the “de minimis” loophole that made it doable for Chinese language firms to ship small, low-value packages into the U.S. with out paying tariffs and additional duties. EU finance ministers followed suit late final 12 months, asserting that Europe would start to impose customs duties on low worth packages shipped into Europe a while in 2026.
