Shein, a China-founded fast fashion retailer that's growing alongside fellow e-commerce competitors Temu and TikTok in the shadow of Amazon, has inked a deal to open an office near Seattle to support its distribution efforts in the United States.
The Singapore-based company plans to open a nearly 10,000-square-foot office at downtown Bellevue's 22-story, 488,470-square-foot Key Center office building. The space will serve as a business hub for its U.S. fulfillment and logistics operations as it expands in key markets to support faster delivery times for customers, Shein said in a statement.
The company joins TikTok in establishing an office presence in greater Seattle, home of Amazon’s corporate headquarters. TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, occupies space subleased from SAP Concur in the same building where Shein just signed its deal. The social media network, which is ramping up its e-commerce presence, more than doubled its Bellevue office square footage recently by taking over a space given up by Microsoft in the 28-story Lincoln Square North tower at 700 Bellevue Way NE.
Shein's expansion "underscores our commitment to efficiency across our operations, and we look forward to contributing to the local community and fostering innovation in the heart of the Pacific Northwest," Andy Huang, Shein's head of U.S. fulfillment and logistics, said in the statement.
Huang is a former manager with Amazon, according to LinkedIn.
Fast US Expansion
Shein has grown its office and distribution footprint rapidly across the U.S. since late 2022.
Shein expanded its U.S. headquarters in downtown Los Angeles last summer with a 50,000-square-foot lease, and also last year moved into a 1.8 million-square-foot new warehouse complex near Interstate 10 in Southern California’s Inland Empire after signing one of the largest industrial leases on record in the region in 2022. The company also established a warehouse expected to employ up to 1,000 workers in Whitestown, Indiana, northwest of Indianapolis, according to a Shein statement in September 2022.
Shein considers Los Angeles to be its main U.S. business hub, with hundreds of employees working at a downtown office development called The Row DTLA, a company spokesperson told CoStar News in an email. The company, which said it now employs more than 1,500 people in the United States, expects to have 50 employees at the Bellevue offices in Key Center at 601 108th Ave. NE by the end of this year, the spokesperson said.
Shein appeared poised to tap U.S. public markets to fund its growth as of last November, when the firm confidentially filed for what would be an initial public offering of its stock, with several news outlets estimating the retailer’s value at between $60 billion and $90 billion at the time.
Despite the rapid global expansion from firms like Shein, TikTok and Temu — a platform operated by Chinese e-commerce company PDD Holdings — an analyst who tracks the retail industry downplayed any competitive threat posed to Amazon from such retailers.
“While low-price platforms like Shein and Temu experienced strong growth over the final quarter [of 2023], their position and appeal remains very different to that of Amazon,” Neil Saunders, managing director of analytics firm GlobalData, said in an analysis this month of Amazon’s most recent earnings. “While there is some overlap, Amazon’s much more rounded proposition is allowing it to retain its share of shoppers and spending.”
“That is not to say that rivals won’t be more of a threat in the future, especially as they start to balance their own assortments, but for now Amazon is more than holding its own,” Saunders added.