Lin’s secret: a revealing look at a Chinese lingerie leader

It’s 5pm on Monday in an old industrial zone in the coastal city of Quanzhou in Fujian province.

Workers at a four-storey warehouse are getting busy. Some are shuttling between rows of shelves to pick out products on order sheets, while others are scanning barcodes before sealing items in boxes.

On each box is a country’s name in big Chinese characters, whether it’s France, Brazil, the United States or Russia. From time to time, big courier company vans stop by to take away the boxes so they can be shipped to every corner of the world.

The modest warehouse building belongs to Shiying Sexy Lingerie, one of China’s biggest online womenswear exporters.

The company’s founder and general manager is Lin Shile, who rose from rural Fujian to learn the tricks of big data and the foreign e-commerce trade to launch new styles faster than the fastest of fast fashion.

With China encouraging international e-commerce to revive exports, Lin, 32, has seen his sales surge in recent years – and even more markets are on the horizon.

“Every day we send out around 20,000 items of apparel from here,” Lin said.

Lin started his international business on   eBay in 2006 and has expanded to more than 150 countries. Last year, his company generated 200 million yuan in sales revenue, making it the top Chinese sexy lingerie and dress seller in the cyber world.

“Domestic consumers see corsets and bustiers as ‘sexy’. But foreign people think it’s just fashionable and they take it as a part of everyday life,” Lin said.

On top of lingerie, Lin has also expanded into swimsuits, women’s dresses and party costumes.

With most of its items priced at US$5 to US$10, Lin’s company mostly targets “small merchants” and “big buyers” in overseas markets and offers free shipping for any purchase of at least US$99 on Amazon, AliExpress  and its own site dear-lover.com.

 

“Our goal is to become the largest sexy clothing supplier in the world,” the ambitious businessman said.

Born into a rural family in Nanan,   Lin started out selling socks online in 2005 to subsidise his university studies. On a trip to replenish inventory, the student stumbled across some people selling lingerie and thought it would be a better seller.

After that, he was sold – he switched to the sexy underwear business and opened shops on domestic shopping platform eachnet.com.   American online shopping giant eBay bought eachnet in 2006, giving Chinese sellers on it a way to expose their products to overseas buyers. To Lin’s surprise, his low prices and wide range quickly made his shops popular.

“With more orders coming from abroad, we found overseas markets were very attractive,” Lin said.

“The market capacity is bigger. Foreign buyers are less price-sensitive than Chinese customers and tend to make repeat purchases if they really trust your service and products. We have a higher profit margin than by doing business on Taobao or opening shops on the street.”

Lin’s company focuses on overseas buyers and his business has grown by up to 50 per cent annually. But the business has become harder in the past couple of years as more players have tried crack the offshore market.

Lin says that being fast will be the key to staying ahead.

Unlike traditional Chinese exporters who wait for foreign customers to make orders, Lin sees his business as a “reservoir”. Buyers can either purchase directly any of the 7,000 styles shown on the company’s websites or send pictures of something they want tailor-made.

It takes seven days at most from sample picture to finished product, and another five to get the order into an overseas buyer’s hands.

“We are even faster than Zara or HM,” he added.

At the same time, Lin keeps his costs down through his long-term ties with dozens of local manufacturers.

Every day the company’s website launches at least 10 new styles, with inspiration coming not from designers but from big data.

“Our staff monitor the most popular styles, the most-searched words and the latest fashion elements that people are looking for online. Then we absorb some of these elements, for example, a leopard print or backless design, to apply to our products and make it into a new collection,” Lin said.

The company makes small batches of around 200 of each new style to test the market before picking the best to promote in the online shops and recommend to more customers.

Still Lin knows to take the rough with the smooth.

“Overseas markets are just like different hills. You can be a top performer in some of them, but you’re unlikely to take them all.”

In December 2014, Shiying’s orders from Russia fell off a cliff due to the sharp fall of the rouble against the US dollar, plus increasingly cut-throat competition.

“Our revenue from Russia fell from 15 per cent to only 5 per cent of our total sales. And we also withdrew the wholesaling businesses from Russia.”

As an exporter, Lin is used to dealing with uncertainties in other countries such as strict limits on foreign currency exchange, poor logistics services and protectionism.

“If a country has too many uncertainties, we will definitely not see it as a key market,” he said.

After several years of fast growth, Lin’s big bottleneck now is how to improve the customer experience and further boost sales.

To cut delivery times and improve the overall experience, Lin’s company has started warehousing some products in the United States and Britain in facilities managed by third-party platforms like Amazon.  

“The market we have reached is just the tip of an iceberg,” Lin said.

“The huge demand is actually in the offline market. Our ultimate goal is to establish our own brand and make it known to individual consumers on the other side of the earth. ” 

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