Every night before bed, Anushka Sachan whips out her phone to log into an app.
"It kind of becomes a habit," said the 20-year-old Hong Kong University student. "Before sleeping, I'm just like, 'Okay, check in.'"
The platform Sachan is using belongs to a Chinese brand called Shein — pronounced "She In" — which has rapidly attracted a global army of teen fans on TikTok.
The company is a mysterious online shopping upstart that has made headlines recently for surpassing Amazon (AMZN) in app downloads in the United States, and creating a cult following for its fast fashion apparel sold all over the world. Some experts even say it's beating stalwarts like Zara and H&M at their own game, by making items more quickly and being more digitally savvy with customers.
"They're making fast fashion look slow," said Erin Schmidt, a senior analyst at Coresight Research, a global advisory and research firm specializing in retail and technology. "They've changed the model."
