838In the fiercely competitive beauty market, hundreds of brands launch thousands of new products every day. This cake, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, attracts countless brands to rush in one after another, but only a few can truly leave an impression in the minds of consumers.
However, in such a market environment, a beauty brand backed by the Chinese cross-border e-commerce giant SHEIN ecosystem,SHEGLAM, has managed to stand out with its unique growth path. In just five years, it ranked 24th on the 2024 "Top 100 Chinese Cross-border E-commerce Brand Influence List," and in the same year achieved
sales of well over 100 million units.
This sub-brand, once regarded as a "freebie," has now expanded its product matrix to 1500+ SKUs, sparked a topic storm of 6.4 billion views on TikTok, and has become an unignorable presence on Gen Z's dressing tables.
Image source: Internet
Attachment and Independence: A Precise Breakthrough Battle for Gen Z
According to available information, the SHEGLAM brand, born in 2019, was initially just a beauty section on the official SHEIN website. At that time, consumers would often add a few makeup items priced at $1-13 when buying clothes, and the brand perception was firmly locked into the image of a "SHEIN accessory."
The real turning point came in December 2020, when the independent official website was launched and the brand began to break free from its parent.
By 2022, the SHEGLAM brand had completed a key transformation, establishing its own exclusive makeup ingredient system and expanding its product matrix to 1500+ SKUs. Today, direct visits and organic search account for nearly 80% of independent site traffic, and brand awareness has grown independently.
SHEGLAM brand independent site
Dual Engines of Low Price and High Quality: Leveraging the Supply Chain + Breaking Circles with IP
Relying on the innate advantages of SHEIN's global supply chain, the SHEGLAM brand has engraved "affordable, fast, high quality" into its genes, and traces of SHEIN can be seen in its sales operations.
Price anchoring: lipsticks as low as $3, eyeshadow palettes no more than $10, only 1/5 the price of international big brands;
Quality endorsement: publicly claims to share the same OEM factories as Huda Beauty and Urban Decay, reduces costs by simplifying packaging, and invests the core budget into formula R&D;
IP co-branding to break circles: collaborates with more than a dozen globally renowned IPs such as Harry Potter and Corpse Bride, turning the $4.99 "Potion Lip Gloss" into social currency.
The effect of this set of strategies is also very significant. Now, the brand's offline channels have covered more than 10 countries and 4000+ counters, and in 2024 achieved sales of well over 100 million units, securing a place in Gen Z's makeup consumption choices.
Image source: SHEGLAM brand independent site
Multi-Platform Layout: From "Content as Product" to "User as Channel"
The operational logic of the SHEGLAM brand can be summed up in one sentence: products are born for communication, and traffic is built for conversion.
They tailor differentiated content strategies according to the user characteristics and content consumption habits of different platforms, turning each platform into an amplifier of brand value.
TikTok: Content Factory and User Co-Creation Ecosystem
As the "digital playground" of Gen Z, TikTok is the core battleground of SHEGLAM's brand marketing strategy.
SHEGLAM's official account @sheglam, with daily updates (or even higher frequency), continuously outputs highly attractive content, such as product tests and creative trendy makeup tutorials.
This high-frequency, high-quality, and highly interactive content strategy has firmly captured users' attention. So far, the account has gained over 9.5 million followers, with total video views reaching 1 billion. Both user retention and interaction effects are impressive.
Image source: TikTok
Moreover, the SHEGLAM brand actively collaborates with TikTok influencers, covering a three-dimensional matrix from top-tier influencers to ordinary KOCs.
This all-encompassing strategy ensures that information penetrates different interest circles, thus achieving traffic conversion.
For example, TikTok beauty influencer @hayleybuix's lip gloss review video, focusing on the moisturizing makeup effect, garnered 26.8 million views, with a buying frenzy frequently appearing in the comments; while @siiara_'s contour stick tutorial demonstrated makeup application by area, turning professional techniques into easy-to-understand steps, with a single video played over 2 million times.
TikTok beauty influencer @hayleybuix video Image source: TikTok
It is worth noting that the brand also attaches great importance to activating the UGC ecosystem, encouraging users to spontaneously create and share makeup looks through the #SHEGLAM topic challenge.
This strategy not only reduces content production costs, but also builds a real word-of-mouth library with 468,700 user works, pushing the brand topic views to over 6.4 billion.
Image source: TikTok
YouTube: The Trust Engine for Deep Seeding
For users with medium to high spending who require rational decision-making, SHEGLAM positions YouTube as the stage for deep "seeding" to final "persuasion" conversion, focusing its strategy on long-form video content and strong trust-building.
The most representative case is the 24-minute "FULL FACE OF MAKEUP FROM SHEGLAM" video released by top beauty blogger James Charles.
The blogger cleverly edited and quoted popular review clips from other TikTok influencers about related products, forming cross-platform content linkage. The video ultimately received 2.41 million views, not only enriching the information dimension of the video, but also further strengthening the brand's collective trust by showcasing consistent praise from multiple influencers.
Image source: YouTube
Independent Site: The Ultimate Pool for User Assets
The SHEGLAM brand's independent site is a crucial "owned position" in its multi-channel layout. Its core value lies in controlling user data, accumulating brand assets, increasing profit margins, and building user loyalty.
According to SimilarWeb data, the independent site had a total of 397,000 visits in June, with direct visits and organic search accounting for a combined 81.76%. This means that a large number of users have established clear awareness and memory of the SHEGLAM brand, forming habits of active visits and consumption stickiness.
Image source: SimilarWeb
Chinese Brands Going Global: The Path Leap from "Borrowing a Boat" to "Building a Boat"
The competition in overseas markets is essentially a battle for user attention. While traditional foreign trade is still struggling with price and channels, the new generation of brands is already leveraging content to drive awareness and using social fission to replace hard advertising.
The practice of the SHEGLAM brand proves that, at a time when TikTok is reshaping consumer decision-making and emerging markets such as the Middle East are experiencing explosive growth, Chinese brands have every opportunity to skip the traditional giants' path dependence and open up the global market with a "social media + supply chain" combination.
What needs to be done now is to bravely take the first step.
