Chinese retailers Shein and Temu sell inexpensive items at massive scale, and they hate one another. The Verge's Elizabeth Lopatto explores the law war erupting between the two companies, starting with the latest lawsuit filed by Shein [PDF].
Temu isn't a marketplace at all. "It controls every aspect of its seller's activity," the complaint says. "It directs what products they can list and the prices for which they can sell; encourages them to infringe the intellectual property rights of others; and even prevents them from removing their products from Temu's website after they have admitted to infringement." I would like to be clear: I am still in the first paragraph of this complaint. This is just the latest sally in the ongoing legal wrangling between the two bargain retailers. They've sent each other legal nastygrams before: Temu accused Shein of browbeating manufacturers to cut Temu off, Shein claimed Temu told influencers to say "false and deceptive statements" about Shein in promotional material. Those two suits were dropped in October. Then, in December, Temu sued Shein again, alleging that Shein had "gone so far as to falsely imprison merchants doing business with Temu."
Pretty intense beef over who can sell $5 skirts, if you ask me.
These two accusing one another of counterfeiting! Break out the Spiderman GIF.
I bought one thing from Shein, a denim jacket, and what I found interesting about it is that everything bad about it was intentional, from cut to stitch. They dialed in the lowest-possible quality without there being any actual flaws. Everything wrong with it optimized it. Wearing it felt like being a character in a near-future science fiction short story by an AI trained on post-2000 William Gibson novels.
Previously: Study: people who buy counterfeit bags likely to buy real ones later
