Sheglam: A $400 million C-beauty brand that barely exists in China

A makeup brand that many Chinese consumers have never tried, and some may not even recognize, quietly generated $400 million in annual sales last year, with almost all of that business coming from overseas markets. In six years, Sheglam grew from a five-person experiment inside Shein into one of the fastest-rising names in global cosmetics. The brand accumulated more than 10 million TikTok followers, expanded into over 4,000 retail counters across 16 countries, and built a business around a generation of consumers who discovered it through social feeds long before seeing it on physical shelves. For a beauty industry that has spent much of the past decade questioning whether Chinese brands can achieve meaningful global scale, Sheglam arrived with a noticeably different proposition. Rather than building domestic dominance before exporting a proven formula abroad, the company largely skipped the domestic stage and treated international consumers as its primary audience from the beginning. The context matters. According to China customs data, exports of beauty, cosmetics and personal care products rose 10.3% year-on-year for the period January-September 2025, significantly faster than domestic cosmetics retail growth of 3.9%. As more Chinese beauty companies look outward for growth, Sheglam is emerging as one of the clearest examples of an alternative globalization model, one built less around heritage storytelling and more around internet culture, supply chain speed and platform-native distribution. “Sheglam was built for global consumers from the start,” says Lisa Shiqi Yu, founder and CEO of Meyris Marketing, which helps Chinese brands go global. “Unlike brands such as Florasis or Perfect Diary, which already had large existing businesses in China and attempted to bring those existing products to international audiences, Sheglam developed products specifically for and with global Gen Z consumers.” Beauty built for internet culture Earlier generations of C-beauty brands often approached overseas expansion through cultural storytelling. Traditional aesthetics, ornate packaging and craftsmanship became tools for introducing Chinese brands to unfamiliar consumers abroad. Florasis built recognition around oriental beauty references, while other brands leaned into museum collaborations and heritage narratives to differentiate themselves internationally. Sheglam chose a different visual language entirely, one shaped less by geography and more by internet culture. “Sheglam hasn’t leaned on any China, or even Asia-beauty aesthetics,” says Tom Griffiths, brand director at creative agency HeathAI. “They’ve gone for a more generic Gen Z style and leaned in as a TikTok native. This allows them to be tied to no particular market, trend or style.” That positioning reduced the friction many export brands face when introducing consumers to unfamiliar visual codes. Rather than teaching audiences a new beauty language, Sheglam inserted itself directly into aesthetics and communities consumers already recognized online. Over the past several years, the company launched collections with Harry Potter, Twilight, Rick and Morty, Powerpuff Girls, Hello Kitty and Corpse Bride. These partnerships rarely aimed to create prestige in the traditional luxury sense. Instead, they embedded the brand inside fandoms and internet subcultures that already carried emotional relevance for younger consumers. “What Sheglam did differently was reject the standard C-beauty playbook,” says Sharon Adesola David, director at S&M, a China market entry agency. “Previous waves of Chinese beauty brands going global leaned heavily into a very clean, high-art aesthetic. Sheglam has an incredibly strong sense of self. They know exactly who their consumer is, their demographic, their age and their internet subcultures.” That understanding extends beyond branding into product development itself. When TikTok becomes product development Beauty companies once treated social media primarily as a marketing channel. Sheglam increasingly treats it as infrastructure. Founder Sylvia Fu has publicly described an internal principle that products should communicate visually within five to fifteen seconds. The philosophy shapes not only content production but also the products themselves. Bright pigments, unusual textures, dramatic before-and-after effects and visually distinctive packaging all help create products that perform naturally in short-video environments. The company’s early liquid blush became one of the clearest examples of that approach. Sold for $5.99 and designed with a sponge applicator that lowered barriers to use, the product quickly became one of Sheglam’s first breakout successes and has since sold millions of units globally. Today the brand operates more than 1,500 SKUs spanning complexion, lips, eyes and beauty tools, maintaining a launch cadence that often resembles fast fashion more than traditional beauty. “They fully embraced TikTok as a primary product development and distribution engine,” Yu says. “Rather than relying on traditional market research cycles, Sheglam iterated products through real-time social feedback loops, giving the brand almost algorithmic responsiveness to what global Gen Z consumers wanted.” The company’s social media footprint reflects that speed. Sheglam now has more than 10 million followers on TikTok, placing it behind only Huda Beauty among major beauty brands and ahead of names including Nyx, E.L.F. and Rare Beauty. Its content strategy also operates at an unusual scale. Tutorials, texture demonstrations, trend participation and creator collaborations appear continuously across platforms, feeding algorithms while encouraging consumers to create their own product reviews and makeup experiments. Creator @hayleybuix’s video reviewing a Sheglam lip product surpassed 25 million views, illustrating how user-generated content increasingly functions as a distribution engine rather than simply brand awareness. “The TikTok-first marketing model is now becoming a common beauty playbook, but Sheglam executes it extremely well,” Yu says. “The brand relies on fast, creator-native content that feels organic to the platform, which makes content faster to produce, easier to test and highly adaptable to trends.” The Shein infrastructure advantage Still, discussions around Sheglam inevitably return to the same question: how much of its success belongs to the brand itself, and how much came from Shein? The answer appears increasingly difficult to determine. According to GlobalData, Shein became the world’s third-largest fashion retailer in 2024 with a 1.53% market share, behind only Nike and Adidas globally. Built inside that ecosystem, Sheglam inherited structural advantages that many beauty startups spend years attempting to build independently, including cross-border logistics systems, manufacturing relationships, consumer traffic and highly overlapping target users. “I don’t think you can separate the two,” says David. “You need a strong ecosystem to build a strong brand in the first place. The ecosystem provides the engine, but the branding is what makes consumers actually want to buy into the product.” Sheglam’s core audience overlapped almost perfectly with Shein’s existing customer base: young, price-sensitive consumers highly active on social media and already accustomed to discovering products online. Rather than spending years building awareness from zero, the beauty brand effectively entered the market with an existing audience already in place. Yu adds that operational advantages mattered equally. “Sheglam definitely benefited from the systems and infrastructure that Shein had already built, especially its ability to launch products in very small batches first and then rapidly scale them once demand is proven,” she says. “Combined with real-time consumer data and an extremely flexible supplier network, this gave Sheglam a level of speed, responsiveness and cost efficiency that most independent beauty startups simply could not replicate.” Pricing reflects those structural advantages clearly. Roughly 80% of Sheglam products sit within a $1 to $10 range, while many hero products including blushes, mascaras and primers remain below $8. That level of pricing depends heavily on China’s mature beauty manufacturing ecosystem. Sheglam has publicly referenced shared OEM relationships with factories that also produce for global brands including Huda Beauty and Urban Decay, helping the company balance low prices with acceptable quality perceptions. The strategy also reflects a broader shift inside China’s export economy itself. Increasingly, the country’s supply chain advantages are no longer being used solely to manufacture products for Western companies, but to build globally distributed consumer brands directly. From viral brand to retail reality As Sheglam matures, however, the next stage of growth becomes more complicated than accumulating followers and views. Over the past several years, the company has expanded aggressively into offline retail, entering markets including Saudi Arabia, Germany, the UK, Australia, Japan, Mexico and Chile. By the end of 2024, Sheglam had reportedly established more than 4,000 physical retail points globally, with the Middle East becoming one of its earliest and strongest expansion markets. Store numbers in the region reportedly grew from roughly 150 locations to more than 900 in a relatively short period, helping establish credibility before entering more mature retail environments. The company later expanded into chains including Germany’s DM and Britain’s Boots, gaining access to established mass-market beauty consumers. For Griffiths, physical expansion introduces a very different operating challenge. “As any brand going into physical stores, the cost increases and the difficulty of selecting the right real estate becomes key to success,” he says. “Getting this right across multiple territories is a huge challenge, especially if the business has a very centralized decision-making structure.” David believes the move also introduces tension around the company’s original value proposition. “Physical retail introduces massive overheads like slotting fees, distributor cuts and real estate costs,” she says. “If Sheglam raises prices to cover those costs, they risk pricing out the community that made them viral in the first place.” That challenge becomes especially sensitive for a brand built around internet-era accessibility and affordability. Consumers who initially embraced Sheglam because it felt fast, playful and inexpensive may respond differently once the brand begins operating inside more conventional retail structures. Beyond ‘surprisingly good for the price’ The larger question surrounding Sheglam is not whether the company can continue growing. It is whether the brand can evolve from a highly efficient export success into a beauty company with lasting emotional resonance. Much of Sheglam’s appeal today still rests on surprise: products that look better than expected at unusually low prices. That positioning works exceptionally well for generating trial and social virality, but building long-term beauty brands often requires deeper emotional attachment, recognizable hero products and a stronger sense of identity that survives shifting consumer trends. “One of the biggest long-term questions for Sheglam is whether the brand can build an identity that goes beyond affordability,” Yu says. “Right now, much of its appeal comes from the idea that the products are surprisingly good for the price.” Its collaborations continue to generate excitement, but they also rely on worlds created by others. Harry Potter belongs to Harry Potter. Rick and Morty belongs to Rick and Morty. Over time, the challenge may involve building stronger brand codes and a visual universe consumers associate specifically with Sheglam itself. For David, longevity will depend less on chasing every trend than understanding which trends actually fit the company’s identity. “The brands that secure lasting mindshare understand that when consumer interests shift, you don’t neglect who you are, you adapt who you are,” she says. “If Sheglam stays anchored in its playful, unpretentious identity instead of trying to blend in with mature luxury, it will last.” For Chinese beauty brands watching from the sidelines, Sheglam increasingly functions as both a blueprint and a reminder of the limits of imitation. Its creator ecosystem, social media fluency and localization strategy can be studied and replicated. Its inherited infrastructure, supply chain leverage and global distribution machine remain much harder to reproduce.

Sheglam: A $400M C-beauty brand that barely exists in China

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Sheglam: A $400M C-beauty brand that barely exists in China

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag