In just six years, Sheglam has quietly become one of beauty's biggest success stories. Launched in 2019 as a small internal project within fast-fashion giant Shein, the color cosmetics brand has grown into an estimated $400 million business, amassed more than 10 million TikTok followers, and expanded into over 4,000 retail counters across 16 countries. Yet despite its scale, many consumers in China, its home market, have never tried the brand, and some have never even heard of it.
That contradiction reflects a broader shift taking place across China's beauty industry. While first-generation C-beauty brands such as Florasis built strong domestic businesses before expanding internationally, Sheglam reversed the model entirely. Rather than exporting products already popular in China, it was designed for global consumers from the outset, using social commerce, creator culture, and agile manufacturing to build an international audience.
The strategy has arrived at an opportune moment. China's beauty exports continue to outpace domestic market growth as more brands look overseas for expansion amid slowing consumption at home. Against that backdrop, Sheglam has emerged as one of the clearest examples of a new generation of Chinese beauty companies that use digital ecosystems, rather than heritage storytelling, to build global relevance.
The brand's rise has also challenged assumptions about what a successful global beauty business should look like. Unlike many established cosmetics companies that still work around seasonal launches and traditional advertising campaigns, Sheglam has built its operating model around constant iteration, rapid product development, and continuous consumer feedback.
"Sheglam's rapid success has been driven by a consistent focus on innovation, especially product innovation and differentiation," Kenneth Liu, General Manager of Sheglam Europe, told BeautyMatter. "At the core of the brand is a simple principle: Every product must be better, newer, or fundamentally different."
That philosophy extends beyond marketing. The company says it works with laboratories, manufacturers, and ingredient suppliers across Japan, Italy, and Korea, while drawing inspiration from adjacent industries, including skincare and even food science, to develop new formulations and product concepts.
Equally important is the role consumers play throughout the innovation process. Rather than relying exclusively on traditional market research, Sheglam conducts monthly global consumer sessions and one-to-one engagements, using feedback to refine products post launch.
"We analyzed e-commerce reviews, social insights, and upgraded our products like software post launch to make them better over time," Liu said.
The comparison is telling. Increasingly, beauty innovation resembles software development more than traditional product design, with launches treated as the start of a feedback loop rather than the finished product. Social platforms no longer simply promote cosmetics; they influence how products are conceived, tested, and refined.
That approach has allowed Sheglam to move quickly without positioning speed as the end goal. The company launches between five and ten new products or variants each month, with development cycles ranging from four months to more than a year, depending on complexity. Many ideas originate directly from requests consumers make through social media, creating a development process that is unusually responsive to changing preferences.
Its hero products reflect that model. The viral Color Bloom Liquid Blush, retailing for just $5.99, became one of the company's earliest global successes thanks to its sponge applicator, accessible price point, and social-media-friendly payoff. Today, Sheglam's portfolio has grown to more than 1,500 SKUs across complexion, lips, eyes, and beauty tools, with roughly 80% of products retailing for $1 to $10.
Maintaining those prices inevitably invites comparisons with fast fashion, but Liu argues that affordability has been engineered into the business rather than achieved through compromise.
"We partner with world-class manufacturers, ensuring our products meet high levels of quality, consistency, and performance standards," he said. "Today's consumers are very savvy. They prefer to pay for truly good products rather than for expensive advertising."
Instead of investing heavily in traditional media, Sheglam has relied on organic discovery. Tutorials, product demonstrations, and creator reviews appear almost continuously across TikTok and Instagram, turning user-generated content into both marketing and product validation.
This strategy has helped propel the company into the upper ranks of beauty brands on TikTok, where it now boasts more than 10 million followers, outperforming several legacy beauty players with significantly larger marketing budgets.
Yet even for a brand born on social media, executives acknowledge that online visibility alone is no longer enough.
"The success of our Liquid Family and lip plumper has greatly benefited from platforms such as TikTok," Liu said. "At the same time, we've learned that while social platforms are important for product discovery, long-term success is driven by product performance and repeat purchase behavior across markets like the UK and Ireland, where consumers validate products through multiple touchpoints before making a purchase decision."
That realization is shaping the company's next phase of growth. After establishing itself online, Sheglam is investing in physical retail through partners, including Boots in the UK and Ireland and dm in Germany. For color cosmetics in particular, Liu believes consumers still want the opportunity to swatch shades, test textures, and experience products in person.
"Our focus is on building a more established and consistent retail presence while staying aligned with how local consumers already discover and engage with beauty," he said. "The next stage is strengthening the connection between social discovery and the in-store experience."
For a company that built its reputation through algorithms, physical retail represents more than another sales channel. It is the first real test of whether a brand designed for infinite scrolling can earn lasting shelf space.
For all of Sheglam's momentum, one question continues to follow the brand: How much of its success belongs to the products themselves, and how much stems from the infrastructure built by its parent company, Shein? The answer is almost certainly both.
Shein has spent the past decade building its DTC ecosystems, combining responsive manufacturing, cross-border logistics, real-time consumer data, and a digital-first customer acquisition model. Rather than building those capabilities independently, Sheglam was able to launch within an ecosystem that already understood how to identify trends, test products in small batches, and rapidly scale successful launches.
That infrastructure has given the beauty brand advantages few startups could replicate. The company can move products from concept to market in a matter of months, keep hero products below $10, and respond to consumer demand in near real time.
According to Liu, affordability is achieved through deliberate operational decisions rather than sacrificing quality.
"Affordability and accessibility are important considerations in how we approach product development," he said. "We focus on making practical decisions early in the development process—such as formulation, packaging, and manufacturing choices—to ensure products can be both effective in performance and scalable across different markets."
Rather than relying on expensive advertising campaigns, the company says it invests in product quality and organic advocacy.
"As a brand that listens more than it speaks, we prefer to launch to consumers who already want the product and focus on digital engagement and authentic word of mouth," Liu said. "Today's consumers are very savvy. They prefer to pay for truly good products rather than for expensive advertising."
This philosophy is increasingly reflected across the beauty industry. As media fragmentation continues and younger consumers place greater trust in creators than brands, product performance has become a more effective growth engine than traditional marketing.
At the same time, the relationship with Shein presents the company's greatest strategic challenge.
Unlike most emerging beauty brands, Sheglam doesn't arrive with a blank slate. It inherits the reputational complexity of one of the world's most controversial retailers. Over the past several years, Shein has faced sustained scrutiny over its environmental footprint, ultra-fast production model, and labor practices. Whether or not those criticisms apply directly to Sheglam, they inevitably influence how retailers, consumers, and investors perceive the beauty business.
As the company expands beyond digital channels into mainstream retail, those questions become increasingly inseparable from the brand itself.
If innovation has fueled Sheglam's rise, whether consumers view it as sustainable will ultimately determine its long-term credibility.
The company is seeking to strengthen its sustainability credentials. According to Liu, all manufacturing partners hold ISO 14001 environmental management certification, while more than half have completed EcoVadis sustainability assessments. Manufacturing facilities are audited against internationally recognized standards, including SA8000, BSCI, and SMETA. Liu claimed that all paper cartons are made with FSC-certified materials and that Sheglam is working to reduce plastic use by increasing the adoption of glass and aluminum packaging, according to the company. The brand is also certified under the Leaping Bunny program, which requires independent supplier monitoring and audits to verify cruelty-free practices throughout the supply chain.
However, certifications alone are unlikely to define sustainability leadership.
Increasingly, the industry's conversation has moved beyond responsible sourcing towards broader questions around carbon emissions, packaging circularity, refillability, product lifecycle impacts, and the environmental implications of continual newness. For a company that introduces five to ten new products or variants every month, those questions are likely to become more prominent as it scales.
The challenge is not unique to Sheglam. Beauty as a whole continues to wrestle with how innovation, trend cycles, and sustainability can coexist. But for a brand operating within the wider Shein ecosystem, expectations are arguably higher. Consumers and retail partners are likely to judge the company's environmental commitments not only by supplier certifications but also by whether its overall business model supports more responsible growth.
Liu argues that sustainability is at the core of the business rather than being treated as a standalone initiative. "Sustainability and responsibility are not add-ons for Sheglam—they are embedded in everything we do, from product development to packaging and supply chain management," he said.
The next challenge will be translating those commitments into measurable outcomes. As retailers become increasingly selective about the brands they partner with, transparency around emissions, packaging, and supply chain performance is becoming just as important as speed to market.
Sheglam has already achieved something few Chinese beauty brands have managed: building meaningful global scale without first establishing dominance at home. It has demonstrated that social commerce can be more than a marketing channel, shaping everything from product development to international expansion, and that affordable beauty can still deliver innovation.
The next phase of growth, however, will require a different kind of success.
Expansion through retailers such as Boots and dm signals the company's ambition to become a permanent fixture within the global beauty landscape rather than simply another viral TikTok brand. Achieving that will depend less on how quickly it can launch products and more on whether it can build lasting trust with consumers, retailers, and the wider industry.
Innovation may have fueled Sheglam's rise, but credibility will determine whether it becomes one of beauty's next global powerhouses or remains best known as the cosmetics arm of the world's biggest fast-fashion retailer.
