The Reimagined Supply Chain Behind Ultra Fast Fashion | Lever Style | PI Apparel

In today's session, I'm just going to talk about a couple of things. First thing is I want to give you a little context and tell you what my company, Lever Style, is about. And then after that, I'll sort of dive into what is the new supply chain for ultra-fast fashion, or some people call it like real-time fashion. So just a few numbers to show you what Lever Style is about. We just— we're a publicly listed company on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. We just reported our 2023 numbers. We're at about just shy of $210 million in sales. We're profitable. I guess one of the very few companies in this industry that manages that. We made 7.5% net margins last year. We've had a CAGR, compound annual growth rate, of about 34% since 2020. Work with over 130 customers. Producing in 80+ factories in 6 countries. We like, we see, we think of ourselves as an apparel production platform where we can move things easily. We are, versatility is our calling card. So just as a publicly listed company, you know, this is what our share price has been doing in the last year and a half. So we've, I guess, coming out of COVID you know, just like most companies, our stock price was also depressed, but I guess it's gone up quite a bit since then. It's still cheap. A lot of the financial analysts are still saying we're trading at 5 times price earnings or 3-something times if you take out net cash. So in case any of you are interested, we'd appreciate your support. But I think that I'm showing this because since COVID a lot of people have been saying, you know, it's impossible to make money in the apparel industry. Everybody's shrinking. But I think, you know, none of us are walking around naked. So people will be buying clothes. It's how you do that, how you sort of work either on the retail branding side or on the supply chain side. How can you do things differently that will keep you in business? So these are just some of the companies that we work with. We work with designer labels like Armani, Paul Smith, James Perse, Alexander Wang, all the way to digitally native companies like Sponobos, which we've been working with them for about 13 years or something. Stitch Fix, one up-and-coming one is True Classic. We work with dozens of these digitally native brands. So we work with over 130 brands in total, and in basically all apparel sectors. One thing that differentiates us is we make pretty much every apparel product category under the sun. We started life as a men's shirt manufacturer way, way back then, But in the last 15 years, we've sort of evolved into a horizontally integrated player, and we've made a series of acquisitions that have helped us gain product know-how into products that we didn't know before. So we— our job is to make apparel production portable. You know, there are geopolitics, there are tariffs, there are sort of cost increases in certain countries, and we felt that, you know, what we— the value we're adding is we help our customers move production around. So now we produce in over 80 factories in 6 countries. Vietnam is our biggest production base, followed by China, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and India. We have plans to further expand beyond this as the geopolitics are now getting more and more sort of unpredictable. But what we pride ourselves on is being able to enter a market very quickly in order to serve our customers' needs. So we're in the business of providing versatility. And versatility, of course, we talked about in terms of production countries. It's geopolitics, tax savings, and so forth. But actually the most important sort of problem that many of our customers are facing is inventory, excess inventory. And that is caused by buying in bulk, and committing very early on because nobody has a crystal ball. Who knows what's being produced, what's going to sell well 9 months down the road? And for some of our outdoor clients, you know, they work on like 18-month calendars. And in today's world, that just won't work anymore. So we're here to help our customers with shorter lead times. You know, we can do as quickly as 2-3 weeks, high mix, low volume production, because that allows brands to just test and see, oh, just buy a few hundred units. And see if that works. You know, if that works, they chase a few thousand more. And then there is the risk of having inventory that you can't sell is going to be much lower. And another hidden cost that doesn't show up on P&Ls is stockouts. If you have a, you know, you're selling something well, but because you need to commit 9 months in advance and you don't have inventory available when your consumers demand it, that's a lost sale, lost full margin, and that doesn't show up in people's P&Ls because it's just, it's, you know, you never, that's never in the numbers in the first place. We also, you know, from the customer list that we talked about, so we have a range of quality compliance price points to serve our customers' different needs. So enough about LeverStyle. So today the topic is, the supply chain for the modern era. And, you know, SHEIN is basically Zara on steroids. So for the previous 20 years, Zara was sort of innovating a new business model, very responsive supply chain, and SHEIN is basically, you know, sort of taking that to the next level, to the digital realm. You may say, well, SHEIN makes bad quality products. You know, they have a lot of controversy around them, some for very good reasons. But it's worth studying their supply chain. So some people say, well, SHEIN, you know, making such cheap things, you know, how can they make money? They're probably just burning venture capital money for market share. Well, they're in the midst of going public, I suppose there's a lot of news in the industry media, and they are said to be doing about $45 billion in merchandise value last year. And making $2 billion. So for reference, H&M made, you know, something like $800 million. So they are more than twice in bottom line than H&M. And Zara, of course, the best performing company in this sector. And they made something like $6 billion. But Shein is catching up quickly. If you consider Shein started like pretty much in 2015 and they have been basically doubling every year. On top line. And of course, you know, when you've bottom— top line goes up that fast, your bottom line is actually going up faster because you have operating leverage and you don't— your overhead doesn't double every year, but your sales and margins do, then that's a good— So, you know, if people say, oh, you know, how can they make money? Well, they do. And if they're going public in either New York or London or something, you know, I'm sure there will be auditors looking at the numbers, vetting everything, and You know, there's no reason to think that these numbers are fake. So some people say, well, you know, Shein makes low quality, we make high quality garments, so how can we have such a fast supply chain? You know, you got to take time to make things right. But if you think about it, making a shirt, you know, takes 20 minutes of labor time. If you make a high quality shirt, you take a little more care, you have a little gusset, you have, you know, little details, that adds, let's say, 5 minutes to it. So in the whole supply chain, when we're talking about 9 months, how, you know, what is that 5 minutes going to do with it? And, you know, so in our experience, it actually doesn't matter what kind of product quality level you're at, you know, to do a fast turn. It's not dependent upon low quality. You can have a very high-quality product, but done in a very fast and responsive way. You know, but how do actually people do it? You know, it sounds like it's like rocket science and it's like a Shein proprietary. It's actually not, it's just several very simple concepts. One is the longest sort of lead time for making garments is actually the fabric, the materials, and So Shein, what they do is they just buy stock material, but most brands of a high-quality standard won't do that. So what brands do instead is you pre-position fabrics. So, you know, let's say in this example, as you say, you know, there's a black fabric making a t-shirt or hoodie or whatever, that black fabric is not going to go out of style. It's— you don't need to discount on it. Whereas if you make it into a t-shirt with whatever pattern or your hoodie, if it doesn't sell well, you know, you're stuck. So fabrics don't, aren't risky, and therefore a lot of companies, you know, preposition the fabrics and then issue purchase orders, you know, just a few weeks ahead of delivery. One of our customers, Bonobos, they are famous for their men's chinos, and they have, for each style, they have something like 200 SKUs. They have 5 fits, you know, regular, slim, athletic, bootcut, whatever, 5 different fits. And for every fit, there are 40 waist-length combinations. So for every style, there are about 200 SKUs. How do you manage 200 SKUs? Of course, they have an advantage that they have just one big warehouse to house all that. But still, if you stock everything way in advance and you commit to things, they will need, they will need just ridiculous amount of inventory. And also, you know, for some odd sizes where they don't stock as much, things can run out very quickly. And we help them solve that problem by just prepositioning fabrics so that when you sort of know how many pairs of pants you sell every week, every month, but you don't know what color, you don't know what size, you don't know what— so we preposition the fabrics. Another Another way to do it is just do more garment dye. Just produce the garment, dip it in orange. So for some pop colors like purple, it may be a high-risk product. You don't want to stock that fabric even. But if you can just do it in grayish and then just dip it in purple, then it adds a day to the production process. And these are some of the tools. How do you manage raw materials? That will help get you the quick turn that you need. So this is a pretty familiar scene. A lot of traditional retailers have this in their stores. Looks great, it's like a, like a, basically like a fabric wall with lots of inventory. But if you need to stock that in all your stores, and you have hundreds or thousands of stores, what kind of order size are you gonna need? To put in. So let's say if Gap buys a basic, you know, let's say a beige sweater, they may need to buy like half a million units in order to stock all their different stores. But when you do that, you know, half a million units, it adds up. And then that's actually, if you order in large quantities, that actually works against your lead time. Whereas what SHEIN does, as big as SHEIN is, $45 billion in sales, Their typical order sizes are between 100 to 300 units. And then once they, you know, they put that into the system and then they look at what sold yesterday. If that style sells well, they'll issue another PO of 200 units and they replenish on a daily basis. They will never commit to a half a million unit order because that actually slows them down on top of, you know, creating inventory. Risks. Airplanes. In our industry, air freight is a dirty word. You must have made a mistake if you need to send yourself on a plane. But in today's world, air freight is actually an enabler. It is a weapon for you to reduce sort of lead time. And SHEIN sells very cheap products. And you would think that their air freight costs as a percentage of the price of that package is going to be prohibitively expensive. But SHEIN air freights all of its products around the world. So there's not one single piece of SHEIN product that goes on a boat. What air freight, what planes do is it basically reduces the size of the world. So, you know, people talk about nearshoring for speed. You can produce anywhere in the world if you're willing to put on an airplane, and carbon emissions aside, that's another issue, your goods will be at either your warehouse or at your consumer's doorstep within a couple days. And, and see, there are lots of brands that are using that as a competitive weapon. If you just think about it, if you have in the traditional supply chain, if you have a 9-month or, you know, in the outdoor world, like 15-month cycle time, adding a month and a half of shipping, it doesn't really matter because you still have to predict what consumers want, you know, way down the road. But if you have a supply chain just like 2, 3 weeks, you know, all the productive-culottes, you position the fabrics, you make the small lots of garments, and then if necessary, do garment dip or or garment dye, or you do digital printing, adding a month and a half of sea freight destroys that flexibility and that ability to respond to consumer demand very, very quickly. So, I mean, in our industry, people think air freight is bad. We actually— the new thinking is air freight is a weapon for people to take advantage of, and it's only the dinosaurs stuck in the old world that's like, oh, we just need to do sea freight. We saved a little bit of freight costs, but the excess inventory, the financing costs, and the markdown costs are just so much higher than what you would pay with air freight. Another thing that Shein does is automation. Because of the— this is a still from the Oppenheimer movie. We talk about nuclear bombs. After the 1990s, I guess for those that are a little older, we may remember in the '80s, you hear in the news, "Oh, there is a nuclear bomb explosion for testing in the US somewhere or Russia somewhere." At the time it was USSR. And then by the '90s, there was a sort of non-testing treaty. So from that point onwards, in the news you don't hear people saying, You know, there's a— in New Mexico, there's a big bomb testing to see how many megatons this is. Of course, whether, you know, countries still do it, sort of hide it from others, I don't know, but at least you don't hear about it. And, you know, the— but that doesn't mean that, you know, people are not designing new bombs and making them more powerful. They're just doing it on computer simulation. If you can sort of basically design a nuclear bomb and basically do all the calculations to figure out how the atoms or whatever will react for nuclear bomb, it is quite possible that we can, in the apparel industry, we can do 3D design and use other tools so that things just, computer simulation, rather than everything's gotta be a physical sample. And in Shein's case, a lot of that is bypassed. Of course, in, let's say, in our sort of higher quality areas, not everything you want to, you know, just bypass samples altogether, but instead of making like 5 rounds of samples, what if we just make 2? What if we just make 1? And if it is just the same block but maybe slightly different color fabric, you know, just forget about it. If your supply partner cannot do a proper product, you know, with minimal changes, that shouldn't be your supply partner in the first place. So, you know, a lot of these sort of things that slow us down as an industry are actually self-imposed sort of myths that, oh, in order to have high quality, I need to have inspectors, you know, send people in order to make sure the product is right. We got to have 5 rounds of samples. Is that really necessary? And I think in the sort of a new world, A lot of the younger companies are doing away with all those self-imposed restrictions, and that's what's allowed them to sort of jump ahead and, and, and, and, and really take market share. Shein, you know, it's, it's founded by a bunch of search engine optimizers, not from the apparel business. And, and we're seeing a lot of these digitally native companies. Of course, recently, some have not done well, but a lot of times they come they have founders and management that come from different industries and they bring sort of new ideas and they challenge the status quo. They challenge the conventional thinking of what the industry should be, should be, you know, should be like, how it should be run. And we see that going forward, you know, as the pace of change in this world accelerates, firms that don't do that will fall behind and eventually sort of slip into sort of oblivion. And so with that, I know with a nuclear bomb, it may not be the right sort of visual for the ending, so I just wanted to thank you for listening to this talk, and I'm here to take questions. Oh, I don't know. Oh, does SHEIN only preposition fabric book capacities? Okay, so let me take the— okay, so it's much more high-tech than I imagined. Does SHEIN preposition fabrics or book capacities for CMT as well and always fulfill obligations? Our company has worked with SHEIN in the past. Unfortunately, we couldn't do it profitably. So we stopped doing it a little while ago, but yeah, SHEIN doesn't preposition fabrics because it just buys what's available in stock from these Guangzhou basically fabric markets. SHEIN is at a pretty basic quality standard, and the way they do it is, okay, well, we want that black fabric for that dress. If that black fabric is not available, they just go to the next stall and buy something similar. And, you know, in their view, the consumer, each of them will only see one dress. They can't tell if this black fabric is slightly different from the next one, from the next batch, because they only see one. And at that price point, the quality of the fabric is probably less important. So it's more about the style. It's basically throwaway fashion. Yeah. So Shein doesn't preposition fabrics, but you can get around, you can achieve the same speed by prepositioning, you know, higher quality fabrics. Do they book capacities for CMT? Yes. What they do is, hey, we know we're going to be selling dresses, you know, so I booked that capacity, you know, over 10,000 units spread over like, you know, 50 styles. But I don't know what style yet. I will tell you the day that it is— it needs to be cut. And so, and to our— in our experience, they have always fulfilled their CMT sort of capacity commitments. I guess it helps that they have been sort of on the rise, so they actually, you know, they are growing so quickly that they need more and more capacity, so if you are working with them, you just worry about getting overbooked rather than having not enough and them not fulfilling their capacity commitments. Air freight could shorten lead time when promoting air products. How Lever weighs the balance between lead time and ESG target? Yeah, so I mean, there are various ways of looking at it. The biggest waste, the biggest sort of harm to the environment is with landfills. And when you make things that nobody wants, whether you bought, you know, there was a little scandal with Burberry burning their clothes, they're, you know, you put it into landfill, that's actually just as bad if not worse than flying everything, right? So I mean, it's a little bit, you know, sort of deciding toss-up between, you know, two evils, but, you know, I don't have data numbers to back that up, but the biggest problem to me seems to be landfills and excess production rather than air freight. Other questions? Or we can do it the old-fashioned way. Anybody want to just raise your hands and— okay, well, there's a lot— uh, sure.

I think that was a fantastic analogy around the nuke simulation because you're doing it on the computer. But the question is, if Shein is so digitally advanced, how is the supply chain getting that message? Or it's because of the proximity they're getting the message with the style and everything and getting it done and shipping it?

Well, yeah, that's a good question. You know, a lot of people think, oh, that's— there must be— the supply chain must be completely digitalized. Yes, SHEIN's systems are probably more digitalized than most, than other traditional retailers. But I think that the reason why they can do this is more about the business model and the mentality. You know, like LeverStyle can provide a lot of the automation, like in terms of information exchange. So for example, with SHEIN, they press a button and then it just basically sends the PO, fabric PO to the fabric supplier. And then, you know, as long as they confirm quickly, then the factory associate will automatically get a— expect to see this raw material coming in and will tell you, maybe the raw material coming in tomorrow or day after tomorrow, and then will tell you tomorrow what that style is going to be. So it's a bit more automation, but that's actually incremental. I think the most important thing is actually having the mindset, hey, we're going to do this. And, you know, it's really not rocket science. You can even do things manually. Yeah, as long as you're willing to accept, okay, we preposition fabrics, we work with factories that, you know, that are reasonably quick, 2-3 weeks turnaround time, we produce in small lots, and then we force ourselves to not forecast so long ahead, you know, just look at what the past week of sales data and then produce things that are just, you know, 3 weeks away. And you can do that in the, even in a more manual traditional manner, you know, especially if Brands that we're talking about are not as big as Shein. Shein puts in about like something like 7,000 new styles every day. And I remember like a couple of years ago I was talking to the head of supply chain and he was saying that they did about 8 million packages every single day and they have since probably about tripled, if not quadrupled since then. So you're talking about 20 million packages every day. And in order to do manually those, all those packages, you know, it's, they need millions of people. But with a smaller brand, you can probably still do that kind of responsiveness while even doing just more manual sort of information passing around. So I don't think automation is actually a sort of a reason that something, a quick supply chain can't be done, although automation will enhance the efficiency of a quick supply chain. Thank you. Yeah, what's the— okay, sorry, what would be SHEIN's average production lead time given that they are replenishing daily and everything? Does SHEIN make to order? Yes, SHEIN— no, SHEIN doesn't make to order for their consumers, but they basically look at yesterday's sales data and they decide whether this style is still going to sell and they continue to do it. Um, the average production lead time is between 10 to 14 days depending on the product. So it's a more complicated jacket maybe, and we used to make like sweaters for them, you know, that's more towards the 14-day side. If they're just making a simple t-shirt, I imagine it'd be like 7, 9 days kind of thing. What is the ESG target for Lever Style? How your company is going to grow with the apparel industry? Yeah, so we are probably one of the most ESG-minded companies, you know, as a public publicly listed company, we have been— we were forced to address that. Just last year, we got certification for B Corp, which is the world's— one of the world's most stringent sustainability standards. It is— very few apparel companies have that. The names that you know of include like Patagonia, Eileen Fisher, Allbirds in the footwear space. And we're very proud that we're amongst these sort of companies that are respected for their sustainability efforts. And we've gone on this journey a long time ago before sustainability was even a word. In 2009, we partnered with World Wildlife Fund to be their guinea pig in the apparel industry globally for their low carbon manufacturing program. So how do you do it through the apparel production process? How do you save on electricity, carbon emissions, and so forth? and we started on that journey 15 years ago, way before, you know, sustainability was even mentioned anywhere in the press. We intend to continue to lead that journey. While we want to produce things, not produce excess things, we want to find a— we want to continue to improve how we can do it in the most environmentally responsible manner. As one of the leading companies in the field, it is— we see it as our responsibility responsibility to take a lead in that effort because if we don't do it, nobody else will and we all know about all the climate change issues. Is nearshoring a theme that is likely to come up in a big way to shorten lead times? My argument would be you don't need nearshoring if you just use planes. Now planes basically dramatically shorten the distances, you know, it basically reduces the size of the world. Of course, by nearshoring you can ship by truck rather than by plane, but if you're willing to use planes, you can produce anywhere in the world and you won't have a lead time issue with, you know— Although nearshoring, there is one advantage, is geopolitics and import duties. So for example, if you import export things from Asia, ship to the US, or you have all these import tariffs. But if you produce in Mexico, you produce for the US market, or you produce in Romania for the EU market, there is less duty. So that all needs to be calculated. But a lot of times, because the garment industry is now so mature in Asia, even if the cost is the same, there may be an argument for producing in this part of the world because the capabilities are stronger, whether it is capacity going up and down, whether it's faster speed in terms of production, whether it's availability of raw material, and also availability of skilled labor to do the product that you're looking for. A lot of times, for example, in Mexico, that's just not available, and you're just doing sort of low-quality products rather than high-quality ones. Why don't more companies adopt the high-speed-to-market model that we're talking about? It's all mentality. Because we all— many of us were brought up in this industry and it got hammered into our head that, hey, you know, if we're doing production, the most important thing is lowering the FOB cost. How do you maximize input margins? That what it takes is going to Timbuktu, the furthest place on earth, long ship times, and committing to large orders. So be it, because I'm— if I'm a sourcing person, I'm responsible for input margin, not the actual margin after, you know, markdowns, discounts, and all those things. And that's just something that we were brought up with. And you see a lot of companies that have broken through are actually led by executives that are not from the industry. Likewise, in terms of on the front end, you know, like coming up with the right product design, traditionally we looked up to people like the Giorgio Armanis, you know, the Ralph Laurens, they are there, or even Micky Drexler, you know, they are there to, they are the top designers or like merchant prince because they can see what our consumer is going to want. 9 months down the road. So that's sort of the traditional way of thinking, how you, you respect that capability and everybody tries to replicate that. But, you know, Zara and now Shein have proven, hey, you know, it's better to be a fast follower than to predict things way in advance because nobody can do it consistently over a long period of time. Shein's been popular lately. However, there have been concerns raised as ethical and sustainability issues. Could SHEIN model transform to be sustainable? Well, SHEIN have a lot of controversy. You know, they're accused of copying designs. Those of us who've worked long enough in this industry may remember in the 2000s, Zara was accused of the same thing. And, you know, these are just, I guess, growing pains that, you know, companies as they mature and they gain respectability, they need to figure out how to sort of prevent that from happening. Ethical, I guess, you know, we've been involved in the SHEIN supply chain. If people— we didn't see like forced labor or, you know, like ridiculously cheap production, you know, whether they use Xinjiang cotton or not, you know, and whether, you know, Xinjiang— how Xinjiang cotton was produced, so that's a whole other issue that, you know, we're not, you know, That's way above my pay grade. But, you know, what I can say is, you know, if Shein wants to avoid the controversy, it can just buy fabrics from somewhere else. And then, you know, maybe they preposition, you know, India-made fabric or something. They can't buy stock from the Guangzhou fabric market. And then they can have a sort of traceability system to make sure the cotton doesn't come from Xinjiang or whatnot. So it could be done. It's just whether they feel that that's something they need to do right now, they have to do, and maybe they will have to because if they are listed on a US or UK stock exchange, the regulators may be giving them a lot more pressure. Okay, we did the first one already. Is Livestyle utilizing AI to help the inventory problem of the brands it is working with? I must admit, AI is something that we're looking into, but so far I'm not aware of any company making— having made substantial progress in it. And I think that different companies use AI for different purposes. If you're talking about sort of brands figuring out what their, you know, how to forecast inventory needs and so forth, that we see that as a job of our customers, you know, the brands. What we're trying to do is to use AI to automate a lot of the manual processes involved in managing the supply chain so that we can be faster, we can be more efficient with smaller unit orders so that we can help our customers reduce their inventory that way. Mention no commitment in the order size but just 150 pieces, still need to pay high MOQ. Well, a lot of times MOQ comes from materials. You know, when you make a roll of materials, you know, the minimum is like, oh, that makes 1,000 shirts or something. If you make way below that, then the material is wasted, and therefore that's why you need a high MOQ. But in Shein's case, when they're just buying stock, they can just buy, you know, 200 yards at a time. They don't need to buy a, you know, order a big roll because it's not custom-made for them. And if you do, you know, let's say, you know, forget about the stock fabric thing. If you do pre-positioning, of materials, you buy a black roll of black fabric, you don't have to use up all, all at once. You can still make 200 units of something and then, you know, okay, I want to try— it's a, let's say, a t-shirt. Is it round neck selling better or V-neck, or should I make a tank top? You know, those things you can try a couple hundred units each, and then whatever sells well, then you use that remaining fabric to do it. So a lot of times this MOQ thing is very usually more related to materials, and if you use a new paradigm, that sort of solves the problem. The speed comes from pre-booking fabrics. Which part do other parameters play, such as patterns, workmanship? Well, to make a pattern for, let's say, a shirt or something takes a couple hours. In the grand scheme of things, if you have a 9-month supply chain, that 2 hours is not making any difference whatsoever. And as I talked about earlier, workmanship. Workmanship, you put a little bit more time into making sure it's, you know, you use better trained workers to make a higher quality product, but the labor sewing minutes to make that garment doesn't increase drastically. You know, it may increase by minutes. So if you're talking, even for Shein, you're talking about a, let's say, 14-day supply chain, minutes don't matter. So this idea that you need to put in the time in order to make a high-quality product is just nonsense. It's sort of like if you want to make a nice dish, you fry it, you cook it, you do a, let's say, a piece of steak. Making a nice piece of steak requires good meat, requires a good recipe, recipe of how much salt, how much vinegar, how much whatever to add. But spending more time cooking that piece of meat does not make it any better. So a good restaurant, like let's go to Morton's Steakhouse versus you go to a more sort of mass market one like Outback, I would bet you that the time requires for the chef to make that steak, not that much different. But the Morton's steak is going to be, you know, it's going to be a lot tastier and of course they also cost 3 times as much, but it doesn't take any more time. How would you describe the internal culture at SHEIN? You know, we've supplied SHEIN in the past, but we've never sort of hired any of the people. We've never sort of got inside that company. So that's, I'm afraid that's a question that I'm not really well positioned to answer. But what, what as a supplier, what do we see? Shein pays on time, so they're famous for that. I forgot it's 7 or 14 days. So are they more ethical or less ethical than a, you know, some other buyer that is— and we have some of those customers too that are like, you know, consistently like 2 months late in paying and not, you know, fulfilling the obligations to their supply partners. You know, it's a, it's a question mark. And I think, you know, I'm not, I'm not arguing that Shein is perfect in every way. And I think as any kind of growing company, there are issues to be resolved. But I think we just— I would caution against just reading too much into media. And sometimes, you know, things get distorted. But as a supply partner, we felt Shein was fair and we couldn't make money from it. So we stopped working with them. But in terms of the interaction, they did what they promised to do and so they were, they were fair to us. Any more questions? All right then, well, thank you.