Shein’s high-profile stock market listing may force its secretive founder and CEO, Sky Xu, to finally come out of the shadows. The fast-fashion giant secured approval for its initial public offering in Hong Kong on Friday, its third bid at going public after attempts to list in New York and London floundered. Xu, who founded the e-commerce company in China in 2012 as Sheinside, remains extremely private and hard to access even as his firm nears a listing that could value it at up to $50bn. It could look to launch its IPO as early as September. Xu has avoided interviews and public events and has no visible online presence. The founder has delegated the public aspects of leadership to others: when Shein was vying for a New York IPO, he hired former banker and media executive Donald Tang as senior advisor and then executive chairman to manage relationships with politicians and investors. But Xu’s aloofness has not always been welcomed by Western partners. The lack of public information about Shein’s leadership contributed to concerns around its IPO from politicians and campaigners in the US and in Britain. Shein has declined Reuters’ repeated requests for an interview with Xu and did not respond to questions about the CEO and founder. Xu did emerge from obscurity for one event in February this year, making a speech to policymakers at the Guangdong High-Quality Development Conference about Shein’s investments into its supply chain, which is concentrated in thousands of garment factories in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Shein has said it aims to increase transparency, but Xu does not feature on its corporate website, where a “governance” section contains no information about who owns or leads the company. Xu founded the company in Nanjing, China with Maggie Gu, Molly Miao, and Tony Ren — now general manager, chief marketing officer and chief supply chain officer, respectively. Xu was born in 1984 in Zibo, a city in China’s eastern Shandong province. Little else is known about his early years or education, but according to several Chinese media reports Xu’s mother was a garment factory worker, perhaps providing him with an early insight into the industry he would later come to shape. For his English name, he initially chose Chris — as per Shein’s first sustainability report, published in 2022 — but later decided that was not distinguishable enough and changed it to Sky, which derives from one of the characters in his Chinese name, Xu Yangtian. An industry source who has known him for years described him as patient, modest and pragmatic. One of China’s most prolific collectors of antique coins, Xu is detail-oriented, remaining deeply involved in Shein’s day-to-day operations despite its huge scale, the source said. Xu has also made strategic calls that would benefit the firm despite short-term disruption, the source said, pointing to his 2015 decision to rebrand the company to the snappier Shein, despite its already significant user base and online traffic. Despite Shein’s growing global recognition, Xu had hesitated for years about going public, the source said, believing it should not rely on outside financing to compete against rivals, especially Pinduoduo’s discount e-commerce platform Temu. Meanwhile, the company took steps to distance itself from China. In 2022, Shein moved its headquarters from China to Singapore, though its suppliers and warehouses largely remain in China. Staying under the radar may be strategic, a second source close to Xu said, if he wants to minimise the risk of a Chinese government crackdown similar to the one that engulfed Alibaba e-commerce tycoon Jack Ma in November 2020, when regulators derailed the $37bn Ant Group IPO.
