Four syllabuses, one rivalry. Every figure today comes from a filing.
BUSINESS
Operations and lean production
Lead time: how long a new design takes to reach the shop.
ECONOMICS
Barriers to entry and tariffs
A barrier to entry: whatever keeps rivals out. Here, a tax rule.
GEOGRAPHY
Globalisation and supply chains
Made near home, or flown in. Somebody pays for the last mile.
WEF FUTURE OF JOBS 2025
Resilience, flexibility and agility
Second of the ten core skills. Both firms sell speed. One made money from it.
The objective: kill the idea that the fastest firm wins. Both of these are fast. Last year one kept 15.6p of every pound of sales and the other kept 4.9p.
4.6bn cheap parcels entered the EU in 2024. 91% of them came from China.
£2.05bn
Shein's UK sales in 2024
£28.6m
UK profit before tax
91
UK staff, and no shops
Sixteen British shops, Next, M&S, Primark, ASOS, Argos and Currys among them, wrote to the Prime Minister in May 2026. Their ask: a £2.60 charge on every cheap parcel, now, not at the end of the decade.
Marshall Fisher's argument: firms do not fail because their supply chain is bad. They fail because it is the wrong kind.
A responsive chain costs more per garment. It earns that back by selling at full price instead of in the sale. The enemy is not cost. It is the markdown: the price cut that clears what did not sell.
It is in every textbook and on every revision site. Check where it comes from.
Where the 15 days comes from. Ferdows, Lewis and Machuca, Harvard Business Review, 2004. It is a best case, from one article, 22 years old. Inditex has never published a lead time. The "three to five day" Shein figure you find online is in no filing anywhere.
The habit to build: a stock turn from a filing beats a speed from a magazine. A firm has to stand behind a filing. Cite the stock turn, not the legend.
Inditex sold €39.9bn last year and kept €6.22bn. Shein sold $41.8bn and kept $2.06bn.
One block is the whole difference: what it costs to get the clothes into your hands.
The average Shein order is $38.82 and it costs $17.70 to deliver. Zara moves a pallet to one of 5,460 shops and lets you carry it home. You are Zara's last mile, and you work for free.
Sales up nearly a third. Value down three quarters.
Shein raised $1.74bn and closed its first day about 9% below the offer price. Sales rose by nearly a third. Profit fell 38.7%.
Investors did not mark down the algorithm. They marked down a customs rule.
WHAT THE MARKET RE-PRICED
2022
~$100bn
JUL 26
$40-50bn ask
SEP 26
$26.5bn
Shein's own prospectus names the cause in its risk factors: losing the tax relief on cheap parcels or facing higher tariffs "may materially and adversely affect our business".
Fisher, M.L. (1997) 'What is the right supply chain for your product?', Harvard Business Review, 75(2), pp. 105-116; Ferdows, K., Lewis, M.A. and Machuca, J.A.D. (2004) 'Rapid-fire fulfillment', Harvard Business Review, 82(11).
Then: what did it cost to deliver? Slide 9 says $17.70.
HANDLE WITH CARE
Zara is one brand inside Inditex. Inditex is the listed company, so Inditex is what can be compared. Say it once.
PUSH THEM
"Is option D a strategy, or an admission you cannot compete?" Make them argue it.
TASK ANSWERS · SLIDE 11, NOT ON SCREEN
Suggested: B + C + D
£30m. Holding £10m back is a fair answer.
D returns most per pound
Losing the US tax relief cut Shein's US sales 14% in a quarter.
B defends the real advantage
Being fast is what holds 58.3p in the pound after the clothes are paid for.
Reject A, firmly
The clothes cost Shein 32.1 of every 100, against Inditex's 41.7.
E is the weakest £30m
Inditex closed 103 net shops last year.
The sentence to look for
Credit any group naming delivery: 45.6 of every 100.
If there is time. Shein's filing puts unsold stock "in the low single digits". Shein also declined to answer the Business and Trade Committee on sourcing in January 2025. Price is not the only scorecard.
Timing: hook 3. The reality now 7. The why table 5. Fisher 7. The two clocks 7. The two receipts 8. The listing 6. Task 12. Close 5. Closing line: "Shein did not lose to a better shop. It lost to a committee redrafting a customs schedule, and that is a risk no algorithm can see coming."