Xiu.com

» see xiu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Chinese luxury e-commerce was a category with no foreign customers in it. Xiu.com, 走秀网 in its own language, existed to move Paris and Milan stock into mainland apartments, and if you were not in the mainland it had nothing to sell you. It was an enormous shop that most of the world never had a reason to open, and I never opened it either.

Ji Wenhong and Jin Huang founded it in March 2008. Ji had graduated from the University of International Business and Economics in 1992 and spent the years after that in Shenzhen as an exporter, which in this story turns out to matter. The site sold shoes, bags, watches, cosmetics and homeware in the band running from mid-market up to actual luxury, and it ran buying offices in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Paris, London, Italy, Korea, Hong Kong, Japan and Australia so it could source that stock directly.

The money arrived fast. KPCB's China fund put in $20 million in April 2011, and by August of the same year Warburg Pincus had joined for a $100 million round, reported at the time as the largest second round anyone in Chinese e-commerce had raised. In November 2012 eBay partnered with the company to run eBay Styles at ebay.xiu.com for Chinese shoppers. Around $150 million went in across three rounds in total.

Then in May 2016 the founder left the country. Ji was in Indonesia, Interpol had a red notice out on him, and the charge was smuggling designer clothing: buy it in Europe and the United States, ship it to Hong Kong, then walk it across into the mainland in travelers' luggage rather than declare it. English Wikipedia puts the value at 438 million yuan; the Economic Observer's reporting gives a figure closer to 321 million. Indonesian police picked him up in Bali on 4 August 2017 and he was flown back through Xiamen airport on the sixteenth to stand trial. The company's public statement at the time was that business was entirely normal.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the b round ~

The August 2011 round is worth sitting with, because it explains why anyone kept this alive so long afterward. Chinese luxury e-commerce in 2011 looked like the obvious next thing. A middle class was forming, foreign brands had almost no mainland retail presence, and whoever solved the sourcing problem would own the category. Warburg Pincus and KPCB agreeing on a $100 million bet was the sector's high-water mark, and Xiu.com was briefly the name at the front of it.

Nothing about that thesis was wrong. The mainland luxury market did what everyone predicted. What the investors did not price was that the brands would eventually open their own mainland stores and their own Tmall flagships, which left the gray-market importers with a margin that kept thinning and a legal position that kept getting worse. The whole cohort went down together: Huha, Sina's luxury arm, Zunxiang, Jiaping, and in August 2019 Shangpin.com, which had once been valued at a billion dollars.

~ bali ~

A red notice is not a warrant. It is a request circulated to 190-odd member countries asking them to locate and provisionally arrest someone, and it works only as well as the country the person is sitting in wants it to. Ji spent more than a year in Indonesia before that machinery closed around him in Bali in August 2017.

The case was still in appeals in May 2020, with no final verdict, by which time the company he founded had already stopped trading. He was out on bail rather than in prison for most of it. Meanwhile the smuggling charge was itself a description of the business model: the gap between a bag's European price and its mainland price, after duty, was most of what the site's customers were there for.

~ what the customers were owed ~

On 20 March 2020 the company told its customers it would pause operations the next day, blaming the pandemic for what it had done to overseas suppliers and shipping. By then one customer had been waiting 388 days for a 2,593 yuan order. Suppliers had invoices going unpaid since 2017, some of them for less than 20,000 yuan, and one of them had renamed her social media account to ask whether Xiu.com had settled up today. The storefront had already been serving an empty shell of a homepage since the spring of 2019, roughly a tenth of the weight of the working one. In 2026 the domain is still registered through Alibaba's registrar and publishes no address at all.

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