Adore it or hate it, you need to admit Temu had a banger yr. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese language-owned ecommerce web site, recognized for promoting an enormous array of astonishingly reasonably priced items, took solely two years to turn out to be a family identify within the US. Over the previous 12 months, it has topped obtain charts, surpassing different viral apps like ChatGPT and Threads, and now operates in dozens of nations all over the world. Even its greatest rival, Amazon, not too long ago launched a Temu clone known as Amazon Haul that intently resembles the unique, each by way of its logistics provide chain and consumer interface.
Temu is projected to earn greater than $50 billion in complete gross sales this yr, in response to analysts from AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China, probably tripling its 2023 determine. Temu’s web site now will get nearly 700 million visits worldwide each month, and Apple not too long ago revealed it was the most downloaded app of 2024 on iPhones within the US.
Temu has now totally changed Want, an earlier cut price on-line purchasing web site, within the cultural lexicon because the signifier of knockoffs or budget-friendly options. The winner of the current Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in New York Metropolis, for instance, calls himself “Temu-thée Chalamet.” Tens of tens of millions of odd individuals have tried out the app, a lot of whom discovered about it by means of one among Temu’s seemingly unavoidable and relentless promoting campaigns. At this level, your grandma might be obsessive about Temu, too.
“My family and friends members who did not know what it was in 2023 do now,” says Moira Weigel, an assistant professor at Harvard College who research transnational on-line marketplaces. “Random kinfolk who know that I research China or ecommerce will say, ‘Oh, you could know all about Temu,’ in a manner that didn’t occur a yr in the past.”
Weigel says that Temu has carried out a number of issues proper, together with figuring out the right suppliers in China, concentrating on acceptable buyer segments, and discovering an affordable solution to ship merchandise from one to the opposite. That allowed the purchasing platform to defy early analyst predictions that it could rapidly burn by means of its money reserves and flame out.
Temu, which is owned by PDD, one of many greatest ecommerce giants in China, is transferring and pivoting at a velocity that its Western counterparts can’t actually grasp, says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founding father of the ecommerce intelligence agency Market Pulse. “Whenever you have a look at an organization like Temu, it is going a thousand miles an hour,” he says.