"Destroying you has nothing to do with you": five years later
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
Today Facebook surfaced an old post of mine from 2020. Back then I didn't really understand entrepreneurship yet, and I hadn't lived through a real market cycle. I just wrote down some thoughts about the industry out of interest.
Reading it again five years later, those not-so-mature observations still hold today.
The dimensional strike of 2020
2020 was a pivotal year in SHEIN's rise.
It had no stores, no advertising, no big fashion shows. Yet with algorithms and a flexible supply chain, it cut into the global fast-fashion market with a completely different speed and logic.
For me back then, it was the first time I truly saw the power of a "dimensional strike", an attack from a level the incumbents weren't even playing on.
For decades, competition in apparel was like runners in the same lane chasing each other:
Traditional department stores lost to the SPA model, SPA lost to fast fashion, and fast fashion ruled for twenty years.
Then one day a player you never even noticed walked in from another direction and flipped the whole table.
At the time I wrote down the classic line from The Three-Body Problem:
"Destroying you, what does it have to do with you?"
People in the industry were still calculating ad spend, sales per square foot and stock turns, but the world had quietly switched tracks.
You think you're competing with your own kind, but the one who really takes your market is someone who doesn't play by your rules at all.
Even SHEIN is feeling the pressure
The bigger irony is that just five years later, SHEIN itself is under pressure.
Global regulation is tightening, supply-chain costs are rising, marketing costs are up, the platform ecosystem has changed, and even its proudest asset, algorithmic distribution, is being challenged by TikTok and Temu.
Dimensional strikes don't stop at any one winner.
There's no permanent advantage, and no business model where "holding steady means holding on".
The world isn't ranked by "who's strongest". It's constantly rewritten by forces from a higher dimension.
Over the past forty years of business change, there's really only one core rule:
Industries aren't eliminated by their rivals. They're eliminated by the times.
This time it's AI
What made me feel this force again is AI.
If SHEIN changed supply chains and cross-border retail, and TikTok changed content distribution and the e-commerce ecosystem, then AI changes the "underlying logic" of retail itself.
It doesn't just help you do your work faster. It redefines "what's worth doing at all".
How content is produced is changing, distribution networks are changing, how supply chains connect is changing, and the paths by which consumers are reached are changing.
While you're still fighting for traffic, the times are already fighting for distribution. By the time you start fighting for distribution, AI has already begun building a new ecosystem.
All of this is happening quietly.
A reminder
When I reread that line:
"Destroying you, what does it have to do with you?"
it's no longer just a threat. It's a reminder:
You don't need to fail, and you don't need to make mistakes. If you just stand still, the world will naturally eliminate you.
The cruelty of business isn't the competition. It's that the world keeps moving forward, and you didn't keep up.