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It’s hard to believe Temu is just a few years old—it’s already a leader in ultra fast fashion and is rated “We Avoid” by our analysts. So where to shop instead? Here, we’re sharing some suggestions for highly rated brands that offer items in the categories Temu sells: mens and womenswear, kids’ clothes, homewares, and beauty.
Why ‘We Avoid’ Temu
Despite launching in 2022, Temu has quickly dominated the ultra fast fashion industry and brought serious competition to long-established multi-category retailers like Amazon. In fact, retail analyst Neil Saunders described Temu as “Amazon on steroids,” to the BBC in 2023, and it has around 13 million monthly users in the UK alone.
The e-commerce business was founded by billionaire Colin Huang and relies on a network of “millions of independent, third-party manufacturers and merchandise partners”, per an email from its PR to Good On You earlier this year (in which it asked us to stop calling it ultra fast fashion, but more on that later) that allows it to stock every kind of product you can imagine, from clothes to fake chicken leg ornaments and other strange objects. The retailer says this variety and its very low prices allow consumers to “shop like a billionaire”. We say it drives mindless consumption and huge amounts of waste.
SHEIN, another behemoth that promotes overconsumption, is Temu’s main competitor in the fashion space, and they’ve been involved in a tiresome saga of trading lawsuits for the last few years. Temu says it’s different from SHEIN because it does not directly manufacture clothing and relies on external suppliers, insisting that it is a marketplace or retailer rather than a brand. Temu also uses this reasoning as a basis for denying it is an ultra fast fashion business. But ultimately, the brands that Temu sells don’t have an independent identity in consumers’ minds and its site is still flooded with new products on a regular basis, which encourages overconsumption. The business’s low pricing strategies, excess of 5,000 products online (at the time of rating), frequent sales and promotions, and marketing methods that encourage overconsumption are all key indicators of the ultra fast fashion business model that is so detrimental to the fashion industry and to people, the planet, and animals as a whole.
The business has been accused of design theft, which our reporter Maggie Zhou investigated in 2024. It’s also been found to use “dark” user interface patterns that push people to shop more and quicker, and to sell products containing high levels of toxic chemicals.
Unsurprisingly, Temu rates “We Avoid” against Good On You’s methodology, and if you need to buy something, we’d recommend seeking out other brands and retailers that take care to ensure their products aren’t full of toxic chemicals, and don’t need to rely on manipulative web design to convince people to buy their products. We’ve listed a selection below across some of the product categories that Temu sells, including menswear, womenswear, kids’ clothes, beauty, and home items.
A note on affordability
Good On You wants to help you find more sustainable options no matter your budget. But we recognise that many responsible brands appear more expensive up front. That’s because more goes into a price tag than the cost of fabric. Fast fashion prices are often low because workers are not paid living wages and sustainable practices are not followed in production.
Fast fashion has also distorted our view of clothing prices. We now spend much less and buy far more low-quality garments than we did a few decades ago. When taking into account cost per wear, higher quality items you’ll wear again and again end up costing less in the long run despite the initial investment.
We aim to highlight the range of more affordable sustainable brands, but we also encourage you to seek out the most sustainable options that work for you. Sometimes this means shopping second hand, other times rediscovering and restyling what you already own. And if you’ve got a specific budget in mind, you might find helpful our round-up of more sustainable and affordable brands, listed by price point.
More sustainable alternatives to Temu
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