Chelsey Dulaney

sending a lot of cheap goods to other places after it got much more difficult to sell those things to the U.S.

And one of the areas that was particularly vulnerable to this was de minimis exports.

So this is stuff like really cheap shirts or things you get for your house on Timu or Xi'an.

And a lot of that has been coming into the U.S.

through this exemption called the de minimis.

And that was closed earlier this year.

You saw almost immediately some of those massive Chinese e-commerce giants switch their

advertising budgets.

And so they pulled advertising from the US and they started doing more promotions in Europe.

So if you go on TikTok, you'll see hundreds and hundreds of videos of these like zero euro, zero pound Timu hauls.

That's what they're called on social media.

And it's just all this stuff you can get for free.

And so many videos of people just with these massive packages saying, oh, I bought this on Xi'an, I bought this on Timu.

So that was one of the first things to really ship this year.

The first wave of this came during the pandemic.

Timu and Qian starting to rise in Europe.

And then this year it's gotten even bigger.

So we have seen these new players like popping up to move this stuff.

And a lot of them, interestingly, are on what they're calling this new Silk Road.

So it starts in China.