Case study: Zara, Fast Fashion from Savvy Systems
Introduction
The poor, ship-building town of La Coruña in northern Spain seems an unlikely home to a tech-charged innovator in the decidedly ungeeky fashion industry, but that’s where you’ll find
“The Cube,” the gleaming, futuristic central command of the Inditex Corporation (Industrias de Diseño Textil), parent of game-changing clothes giant, Zara. The blend of technologyenabled strategy that Zara has unleashed seems to break all of the rules in the fashion industry. The firm shuns advertising and rarely runs sales. Also, in an industry where nearly every major player outsources manufacturing to low-cost countries, Zara is highly vertically integrated, keeping huge swaths of its production process in-house. These counterintuitive moves are part of a recipe for success that’s beating the pants off the competition, and it has turned the founder of Inditex, Amancio Ortega, into Spain’s wealthiest man and the world’s richest fashion executive.
Figure 3.1. Zara’s operations are concentrated in Spain, but they have stores around the world like these in Manhattan and Shanghai.

The firm tripled in size between 1996 and 2000, then its earnings skyrocketed from $2.43 billion in 2001 to $13.6 billion in 2007. By August 2008, sales edged ahead of Gap, making
Inditex the world’s largest fashion retailer.[1] Table 3.1 compares the two fashion retailers.
While Inditex supports eight brands, Zara is unquestionably the firm’s crown jewel and growth engine, accounting for roughly two-thirds of sales.[2]

Table 3.1. Gap versus Inditex at a Glance

Gap

Inditex

Revenue

$14.5 billion

$14.7 billion

Net Income

$967 million

$1.68 billion

Number of Stores

3,149

4,359

Number of Countries

6

73

Biggest Brand

Gap

Zara

Number of Other Brads 4

7

Based in

San