Zara Case
1. What are the ways that Inditex ensures that “fast fashion” is truly fast?
The primary drive behind “fast fashion” for Zara and more importantly its CEO Pablo Isla is logistics. The company produces two thirds of its product in nearby location such as Spain, Portugal, and Turkey, thus ensuring significant savings on transportation costs along with significantly faster delivery times. Aside from delivery times, Mr. Isla has installed sophisticated system of monitoring sales and ordering merchandise. Stores are restocked as often as twice a week, and merchandise reaches the store within two days of the order. The fashion is monitored very closely, and those items that are successful are quickly sent to both designers for creation of like merchandise, and the company’s factories for creating more. The company has even added new shipping routes to ensure that managers get their merchandise quickly. Store mangers use handheld computers to monitored current and order new merchandise. While previously ordering new merchandise took around three hours, now it takes less then an hour. New fashions hit the stores much quicker then majority of the company’s competitors.
With that said, the company is expanding rather quickly and majority of its expansion is outside of its native Spanish market. Expansion in Americas will likely put a strain on its distribution network as majority of its merchandise is produced in Europe. Asian production does account for approximately a third of the company merchandise, while the Asian market is quickly expanding.
2. What are the important attributes of a “fast fashion” retailer to customers? To store managers?
The important attributes of “fast fashion” to customers is exactly what it sounds to be. The fashion is always the latest trend. Because the company is able to deliver the merchandise quickly to the stores, the