One of the most famous and the most successful retail fashion brands, Zara, introduced the unique concept of fast fashion in the year 1975 in Spain. Zara’s aim is to spread the new fashion to their customers of different age groups and of different cultures. The main reason for Zara’s success is that it always puts its customers first. Zara provides men and women’s fashion (clothing), kids fashion (named as Zara kids), accessories and shoes.
Let us now talk about the story of the famous brand “Zara”
The first store of Zara was opened in 1975 in Galicia in the Northern part of Spain as a family business by Amancio Ortega and Rosalia Mera. The name of the brand (Zara) was given by Amancio Ortega as the name Zorba which he preferred was taken already by another company. The first store of Zara consists of products of higher-end clothing and fashion at a lower price which attracted Spanish consumers due to which 9 new stores were opened in the largest cities of Spain.
In the year of 1985, Inditex started as a holding company that set up foundations capable of reacting to the latest market trends which shift extremely quickly and dynamically. Ortega started making new designs and manufacturing and created a distribution process that helps in reducing the lead time and reacting to the new trends quickly and he named this process ‘instant fashion‘. For applying this process, heavy investments in the technology of information were required and rather than giving work to the individual designers, the work for the key elements of the fashion brand ‘designing’ was given to the groups of designers.
After 10 years, Amancio Ortega and Rosalia Mera began spreading their company into the global markets like in France, Greece, Belgium, Sweden, the United States of America, Norway, Israel, Malta, Cyprus and many more. Zara started from a small store in Spain and now is the largest fast-fashion retailer in the world and according to the magazine of Forbes Amancio Ortega (the founder of Zara) is the sixth richest man in the world. In the leading cities of the 96 countries, there are around 2264 stores located strategically. Almost every developed country has a Zara store.
More than 174,000 workers are working in the world’s largest group of fashion (Inditex) and are operating more than 7400 showrooms and 202 markets worldwide including the 49 E-markets. In 2019 the total amount of revenue that Inditex collected was about 23.4 billion dollars and some of the other brands of fashion in the world’s largest fashion group are Zara Home, Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stadivarius, Oysho, Uterque.
On the other hand, a real estate investment fund named Pontegadea Invensions which has its corporate office in nine countries of the world consisting of Britain, France, South Korea, Canada, the United States of America and Italy has also been set up by the founder of Zara.
The special strategy of Zara
The main four values of Zara are beauty, functionality, sustainability and clarity. In the global brand consultancy, Interbrand’s list of best global brands Zara was at number 29th in 2019.
Zara keeps changing its fashion trends very quickly and showcases in its collections take a very little delay which is the secret to the company’s success. Zara always offered clothing collections that have a high quality of combination which are affordable also. The brand always keeps a close track of the changing fashion and the clothes which are trending and are of the latest styles. The new designs come in the stores of Zara in a few days only. The customers love this about the brand as most of the other brands take around 6 months to showcase their new collections in the market. And, this is the only reason that Zara is able to beat other companies.
The views on the latest clothing trends are that they are a commodity that is very perishable just like the yoghurt bread and fish. This ideology believes that people should wear clothes for a small span of time and then throw them away instead of making a pile of clothes in the cupboard.
The fashion trends in Zara switches in a month or two due to which the media says that Zara makes freshly baked clothes. There are three main areas on which Zara concentrates to bake its new and fresh fashionable clothes:
1. Zara always moves with their customers; which means Zara keeps the stock that customers want at that point in time, unlike the other retail stores that showcase the clothes which customers may buy in the future.
2. Zara always makes low quantities of a particular style because it applies the principle that the lower the availability of the product, the higher the desire for the product. The second benefit of manufacturing low quantities of a product is that if that style is not having a great amount of sale, then there is not a big quantity that has to be disposed of.
3. Zara produces more styles rather than producing higher quantities. Around 12000 styles are being manufactured by Zara every year.
4. Zara always allows its designs to remain in the showroom only for 3 to 4 weeks. Due to this, the customers are intrigued to visit the stores on a regular basis to make sure that they do not miss any new styles.
Thus, by using all these strategies Zara has been one of the most famous clothing brands.
