The secrets to success of Zara fashion brand  

There are many factors contributing to the success of Zara today and one of the important strengths of this cult fashion brand, which is putting customers at the center of all product calculations.

Zara is one of the most successful fashion retail brands in the world – if not the most successful. With the creation of a rapidly growing retail empire, Zara aspires to create a passion for fashion among consumers, spanning different cultures and age groups.

Success of Zara – The Zara brand story

Zara was founded in 1975 by Amancio Ortega and Rosalía Mera in Galicia in Spain. The first store sold cheap clothes. And within the next 8 years, Zara’s approach to fashion and business model gradually created an appeal to Spanish consumers, along with nine new stores opened in the largest cities of Spain.

In 1985, Inditex was established as a joint stock company, laying the foundation for a distribution system that was capable of responding to any changes in market trends extremely quickly. Ortega has created a new design, production and distribution process that can help reduce production time and respond to new trends more quickly. That’s what he calls “instant fashion.” This is driven by large investments in information technology and using teams instead of individual designers for a very important part – design.

Over the next decade, Zara began to expand strongly into global markets including Portugal, New York (the United States), Paris (France), Mexico, Greece, Belgium, Sweden, Malta, Cyprus, Norway and Israel. Today, there is almost no developed country without a Zara store. Zara currently has 2,251 stores strategically located in top cities in 96 countries. It is no surprise that Zara, which started out as a small store in Spain, is now the world’s fastest growing fashion retailer. The founder of the brand, Amancio Ortega, ranked sixth in the world according to Forbes magazine.

Today, success of Zara, Inditex is the world’s largest fashion corporation with more than 170,000 employees operating more than 7,400 stores in 96 markets worldwide and 49 online markets. Management and business field of Inditex includes many famous brands in the world including Bershka, Pull & Bear, Stradivarius …

Success of Zara brand’s strategy

In 2017, Zara was ranked 24th in Interbrand’s global brand consulting list for the best global brands. Its core values ​​are found in four simple terms: beauty, clarity, functionality and sustainability.

success of Zara is primarily driven by the ability to keep up with the rapidly changing fashion trends and rarely delay when showing it in its collections. From the beginning, Zara has solved the difficulty between fashion and launch time, which few clothing brands do well. The brand’s goal is to keep up with the latest fashion trends, and to create a collection of clothing of high quality but affordable prices. Zara closely monitors fashion trends that change and develop every day around the world. Based on the latest styles and trends, it creates new designs and puts them into stores in just a week or two. Meanwhile, most other fashion brands will take nearly six months to bring new designs and collections to the market.

Thanks to the strategy of introducing new collections based on the latest trends quickly, Zara defeated other competitors. It quickly became everyone’s favorite brand, especially for those who wanted to keep up with fashion trends. And founder Amancio Ortega is famous for his view of clothing as a perishable item. According to him, people should prefer to use and wear clothes for a short time and then they should throw them away, like yogurt, bread or fish, instead of storing them in a wardrobe.

Shorter production times (and more fashionable clothes): Shorter production times allow Zara to ensure that its store sells the clothes the customers want at the time (for example, specific spring / summer or fall / winter season collections, recent trends, an item worn by a celebrity / an actor and popular surprises, latest collections by a top designer, etc. ). While many retailers try to predict what customers can buy monthly in the future, Zara moves with its customers and gives them what they want to buy at a given time.

Lower quantity (scarce supply): By reducing the amount of production for a particular design, Zara not only creates the fact that “not everyone can own the product” but also creates “artificial” scarcity. Similar to the principle that applies to all fashion items (and more specifically luxury fashion), the less readily available, the more desirable it becomes. Another benefit of lower-volume production is that if a design does not generate traction with buyers and has poor sales, then it reduces the likelihood of a large number of products being thrown away. One year, Zara only has two “conditional sales” instead of having to constantly reduce prices. The brand also has to pay a very small discount on its products, about half of its competitors, which is an impressive feat.

More designs: Success of Zara, Instead of producing more of each design, Zara creates more designs, about 12,000 designs a year. Even if a style / design sells out very quickly, there are still new models waiting to fill store space. This means there are more options and a higher chance of achieving the best fit for the needs of the consumer.

Zara only allows its designs to remain in the store for three to four weeks. This makes consumers constantly visit Zara stores because if they are only one week late, all clothes in a specific style or trend will disappear and replaced with a new trend. At the same time, the constant refresh of lines and designs also entices customers to visit its stores more often.

Zara’s key designer is the customer: The co-creative culture

Zara’s relentless focus on its customers is at the core of the brand’s success and the heights it has achieved today. There is a fascinating story surrounding how Zara and its customers “co-created” the products. In 2015, a woman named Miko walked into a Zara store in Tokyo and asked the store assistant about a pink scarf, but the store didn’t have any pink scarves. The same thing happened almost simultaneously for Michelle in Toronto, Elaine in San Francisco and Giselle in Frankfurt, all of which walked into the Zara store and asked for pink scarves. They all leave the shops without any scarves – an experience that many other Zara fans have encountered globally in different Zara stores in just a few days.

Success of Zara, 7 days later, more than 2,000 Zara stores around the globe started selling pink scarves. Exactly 500,000 pink scarves were sold out in 3 days.

One of Zara’s success secrets is the brand that trains and empowers its employees and store managers. These people are particularly sensitive to the needs and desires of their customers, and how they present themselves at the store. Zara empowers sales associates and store managers in customer research. They listen attentively and note customers’ ideas about the idea of ​​cutting down extra parts, fabric or a new trend. They closely observe the new styles that customers are wearing, get assess themselves on the possibility of being transformed into a unique style branded Zara. Meanwhile, traditional daily sales reports are unlikely to provide such a dynamic up-to-date picture of the market. The Zara Empire is built on two basic rules: Tap to give customers what they want to have, and make it possible for customers to get the product they want faster than any other brand.

Due to Zara’s highly competitive customer research capabilities, their product offerings around the world reflect the unique needs and wants of each individual customer based on physical, climatic, or cultural differences. chemistry. It offers models of smaller sizes in Japan, women’s clothing especially in Arab countries, and various seasonal clothing in South America. Differences in product offerings across countries are greatly facilitated by the constant interaction between Zara’s local store managers and the brand’s creative team.

Technology is also a factor to mention. Zara has established sophisticated technology control systems, allowing information to be quickly transferred from shops to its headquarters in Arteixo, Spain. This allows decision-makers to act quickly and respond effectively to emerging trends. Its design team regularly visits universities; night clubs and other venues to observe what the young fashion leaders are wearing. At its headquarters, the design team uses a flat panel screen linked by webcams with offices in Shanghai, Tokyo and New York (the top cities in fashion trends), acting as chasing trends. The ‘Trends’ group never goes to fashion shows but watches bloggers and listens to their customers closely.

Zara’s designers and customers are closely connected with each other, which is an important part of the brand strategy. Teams of experts receive constant feedback on the decisions their customers make at each Zara store, which constantly inspires the Zara creative team.

Super-efficient supply chain

Zara’s highly sensitive vertically integrated supply chain allows garment exports 24 hours, 365 days a year, resulting in shipping new products to stores twice a week. After the product was designed, it took them about 10 to 15 days to get to the store. All clothing items are handled through a distribution center in Spain, where new products are inspected, sorted, tagged and loaded onto trucks. In most cases, clothing items are delivered to stores within 48 hours. This vertical integration allows Zara to retain control of processes such as fabric dyeing and the ability to process fabrics on demand to provide precise fabrics for new styles according to customers’ preferences. It also eliminates the need for warehousing and helps reduce the impact of demand fluctuations.

This is exactly the culture and the real respect for this brand that it is no one who creates an authentic trend, better than the customers themselves.

Trang Trang

According to Young Intellectuals / Martinroll