Zara, the Spanish clothing firm owned by Inditex, has revolutionized the fashion industry by becoming the first global retailer to sell fashion lines designed especially for seasons in the southern as well as the northern hemisphere. Zara has a successful business model that has enabled the retail chain to expand to more than 3,000 outlets and stores in Europe, South America, Oceania and Africa, which means developing ranges to suit the seasons is an important part of its expansion strategy. Its key competitive advantage lies in its ability to match fashion trends that change quickly. This, in turn, relies on an extremely fast and responsive supply chain. While other retailers moved production to the Far East to save money, Zara’s marketing team knew it could make its bestselling clothes faster in Spain. 

Zara uses its stores to discover consumer wants, which styles are selling, what colours are in demand, and which items are hot sellers and which failures. The data are fed back to Zara headquarters through a sophisticated marketing information system. At the end of each day, Zara sales assistants report to the store manager using wireless headsets to communicate inventory levels. The store managers then inform the Zara design and distribution departments at HQ about what consumers are buying, asking for and avoiding. Top-selling items are requested and low-selling items are withdrawn from shops within a week. There is a big incentive for store managers to get this right, as up to 70 per cent of their salary is based on commission. 

Garments are made in small production runs to avoid overexposure, and no item stays in the shops for more than four weeks, which encourages Zara shoppers to make repeat visits. Whereas the average high-street store in Spain expects shoppers to visit on average three times a year, Zara shoppers visit up to 17 times......

Questions:

1. Discuss the implications of shorter product lifecycles for a clothing manufacturer like Zara or H&M (also see Marketing in Action 16.1 on Shein). 

2. Suggest why Zara does not just use the garment ranges developed in the winter for the northern hemisphere and then sell them on in the southern hemisphere. 

3. At the opposite end of the spectrum from fast fashion is the ‘slow fashion’ movement, which advocates buying fewer clothes of better quality that will last longer and help to save the environment. Do you think this growing trend will affect the demand for fast fashion, and do fast-fashion brands appeal only to the young?

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