When Amancio Ortega opened his first Zara clothing store, his business model was simple: sell high-fashion lookalikes to price-conscious Europeans.88 At the time, it took six months to get a new garment from the designer's drawing board onto the shop floor for a customer to purchase. What Ortega envisaged was 'fast fashion': getting trendy. desired designs to customers quickly. And that's exactly what Zara has achieved, using technology, an army of designers, and some principles of just-in-time production. Zara is one of eight brands owned by Spanish fashion retail group Inditex. Inditex is one of the world's largest fashion retailers, operating 7,420 stores in 96 markets and with a workforce of over 174,000 people.89 With a large global presence, Zara is tweaking its strategy to focus more on flagship brick-and-mortar stores and online expansion? Despite the struggles facing the retail fashion industry, Zara has outperformed rivals even in a challenging market environment.91 The keys to Zara's success have been a clear and focused understanding of fashion, technology and their market, and the ability to adapt quickly to trends. This enables Zara to get a new design from drawing board to store floor in appr0ximately two weeks, and to stock stores with new designs twice a week. Each aspect of Zara's business contributes to the fast turnaround. Sales managers at company headquarters scrutinise sales at every store, monitoring 'hits' and 'misses' almost instantaneously. ln-house designers work in teams sketching out new styles and deciding which fabric will provide the best combination of style and price. Once a new design is drawn, it is sent electronically to Zara's factory where a clothing sample is made. To minimise waste, computer programs arrange and rearrange clothing patterns on the massive fabric rolls before a laser-guided machine cuts them out. Zara produces most of its designs in Morocco, Portugal, Spain and Turkey, and finished garments are returned to the factory within a week. Finishing touches such as buttons, trim and detailing are added and then each garment goes through a quality check. Garments which pass are individually pressed, then garment labels indicating which ocuntry the garment will be shipped to are added. Garments proceed along a moving carousel of hanging rails via a maze of tunnels to the warehouse, a four-storey, 5 million square foot building. As the merchandise bundles move along the rails, electronic tag readers scan each garment's barcode to determine where it is being shipped to and then directs it to the right distribution area so it can be shipped to its destination. With this ultra-sophisticated distribution centre overseen by just a handful or workers, Zara ships around 60,000 items each hour and more than 2.6 million items a week. Staying ahead of other fashion retailers who now also make 'fast fashion\" means Zara must remain resgnsive to customer preferences. One way the company does this is by using Radio Frequency Identification Technology to track individual garments so it can instantly determine where garments are in the world and direct them to markets where they are in high demand.92 In response to sustainability concerns, Zara has also introduced clothing recycling containers in its stores and introduced free in-home collection of used garments to complement home delivery of garments ordered online.93