Zar Business Model And Marketing Tactics

The global apparel market is a buyer-driven market. Along with the globalization and technology development, consumers are easier to access to fashion. As a result, the customers are changing and the companies are evolving to deliver customers satisfaction. Zara, the most profitable brand of Spain clothing retail group Inditex, has leveraged its unique strategy to achieve success and will be expected to maintain a sustainable growth in the fashion industry.

Zara is a clothing retail store for women, men and children, concentrating sixty percent of their effort to the women clothing market. Besides retailing, Zara also designs, produces, and ships their lines of clothing to their Zara stores. Zara 's corporate concept is to offer fashionable, trendy, designs at a reasonable price. The key to their corporate success is to offer the latest trends and fashions before their competitors. They believe that they are in the fashion business, not the clothing business. As part of this corporate concept, the stores try to hold very low levels of inventory, often having their entire inventory out on display, in order to sell out and make room for the

Zara is a high-end street store offering the latest tastes in fashion for women, men, and children alike. Amancio Ortego, Zara’s founder, has made the store grow with rapid success in both its home country, Spain, and internationally. One of the distinct reasons why Zara is such a unique company compared to its competitors is its foundation of the quick response system. Today, Zara’s cycle time is six weeks, in which it responds to its customers’ demand very quickly, unlike most stores that take half a year. Overall, Zara is distinct from most apparel stores in its ability to travel globally and from its international strategy.

The business idea of Zara is to link customer demand to manufacturing, and to link manufacturing to distribution. And based on this general idea, Zara has several essential elements for its business model. First, speed and decision making, which means that in the external level, Zara need to respond very quickly to demands of target customers, and always keep in style. While for the inside, Zara treasure intelligence and judgment of common employees who enjoy a great deal of autonomy. Second, its marketing, merchandising and advertising strategy. Zara does not spend on virtually advertising, while it spends heavily on stores, and no selling online because of

The Spanish retail chain Zara has unique supply chain management practices that enable it to gain a competitive advantage over other fashion retailers in the industry. Zara’s rapid response time enables the firm to quickly respond to changing fashions while deliberately under producing products. This strategy, which is supported by competencies in logistic management, design and information systems, allows the company to maintain less inventory and higher profit margins and is a key factor to Zara’s success. The firm should continue to add value by seeking new opportunities to expand in the retail market and maintain their sustainable growth.

Zara’s strategy is to offer cutting edge fashion at affordable prices by following fashion and identifying which styles are “hot”, and quickly getting the latest styles into stores. They can move from identifying a trend to having clothes ready for sale within 30 days (whereas most retailers take 4-12 months). This is made possible by controlling almost the whole garment supply chain from design to retail.

The basic strategy for fighting competition is to attract buyers at lower prices, more unique designs, high-quality design, efficient customer service and solid image brand. Thus bargaining power of buyer for apparel industry is high as the products falls under the basic needs in human lives. There is no much difference in terms of products offered by the apparel company, so if buyer is unhappy with the product or service they can easily switch to another brand. Thus, Zara are trying to strengthen its position in the market by using their unique strategy by giving priority to buyer to meet their special needs.

The core concept of Zara 's business model is they sell "medium quality fashion clothing at affordable prices", and vertical integration and quick-response is key to Zara 's business model.  Through the entire process of Zara 's business system: designing, sourcing and manufacturing, distribution and retailing, they presented four fundamental success factors: short cycle time, small batches per product, extensive variety of product every season and heavy investment in information and communication technology.  These four elements are involved in every aspect of the business.

An additional method Zara utilizes to ensure the right product is produced is to constantly monitoring the sells at every store in real time through the use of computers. Sells managers are the individuals that play out this strategy. When the clothing sells well or does not sell well, they can quickly let the designers know to swiftly create new designs (“Case 3-4. Continued Growth for Zara and Inditex”, 2013). However, the competition is changing their strategies in an attempt to successfully compete with Zara. The methods that Zara has implemented to ensure fast fashion is truly fast has pressured the competition into reducing their lead times on stocking their stores (Hayes & Jones, 2006).

This case discusses the unique supply chain management practices of Spanish garments retailer Zara, which enabled it to gain competitive advantage over other fashion retailers in the world. Zara's vertically integrated supply chain system enabled the company to place the latest designs in any store across the world within a period of two to three weeks. The company produced garments as per the latest trends in a limited quantity. Zara introduced 12,000 designs every year, with new designs appearing in the stores globally, twice a week. The case explains in detail the design, production and distribution processes of Zara's supply chain.

Enforcement of such system “fast fashion” is too good in decreasing the time of production. This is clear in the case of Zara as recognizing the required fashion and applying or producing it in a short period of time less than two weeks. This is too good for forming rapid answer for all clients’ requirements, and so keeping clients satisfied. This system of fast fashion also helped Zara to produce more effective styles. This included the production of 11,000 items, while in case of rivals we find that Gap produced only 4,000 items, and H&M produced only 2000 items. Moreover, the adopting of such system helped the company reduce level of supply “scant quantities”, and this is too effective for satisfying clients as they wear a unique model. All those issues helped Zara to support its name in the market, and so despite of the different disadvantages, we find that Zara will

Zara, a Spanish-based chain owned by Inditex, is a retailer who has taken a new approach in the industry. By owning its in-house production, Zara is able to be flexible in the variety, amount, and frequency of the new styles they produce. With their unique strategy, Zara has the competitive advantage to be sustainable. In order to maintain that advantage and growth they must confront certain challenges that face traditional retailers in the apparel industry such as Hennes and Mauritz (H&M) and The Gap, who differ from Zara because they outsource all of their production, spend more money on advertising, and is price-oriented.

The first Zara store was opened in 1975 and now there are over 1500 Zara stores around the world. Zara is now recognized as one of the top 100 most valuable retailers all over the world mostly thanks to its “fast-fashion” strategy. (Rachel Tiplady, 2006) Zara is famous since it only needs 4 to 5 weeks to design, produce and distribute a new style of clothing while other famous brands usually need 6 to 9 months to develop a new style. Currently Zara has over 200 fashion designers working for it, and it is able to develop over 1,000 new styles every month. Zara is using a “fast-fashion” strategy; it focuses on finding the popular styles of clothing in every different country or area in the world and design large quantity of styles to follow the fashion. Zara believes that more styles mean more choices and more chance to hit the market demand.

Zara is a clothing and accessories retailer selling stylish apparel at affordable prices, and it is also the most profitable brand of the Spanish clothing retail group Inditex SA. Ortega planned for this new Zara outlet, located near his factory in La Coruna in northern Spain, to sell this overstock merchandise himself. Since then, Zara has expanded into 500 stores in 68 countries as of January 2007 and has become a leader in customized fashion retailing. This assignment presents core competencies to help Zara achieve competitive advantages in fashion industry. Besides, we also offer five competitive objectives about quality, speed, flexibility, dependability and cost to evaluate

Moreover, Zara move/shipped over 2 million items per week, nothing remains warehouse within 72 hours. The clothes are pre-ironed and hang in hangers with security and price tag to save stores prime selling time. Every clothing stores nowadays sell clothes on a seasonal basis which mass produce clothes for the season. But Zara produces and sells new design every 2 weeks, which forces people to visit their stores more frequently because they could find new designs every time they visit and to buy their favorite designs as soon as possible. This strategy eliminates the idea of putting discounts and sales in the stores toward the end of the season because of its limited production and Zara’s customers soon learned to buy them quickly before it gets sold out. Moreover, Zara does not spend money on advertisements because of they usually their flagship stores on most expensive real estate location. This is another strategy that the company is using effectively because this most expensive real estate where most people who love to shops lives. Thus, eliminating advertisement to be spent on their revenue. Zara recently beats its competitor H&M in profits, sales and also in the stock market by 8% in 2016 and it still going strong as the margins go up to 11.5% right now. As Zara focus on quick fashion and more online presences to drive up their sales rather than mass producing clothes and then heavily discount them later on the