Zara Case

Zara’s core competencies can be divided into four areas: process development, distribution, marketing and integrated business structure (referred to Appendix 1). Zara’s unique process development allowed Zara to produce in a shorter cycle time and more quickly response to the

Zara is a Spanish clothing and accessories retailer based in Arteixo, Galicia, and founded in 1975 by Amancio Orteg. It is the flagship chain store of the Inditex group, the world's largest apparel retailer. Zara describes its business as “The fast fashion” model which abandoned the traditional model of seasonal lines using instead adapting the creative ideas to customer demand on a going basis. Fashion clothes are like food, it turns bad quick. Zara’s business is about reducing response time. Zara needs about two week to develop a new product and gets it to stores. The company launches around 12,000 new designs each year. Zara’s success offers us some instructive lessons in how to create and sustain a break through strategy.

Zara is one of the retail sale format of Inditex group and well-known an international fashion clothing brand which is very famous for its apparel and accessories. Zara is a place where we can buy all the latest fashionable clothes in the world as they launches 10,000 designs every year. Zara is one of the Spain famous fashion clothing brand which is located in 70 countries in the world. Zara company is started earlier in 1975 by Amancio Ortega, a famous business person who planned to enlarge his small factory by opening a big store. In 1988 the Zara Company started to enter in to the international market to expand their business globally. Zara opened first international store in Portugal. Portugal store got a big success and then Zara decided to open a store in USA. By the next year they opened another store in Paris. These all made a tremendous growth to Zara and it became as an iconic representation of Spanish fashion. Zara began to enlarge their business quickly in 1990s. Around the world there are 1763 stores in 2013. In this assignment we are going to discuss about Zara’s strategy structure, infrastructure and process development, work scheduling and its reward products.

Zara is the major brand of the Inditex Group that is one of the world’s largest fashion retailers. The group is composed out of eight brands: Zara, Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho, Zara Home and Uterque; comprising 6700 stores all over the world. Zara is a Spanish company and has more than 2000 stores located in 88 countries. The subsequent table compares and gives an overview on each brands creativity approach:

Zara has been expanding into new territories since its initial expansion into Portugal in the 1989. Throughout its international development, Zara has kept its central distribution center in Arteixo, Spain, where the satellite distribution centers are sourced from the centralized center in Spain. All of Zara’s products go through this distribution center, and this strategy has its costs and benefits. The distribution center in Arteixo allows Zara to manage its inventory all in one place, and “the warehouse [is] a place to move merchandise rather than to store it”. This allows Zara to be efficient and respond quickly to customer demands, given that “none [of the merchandise] ever stayed at the distribution center more than three days”. Through this warehouse, Zara has ease of access of providing for Spain and its neighboring countries; however, when

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

Traditional supply chains take a supplier centric/push view with a focus on what a business is trying to sell rather than a focus on customer’s demands (Kotler et al, 2009). Zara’s supply chain adopts a vertical structure which is mainly demand driven with cycle times being kept to a minimum which allows information to be acted upon quickly (Grant, 2011).

Zara’s mission was always to provide the consumer the ability to purchase high quality clothing and footer with the latest trends with same look as the high fashion luxury brands at an affordable price for the everyday man or woman which has led to their steady rise and leading to customers being loyal and sticking with brand for a long period of time.

It might not be in the retailer’s best interest to perform such upgrade, as the new system will replace three of the existing legacy systems in terms of ordering and fulfillment. The IS department will perceive such upgrade as a radical move and is expected to show high resistance in response to it. Even though Zara has a decentralized decision making process, the retailer’s IS department exercises absolute autonomy on the IT infrastructure and design. The fact that “only one person had left the department” in the past 10 years further confirms that the retailer is suffering from cognitive and action inertia, and thus creating a huge barrier for such

The value chain is a temporary competitive advantage for Zara. The major reason why it is not a sustainable advantage is that it is not rare. Barney stated that it is not a sustainable resource if a large number of other firms can also gain benefit from the same resource. It is clearly that Zara’s competition also get their global value chain. Therefore, no firm could get a competitive advantage on the common strategy. Nevertheless the value chain is difficult for new entrants to imitate cause it is costly in capital and time. Further, there is not another way

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.

In society is such opinion about prices, if the product price is low, it means that the quality is low. People think that everything with high prices has high quality, but it is not true. In this case Zara did not want to be seen as a low quality brand. Hence they create products of high quality. They wanted to be first between fashion brands and add new designs to their collections twice a week. For customers is not good to look the same designs two week, the company knows about customers needs and they remove the products that do not sell well and changes the stores’ organization twice a week. Products can be different by their functional aspects, by the price and the quality. Zara differentiates by these elements. The main point of the differentiation strategy for Zara is combination of the low price and high quality and if other companies want to be desirable, they must do the same. Zara tries to decrease the product in the inventory and increase the number of variable

Zara’s business model can be broken down into three basic components: concept, capabilities, and value

In recent year, Zara is well-known as the world’s largest retailer and the most favorite fashion brands in the world to the people in their 20s-30s and children. Its success doesn’t come from just only what it sells but how it sells them.