Zara is perceived as one of the grandest international fashion companies, selling conveniently-priced women’s, men’s and kids’ fashions worldwide. It ties its name to Inditex, the latter being an extremely large distribution group that owns companies like Zara, including Pull & Bear, Stradivarius or Bershka.
Zara, with its extensive retail network, is one of the few fashion companies who deal with designing, producing, distributing and selling garments. Basically, Zara is a Spanish retailer who offers affordable lookalike pieces of renowned, higher-end fashions.
It is said that Zara only needs a couple of weeks to create a new item and bring it onto the shelves. This is spectacular considering that the average figure of the fashion industry says that companies need about six months to develop and sell new products in stores.
Zara manages to create around 10,000 new pieces each year, and it does that with zero advertising. In fact, Zara prefers to invest in opening new stores, and it also bases its fashion developments on groups of designers rather than counting on individual designers.
One of the reasons why Zara clothing is so successful lies in the fact that the company has resisted the industry’s tendency to let low-cost countries handle the production process. This and the above-mentioned factors explain why Zara is considered an imitator in the fashion world, creating copies of successful and highly priced fashions. Be that as it may, their ways of creating and selling fashion are embraced by numerous people worldwide, people who get to enjoy low cost products that resemble items seen on the runways and within the collections of fashion giants.
Half of the Zara clothing is manufactured right in the country where Zara emerged, Spain; the rest of the workload is divided between European, Asian and African countries. So, unlike other competing fashion companies that outsource their production to countries like China, Zara makes its high-end products in factories from Spain and Portugal. The Zara clothing that is outsourced to low-cost suppliers consists of pieces that, like basic tees, have a longer shelf life.
Zara clothing attracts buyers (from all countries especially the USA) in the in a number of ways. One reason is because Zara shortens items’ life cycles if the company realizes that some garments do not capture the customers’ interest. Some designs get so popular that they quickly evaporate from the shelves, prompting fashion-lovers to keep returning to the store. All these factors influence the number of customers that step into the Zara stores each year.