Assessing the Zara brands success worldwide

Assessing the Zara brands success worldwide Zara is one of the most well known brands in the world and is also one of the largest international fashion companies. They are the third largest brand in the garment industry and are a unit of Inditex. It their flagship range of chain stores and are headquartered in Spain. Zara opened its first outlet in Spain in 1975. The headquarters of the company is based in Galicia. There are more than 2600 stores across 73 countries in the world. The Zara clothing line accounts for a huge bulk of its parent group’s revenues. There are other clothing brands owned by Inditex such as Kiddy ´s Class (children’s fashion), Pull and Bear (youth casual clothes), Massimo Dutti (quality and conventional fashion), Bershka (avant-garde clothing), Stradivarius (trendy garments for young woman), Oysho (undergarment chain) and Zara Home (household textiles). Inditex owns all Zara outlets except for places where they are not allowed ownership of stores (that’s where Franchises step in) . Zara is renowned for coming up with products on a short timescale instead of taking forever. They are known for taking around 2 weeks to develop products and have been known to come up with around 10,000 new designs every year (which is an industry record). They have bucked the trend by making productions in Europe instead of shifting their entire production to Third World or Developing countries. However some of their clothes are manufactured in parts of Asia due to the fact that they have a longer shelf life. They make most of their own products inside Spain or other European Countries as they own a large number of factories in both Spain and Portugal. They also don’t have to depend on anyone else as they can get everything done by themselves. Zara is unique in the way that it does not spend money on marketing and instead concentrates on opening new stores instead. Their brave experiments have led them to be labeled as one of the most innovative retailers in the world. Za ra started out with low priced products which were pale imitations of high end fashion products. This move led to Zara being a smashing success and allowed them to expand by opening more stores in Spain. The company management also managed to reduce the time it took to create new designs and came up with the term â€Å"instant fashions† which allowed them to capitalize on new trends really fast. Zara is known to use teams of designers instead of individuals. Zara has to face a lot of competition from H&M, Gap and Bentton internationally. Fortunately Zara is considered to be more fashionable than the rest of the brands despite the fact that its price is less than Benetton and Gap. H&M is still cheaper than Zara but is equally fashionable as Zara. Gap and Benetton are less fashionable and more pricy. SWOT Analysis Strengths Zara’s biggest strength is the fact that it provides cost leadership strategy by aiming at efficiency and cost reduction on products. There is a lot of efficiency merely due to the fact that products are put on fast track and costs are kept really low. They don’t take a long time to come up with new collections. Zara is able to come up with collections really fast (around 2 weeks to get a collection ready).