Zara Essay

1. There are several factors that made Zara a successful venture. Some of them are listed below:

1) The designers of the company used to keep the track of customer’s preference and place the order accordingly to the internal and external suppliers.

2) The products were shipped directly to the well-located, attractive stores twice in a week which eliminated the need of having warehouses and also kept the inventory low.

3) The vertical integration of manufacturing the most time sensitive products Zara was able to reduce the “Bullwhip effect”.

4) In contrast to the other traditional industries Zara took much less time for the design and manufacturing stage.

5) The short time cycle helped in reducing working capital intensity and facilitating manufacture of new merchandise.

6) They different design team for all the product lines- kids, men and women, all of them worked on aspects like continuing in season development, expansion of in demand products etc.

7) Zara launched almost 11,000 new items per year as compared to its competitors H&M and GAP which only managed 2,000 to 4,000.

8) The company used PDA (personal digital assistance) in stores, which ensured quick information flow within the company and created value for customers.

9) Zara also put a lot of emphasis on training the people about the products and the sales executives were given one week training before starting the work.

10) Because of the higher turn-over ratio the customers were satisfied as the products were not repetitive.

11) They hired the Spanish and Portuguese people to take the advantage of the local geographical conditions.

Zara’s Operation- the Inditex offices had headquarters at the country level which helped in supervising and coordinating the operations of the various Inditex brands. Zara’s headquarter in Spain consists of three spacious halls of each of these centers. The designers work together along with the marketing team and planners of procurement and manufacturing team. The designers while working with other teams quickly check the initial drafts and then discuss some of the new styles. Therefore, the prototypes were examined on site. This is the main reason why the design team of Zara played an important role for the production of 11,000 products in a year with very low turn-over ratio. Each brand from Inditex Group has his own autonomy. They could quickly react to market requirements and act in