CASE 3-4
Continued Growth for Zara and Inditex
CIRCA 2008
ARTEIXO, Spain—Zara stores have set the pace for retailers around the world in making
and shipping trendy clothing. Now Pablo Isla, chief executive of parent company Inditex
SA, says Zara needs to speed up. As rivals catch up, Mr. Isla is attempting one of the
fastest global expansions the fashion world has ever seen, opening hundreds of new
stores and entering new markets. To do that, as an economic downturn threatens sales,
Inditex is changing the systems that have driven its success at Zara and its other store
brands, to save time and money. Among the innova - tions, it is introducing new methods to
enable store managers to order and display merchandise faster and adding cargo routes
for shipping goods. “There has been a clear change of mentality in the company,” Mr. Isla, a
former tobacco executive who arrived at Inditex in 2005, said in an interview at the
company’s head - quarters here.
The world’s second largest clothing retailer by sales after Gap Inc., Inditex is responding to
a predicament shared by other com -panies that come up with game-changing
formulas: Eventually competitors catch up, forcing the pioneers to do even better to keep
their edge. Low-cost carrier Southwest Airlines Co. is making big changes to fend off
rivals that have copied its efficient operat - ing model. Inventory-control methods at
Walmart Stores Inc. are being mimicked around the world, and Google Inc. is updating its
search engine to keep users loyal.
The consumer slowdown is adding pressure. Inditex shares have fallen nearly 24
percent in the last 12 months, in large part because investors are worried about an
economic downturn in Spain, where Inditex generates over a third of its $12 billion in
annual sales. The company is pressing ahead with its expansion plans even as
consumers are slowing down. In the U.S., retail - ers had their worst monthly sales
results in nearly five years in January, and some chains are planning to close stores and
cut jobs. U.K. retailer Marks & Spencer PLC recently reported its worst quarterly sales
performance in two years, and warned the pain could extend into 2009.
The industry is watching the company’s logistical makeover. Though it sells
inexpensive trendy clothing—“fast fashion” in industry parlance—Zara has been so
successful in luring high-paying customers that luxury fashion brands such as Gucci,
Burberry and Louis Vuitton have overhauled their own practices to send new fashions
to stores more frequently. “They’re a fantastic case study in terms of how they manage to
get product to their stores so fast,” Stacey Cartwright, chief financial officer of Burberry
Group PLC, says of Zara. “We are mindful of their techniques.”
In recent years, competitors across the globe have adopted Zara’s methods. Italy’s
Benetton Group SpA now replenishes stores up to once a week. Los Angeles-based
Forever 21 Inc. and Japanese apparel giant Fast Retailing Co., owner of the Uniqlo
chain, can get new looks to their stores within six weeks. Even outdoor clothing
maker Patagonia Inc. has doubled the number of new styles it offers every year. As the
popularity of cheap-and-chic chains has zoomed, Zara’s rivals Hennes & Mauritz AB of
Sweden and Mango of Spain have also become fixtures on U.S. shopping streets.
In addition to Zara, which makes up 60 percent of its busi-ness, Inditex owns seven
smaller store brands, including the more upscale Massimo Dutti and the youth-oriented
Bershka. In the last 12 months Inditex added 560 stores, including entering new
markets in Croatia, Colombia, Guatemala, and Oman, to reach 3,691 stores in 68
countries. It plans expansion of a similar scope over the next year. The first Zara store
opened in 1975 in La Coruña, a port town near Arteixo in a remote corner of northern
Spain. Its two key traits were an eye for customer tastes and a production process
that started with the final price and worked backward to the most-efficient production. In
the mid-1980s, local business-school professor José
Maria Castellano, a technophile, joined Inditex as right-hand man to founder Amancio
Ortega Gaona, and the company became a world-class logistical outfit, peddling “fast
fashion.” The first foreign store, in Portugal, opened in 1989, followed by New York. In
2001, Mr. Ortega took Inditex public and its stores are now on prime shopping streets
around the world. Stores are stocked with new designs twice a week. Collections are small
and often sell out, creating an air of exclusivity and cut-ting down on the need for
markdowns. The company ships clothes straight from the factory to stores. Unlike
competitors who manu-facture most of their wares in Asia, Inditex makes two-thirds of its
goods in Spain and nearby countries such as Portugal, Morocco and Turkey. The
retailer says the higher labor costs are offset by the flexibility of having production close
to its warehouses and distribution centers, which are all in Spain.
At “the Cube,” as employees call their futuristic-looking headquarters outside La
Coruña, sales managers sit at a long row of computers, monitoring sales at every
store around the world. When a garment sells well—or flops—they quickly tell designers
sitting nearby to whip up fresh designs. In the base-ment, stylists decide store layouts
and window displays. One room is built like a shopping street, its walls lined with lit and
decorated store windows that dictate how storefronts will look from New York’s Fifth
Avenue to London’s Regent Street. Every two weeks, new decorations are photographed
and e-mailed to stores to replicate.
To speed up new store openings, Mr. Isla needed to cut start-up costs. Inditex now avoids
store openings in slow months such as August. In the past, stores opened year-round,
accruing costs from the first day even if sales took longer to build. Mr. Isla’s goal is
for Inditex is to reverse a trend of costs growing faster than sales. It met that target in the
first half ended July 31, 2007, when costs grew 16 percent over the same period the
previous year, while sales increased 19 percent.
In another move to cut costs, Mr. Isla installed software in store computers to
schedule staff based on sales volume at differ-ent times. As a result, more salespeople
work at peak times such as lunchtime or the early evening. Inditex says the more flexible
schedules shaved 2 percent off the hours staff work. Alarm tags are now attached to
garments at the factories. In the past, at a big Zara location such as the four-floor store
on Madrid’s Alberto Aguilera shopping street, 10 people spent an average of 12 hours a
week putting on the tags. Now, Inditex estimates, those sales - people spend 3 percent
more time serving customers. “In the past, a shipment would come in the morning, and
the staff wouldn’t have it unpacked till noon. They were just giving away three hours of
prime selling time,” Mr. Isla says.
Shipping papers now label the newest collections “NEWC.” Those pieces are often
rushed to the shop floor on plastic shipping hangers and only later switched to Zara’s
customary light wood hangers. Zara regulars know to look for the black plastic hangers
with the latest looks, says Dilip Patel, U.K. commercial director for Inditex. Store
managers also use new hand-held computers that show how garments rank by sales, so
clerks can re-order best-sellers in less than an hour—a process that previously took about
three hours. These orders arrive, together with new pieces, two days later.
Also, each of the company’s various store brands shipped merchandise separately in
the past, concerned that mixing even behind the scenes could dilute their images.
Combining the brands into larger volumes has allowed Mr. Isla to launch twice-weekly
air shipments with Air France Cargo–KLM Cargo. Planes from Zaragoza, Spain, land in
Bahrain with goods for Inditex stores in the Middle East, fly on to Asia, and return to
Spain with raw materials and half-finished clothes. The company also started new
shipments with Emirates Airline.
Despite Mr. Isla’s efficiency gains, some experts caution that Zara faces challenges it is not
addressing. Keeping a large amount of production close to home, some warn, loses its
benefits when a growing number of stores are far away. “The efficiency of the supply chain
is coming under more pressure the farther abroad they go,” says Nirmalya Kumar, a
professor at London Business School.
For now, the company makes up for some of the cost by charging more for goods sold
overseas. In the U.S., for instance, Zara clothes cost up to 40 percent more than they
do in Spain. However, that could lead to an inconsistent brand image, a risky strategy in a
globalizing world, some critics warn. Mr. Isla says that when he joined the company, he
considered a logistics center in Asia, where the company produces around a third of its
goods, but decided it would only make sense if Zara had more stores in the region. He
says the group’s current logistics capacity will suffice until 2013.
CIRCA 2009
Inditex SA, Europe’s biggest fashion retailer by revenue, said Wednesday it plans a
major push online for its flagship Zara-brand, as it reported a 7.6 percent decline in net
profit for the fiscal first half.
Inditex, which also owns the Massimo Dutti, Pull and Bear, and Bershka brands, is known
for savvy use of information technology to tightly control production and inventories. It
collects data from its 4,430 stores in 73 countries to detect trends and tweaks prod-ucts
based on consumer tastes.
Compared with its main competitor, Sweden’s Hennes & Mauritz AB, however, Inditex
is a bit of a latecomer to the Internet. It started operating an online store for
furnishing brand Zara Home in 2007, but had so far shied away from the Web for Zara
clothing because of the complexity of managing and selling its fast-changing collections
online. So it caught many by surprise when it said Wednesday that it will launch
online sales next year for Zara’s Autumn/Winter 2010 collec-tion. “There had been
some concern that Inditex was falling behind competitors on e-commerce,” said Anne
Critchlow, an analyst at Socié
Initially, the company plans to launch the online store www.zara.com in Spain, France,
Germany, Italy, the U.K. and Portugal. Later, it will roll it out in all of Zara’s remaining
markets. In the medium term, Inditex may also launch its other six formats online, said
Chief Executive Pablo Isla. “The Internet is becoming a more and more relevant channel,
so it would be logical to continue expanding online with the other formats,” he said.
Neither H&M nor Inditex disclose what proportion of sales comes from their online
outfits. U.S. rival Gap Inc. generated about 8 percent of its Gap-branded sales in the U.S. on
the Web.
For the first half ended July 31, Inditex’s net profit dropped to 375 million ($550.4 million)
from 406 million a year earlier, while sales were up 6.6 percent at 4.86 billion. Sales
in stores open at least a year, however, shrank by an annual 2 percent in the fiscal first
half, compared with a decline of .7 percent in second half, and operating costs grew
8 percent as Inditex continued to expand its empire. The retailer opened 166 new stores
in the first half, down from 249 a year earlier. Inditex’s gross margin fell to 55.3 percent of
sales from 56.4 percent a year earlier. Analysts attributed the decline to a stronger
dollar, which is making it more costly to source materials, and pricing pressures in the
company’s main market, Spain.
The retailer gave a resilient trading outlook, saying sales in the first weeks of its
fiscal third quarter were up 9 percent when stripping out currency fluctuation, the same
growth rate as in the first half. Inditex’s much smaller U.K. rival, Next PLC, which
launched online sales in 1998, meanwhile, posted a 6.9 percent increase in first-half net
profit. Cost savings helped push net profit up to £131.8 million ($217.5 million) from
£123.3 million a year earlier, as revenue inched up to £1.51 billion from £1.5 billion.
Next, which like Inditex sells clothes and home wares, warned, however, that like-for-
like retail sales are likely to decline between 3.5 percent and 6.5 percent in the
second half. At Directory, its catalogue and online-shopping business, which generates
about 40 percent of operating profit, Next said it expects sales to rise by up to 2
percent. The retailer never-theless raised its full-year forecast, saying it now expects
to deliver pretax profit “close” to last year’s £429 million, subject to its sales performance
in the fourth quarter, which includes Christmas.
CIRCA 2010
Spanish fashion retailer Inditex SA launched its Zara online store in the United States in
the fall of 2011, seeking to widen its clientele beyond the big cities where it currently
operates, chief executive Pablo Isla said. Early indications showed the online launch
may have traction in the U.S. market. A Zara application for Apple Inc.’s cell phone the
iPhone has been downloaded by more prospective clients in the U.S. than in any other
market, Isla said.
Speaking to Dow Jones Newswires after the presentation of Inditex’s 2009 results, Isla
said that more than a million iPhone users have downloaded the App since it was
first released in December. “It’s a market where Internet sales are very important, and it’s
a way of accessing all those clients that are interested in Zara,” said Isla. The App allows
shoppers to check out what’s new in the Zara collection, and to find the nearest shop.
Inditex, based in La Coruna, northwestern Spain, last year soared past Gap Inc. to
become the most-selling fashion retailer in the world, with more than 4,600 stores. Zara,
which is present in 76 countries, will roll out its online store first later this year in six
European countries, and then progressively add the remaining countries where Zara
operates. Inditex entered the United States early, in 1994, but has expanded rather
slowly, focusing store openings in large cities like New York, Miami and Los Angeles. It
currently has 48 stores there. Isla said Inditex plans to grow “selectively” there in the
coming three years.“We have to prioritize at every step, and ours are twofold: Growing
in Europe and in Asia,” Isla said. Inditex is opening almost all of its new stores
outside its Spanish home market, which currently accounts for 31.8 percent of group
sales. By 2013, Inditex expects the weight of Spain to drop to 20 percent of total sales,
while Europe, excluding Spain, is expected to rise to 50 percent and Asia, 20 percent.
The remaining 10 percent will come from the Americas.
