How Zara became the world's biggest fashion retailer - Telegraph Retail and Consumer How Zara became the world's biggest fashion retailer A rare insight into the story and business model behind Inditex, the owner of Zara, and its founder Amancio Ortega, the third richest man in the world Staff review items from the latest range in the main design studio at Inditex HQ Photo: INDITEX By Graham Ruddick 9:14AM BST 20 Oct 2014 A digital mirror that allows you to try on clothes without actually taking them off the shelf sits on one side of the room, next to it is a self-service till where shoppers can pay for their clothing and remove the security tag without a shop assistant. This is the future of retail in front of your eyes. They stand in a room full of new technology at a large industrial complex in Arteixo, a small town in northern Spain. From the outside, the industrial estate does not appear that different to the standard collection of offices, warehouse and factories typical in the UK. However, it is home to the biggest fashion retailer in the world, a company that has reset the boundaries for what shoppers expect from a high street clothing store.

This is a rare glimpse into the world of Inditex, the owner of Zara – a company that does not advertise, still manufactures products in Europe and relies heavily on its store managers. Inditex is notoriously guarded and private, a legacy of its founder, Amancio Ortega, who was born in 1936 in northern Spain into humble origins and is today the third richest man in the world. Ortega and his business partner Rosalia Mera opened their first store in the city of A Coruna, close to Arteixo, in 1975. They wanted to call the shop Zorba, after their favourite film, Zorba the Greek. However, a bar further down the street had adopted the same name, so Ortega and Mera were forced to adapt. Given that the Zorba name was already on the store, they tried to think of a name that would still use most of the letters. They settled on Zara, a brand now present in every corner of the globe.

Related Articles Zara owner posts slowest profit growth in five years 19 Mar 2014 This flexibility and efficiency has remained at the heart of Inditex, the company built from Zara that now runs 6,500 shops in 88 different countries and includes seven other brands, including Bershka, Pull & Bear, and Massimo Dutti. The business model built by Ortega is unique. Zara stores around the world receive deliveries twice a week and products designed at the headquarters in Arteixo reach stores three weeks later. This is a staggering pace, helped by the fact that between 51pc and 55pc of clothing is manufactured in what the company describes as “proximity” markets, Spain, Portugal, Turkey and Morocco, instead of Asia. This model is regularly described as “fast fashion”, but Pablo Isla, chief executive and chairman, insists Inditex is “much more” than that. “It is too narrow for everything that is Inditex,” he explains. “You see the stores and you can’t imagine what is behind them.” If there is a secret to Inditex’s success it is the connection between stores, the in-house designers, and its factories.

Twice a week, a store manager will send an order to HQ. This is based on the sales data for the store but also anecdotal evidence from shoppers about what they like and don’t like. The commercial team will then compile the order, adding in new products and balancing out demand with other stores, before sending it to Inditex’s manufacturing hub. Within two days, the order has reached the store. At the same time, the commercial team is a liaising with the in-house designers, who they sit next to in the offices at Inditex HQ. When sales trends are identified – either from evidence in stores or the catwalk – the commercial team will work with the designers to develop new products to meet the trends. New fashions are then produced in relatively small batches, so flops can be disregarded after their first appearance and hits can be followed quickly by similar incarnations. The commercial and design teams are vast – covering a large proportion of the 1.7m sq ft of offices at Inditex HQ. The result of this structure is that the product range in Zara stores evolves rapidly.

Rather than relying on one product range per season – like Marks & Spencer will for autumn and winter – the retailer will enjoy four or five waves of new products after the initial seasonal launch. A mock high street of Zara stores, built within the headquarters, allows store managers and the commercial team to examine the new ranges. The influence of the store managers means they are paid more than the average in the industry and can earn 100pc of their salary in bonuses for hitting sales targets. “We are never losing the human touch,” Isla says of their power. “They feel like the owner of the store.” Every single item of clothing that Zara sells comes through Spain, even if it has been made in China and will ultimately be delivered to a Chinese store. At the vast Arteixo base, home to 6,000 staff from 30 countries, a tunnel network carries a carousel that moves clothing from the on-site factories – which themselves account for 5pc of Zara’s products – to the vast distribution centre. Inside the distribution centre, clothes move along the carousel until they reach their allocated box.

This box, earmarked for an individual store, will be packed with different products and reach its destination within 36 to 48 hours. The flexibility and speed of Inditex has helped the fashion retailer to expand overseas. If clothing is not selling in a particular store, it can quickly adapt. However, Isla says that fashion trends are becoming “more and more global”. The company is still expanding quickly. In the last few years, like-for-like sales have grown by 17pc and it has opened 11m sq ft of new shop space. Every year, it is opening stores in more than sixty countries. Isla grow to expand the company’s shop space by eight to 10pc every year for the next three to five years. This includes in the UK, where Inditex has 99 stores and which Isla describes as a “very good environment to do business”. But it also includes China, where Inditex has 450 shops. At the present rate of growth, China could become Inditex’s biggest market ahead of Spain within a few years. “It could be the case, why not,” Isla says.

This highlights how far Inditex has come from its first store in A Coruna, which still exists on a street corner next door to a dentist. However, the company’s methods have remained the same. This is encapsulated by Ortega himself, who still owns roughly 60pc of Inditex. At 78 he has stepped into a non-executive position on the board, but has lunch in the staff cafeteria every day. How Zara Grew Into the World’s Largest Fashion Retailer - The New York Times The New York Times Magazine |How Zara Grew Into the World’s Largest Fashion Retailer Search How Zara Grew Into the World’s Largest Fashion Retailer By SUZY HANSEN Continue reading the main story Photo Jackets from Zara’s fall 2012 collection await inspection at a factory in Arteixo, Spain. Credit Pedro Guimarães for The New York Times Galicia, on the Atlantic coast of northern Spain, is the homeland of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but is otherwise famous for being a place people try to leave.

For much of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of gallegos, as they are called, emigrated to countries as far away as Argentina to escape Galicia’s rural poverty. Today, however, even as Spain teeters on the edge of economic catastrophe, the Galician city La Coruña has attracted notice as the hometown of Amancio Ortega Gaona, the world’s third-richest man — he displaced Warren Buffett this year on the Bloomberg billionaire index — and the founder of a wildly successful fashion company, Inditex, more commonly known by its oldest and biggest brand, Zara. Ortega has never given an interview, according to his communications department, nor does he attend award ceremonies or parties. He rarely allows his picture to be taken. Pablo Isla, who took over the company when the 76-year-old Ortega stepped down as chairman last year, rarely gives interviews or waves to the camera, either.

In fact, the public face of Inditex is its soft-spoken communications director, Jesus Echevarría, who, as I discovered during a recent visit to the Inditex complex, is perhaps the only communications director on the planet who all but apologizes whenever he must answer questions about Inditex’s runaway success. The company’s outward modesty reflects its surroundings. La Coruña is a quiet place, typically European in its humdrum perfection: tidy highways and compact cars, clean taxis, no need to worry about tipping. The week I visited in late July, the conservative national government was threatening to implement a new austerity plan, and unemployment among people under 30 in Spain hit 50 percent, but the city seemed calm. Restaurants were busy, beaches packed. People dozed on La Coruña’s seaside boulders, while their dogs leapt in the water. The city is a little more than 300 miles from Madrid and 555 miles from Barcelona. It’s an odd location for an aggressive, global company like Inditex.

The campus (located in the industrial area of Arteixo, next door to La Coruña) consists of corporate headquarters for the entire company, as well as headquarters for Zara and Zara Home, two of Inditex’s eight brands. There are also factories and a distribution center where clothes are loaded onto trucks to be sent around the world. The factories are directly across from the corporate offices. The main building, where I waited for my hosts, somewhat resembled a hospital waiting room, with rows of plain boxy black chairs and little else. Apart from a single poster of a fashion model, nothing adorned its white walls. No flowers, no words, no ads, no fashion magazines, no style. The setting felt appropriate for the age of austerity, even if Inditex is one company in Spain that is actually thriving. Continue reading the main story Inditex is a pioneer among “fast fashion” companies, which essentially imitate the latest fashions and speed their cheaper versions into stores.

Every one of Inditex’s brands — Zara, Zara Home, Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Stradivarius, Pull & Bear and Uterqüe — follow the Zara template: trendy and decently made but inexpensive products sold in beautiful, high-end-looking stores. Zara’s prices are similar to those of the Gap: coats for $200, sweaters for $70, T-shirts for $30. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Inditex now makes 840 million garments a year and has around 5,900 stores in 85 countries, though that number is always changing because Inditex has in recent years opened more than a store a day, or about 500 stores a year. Right now there are around 4,400 stores in Europe, and almost 2,000 in Spain alone. Inditex’s main rivals are way behind.

Arcadia Group, which owns Topshop, among others, has about 3,000 stores worldwide; H&M, based in Sweden, has 2,500 (when you include its smaller lines of stores); and Mango, based in Spain, 2,400. In an Inditex conference room, Echevarría gave me a multimedia presentation about the company. The number of stores in different countries popped up on the screen — including 289 in China and 45 in the United States. Since the time of our meeting, in late July, Inditex has reached 350 stores in China and opened another in the United States. The company’s march appears to be as inexorable as the passage of the seasons. But can Inditex survive its own expansion? “When we open a market, everyone asks, ‘How many stores will you open?’ ” he said. “Honestly, I didn’t know. It depends on the customer and how big the demand is. We must have the dialogue with the customers and learn from them. It’s not us saying you must have this.

It’s you saying it.” The roots of Inditex go back to 1963, when Ortega, the son of a railway worker, started a business making housecoats and robes in La Coruña. In 1975, he opened his own store in town. He called it Zorba, after the 1964 film “Zorba the Greek.” Photo The complex in Arteixo, Spain, that houses Inditex headquarters and some Zara factories. Credit Pedro Guimarães for The New York Times “I don’t think they were thinking of making history, just that it was a nice name,” Echevarría said. “But apparently there was a bar that was called the same, Zorba, like two blocks away, and the owner of the bar came and said, ‘This is going to confuse things to have two Zorbas.’ They had already made the molds for the letters in the sign, so they just rearranged them to see what they could find. They found Zara.” The holding company Inditex was created in 1985.

Ortega wanted to maintain his own manufacturing business in La Coruña, so from the beginning his business model differed from the norm. A traditional ready-to-wear fashion company in the West sends the designs for its clothes to independent factories in countries like China and India, where the labor to make them is cheap. These clothes are then shipped back and stocked in stores in spring and fall, with smaller shipments throughout the year. But a brand at Inditex will make a fall collection, for example, and then ship only three or four dresses or shirts or jackets in each style to a store. There’s very little leftover stock, few extra-smalls or mediums hiding in the back. But store managers can request more if there’s demand. They also monitor customers’ reactions, on the basis of what they buy and don’t buy, and what they say to a sales clerk: “I like this scooped collar” or “I hate zippers at the ankles.” Inditex says its sales staff is trained to draw out these sorts of comments from their customers. Every day, store managers report this information to headquarters, where it is then transmitted to a vast team of in-house designers, who quickly develop new designs and send them to factories to be turned into clothes.

More than half of Inditex’s manufacturing takes place either in the factories it owns or within proximity to company headquarters, which is to say in Europe or Northern Africa. Inditex owns factories in Spain and outsources production to factories in Portugal, Morocco and Turkey — considered costly labor markets, typically. The rest of its clothes are produced in China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Brazil, among other countries. The trendiest items are made closest to home, however, so that the production process, from start to finish, takes only two to three weeks. Inditex’s higher labor costs are offset by greater flexibility — no extra inventory lying around — and on faster turnaround speed. Advertisement Continue reading the main story That means that if Inditex stores in London, Tokyo and São Paulo all have customers responding enthusiastically to, let’s say, sequined cranberry-colored hot pants, Inditex can deliver more of these, or a variation on hot pants, sequins or that cranberry color, to stores within three weeks. The company tries to keep the stock fresh; one promise its stores make is that you will always be buying something nearly unique. Merchandise moves incredibly quickly, even by fast-fashion standards.

All those thousands of Inditex stores receive deliveries of new clothes twice a week. In this way, says Masoud Golsorkhi, the editor of Tank, a London magazine about culture and fashion, Inditex has completely changed consumer behavior. “When you went to Gucci or Chanel in October, you knew the chances were good that clothes would still be there in February,” he says. “With Zara, you know that if you don’t buy it, right then and there, within 11 days the entire stock will change. You buy it now or never. And because the prices are so low, you buy it now.” Inditex owes none of its success to advertising. That’s because Inditex doesn’t advertise. It hardly even has a marketing department, and it doesn’t engage in flashy campaigns, as its competitors do, teaming up with fashion designers like Stella McCartney, Karl Lagerfeld, Martin Margiela and Marni. Zara’s designers are completely anonymous; some would say this is because they are copiers rather than designers. The marketing Inditex does do is all about real estate. The company invests heavily in the beauty, historical appeal and location of its shops.

Photo Zara’s palette of thread at a factory in Spain. Credit Pedro Guimarães for The New York Times “The high street is really divided according to brand value,” says Golsorkhi, who is also a consultant for fashion brands. “Prada wants to be next to Gucci, Gucci wants to be next to Prada. The retail strategy for luxury brands is to try to keep as far away from the likes of Zara. Zara’s strategy is to get as close to them as possible.” For example, in Istanbul, where I live, Zara, Uterqüe and Massimo Dutti can all be found on Tesvikiye Caddesi, a tony and heavily trafficked avenue. They are one street away from Cartier and Hermès and Chanel. But Inditex is even more ambitious than that when it comes to finding valuable real estate. In 2003, Inditex built a Zara in the San Antonio el Real, an 18th-century convent in Salamanca, and in a historic cinema in Elche (also in Spain). The company likes special buildings.

Last year, it paid $324 million to buy space at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York, according to the company, a building best known for being the most expensive ever sold in Manhattan. “In New York, they did one page saying they were opening — in The New York Times,” Echevarría said. “But it’s not a campaign; it’s an announcement; it’s information. The company does not talk about itself. The idea was that the client was to talk about the company. It was not to say how good it could be. The customer would say that if it was deserved.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story In the last five years, Inditex’s overall sales have grown to 13.8 billion euros a year from 9.4 billion euros. Profit has risen to almost 2 billion euros a year. The company expanded to 110,000 employees in 2011, from around 80,000 in 2007. In short, while Spain has been suffering through real estate and debt crises (following the global financial crisis), Inditex has prospered.

Echevarría said that is because the customer is always determining production — not the other way around. Every piece of clothing the company makes has, in a way, been requested. A business model that is so closely attuned to the customer does not share the cycle of a financial crisis. Fast fashion has also become more hip in recent years; even celebrities like Kate Middleton have been photographed wearing Zara. “It’s generally the way the retail market is going — it’s not just Zara,” says Isabel Cavill, a senior analyst with Planet Retail , a consulting firm based in London. “There’s a bit of cachet in picking up something that looks like £500 for £50.” If people compliment your nice dress, you can proudly boast that you got it for a steal. Increasingly, H&M and Mango have raced to keep up with Zara. But the Inditex effect is not confined to cheap, fast fashion. It has forced — or inspired, depending on how you look at it — people to spend their money in a different manner. In Zara, every purchase is an impulse buy; there’s no longer any saving up for that gorgeous leather jacket in the window.

You are buying clothes not because you love them, but because, at $50, those hot pants are as cheap as Sunday brunch for two — and likely to be gone in a matter of days. It’s a way of consumption that has conditioned buyers to expect this up-to-the-minute trendiness and variety in higher-end labels as well. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy “They broke up a century-old biannual cycle of fashion,” Golsorkhi says. “Now, pretty much half of the high-end fashion companies” — Prada and Louis Vuitton, for example — “make four to six collections instead of two each year. That’s absolutely because of Zara.” The Inditex brands exist in a dizzying fashion time frame, where the latest trend seems to be wilting on a woman a few hours after she buys into it.

The public relations person who gave me the rest of my tour of the Inditex premises — and requested not to be named, presumably in accordance with Inditex’s modesty rules — wore sleek black pants with zippered ankles, a loose yellow blouse and a black blazer with an upside-down V cut out of the back. She looked sharp and shiny as a penknife. I wore a dress that was at least six years old, which basically means I showed up for my fast-fashion tour in a poodle skirt. The Zara headquarters is a huge airplane-hangar-size open space, with regional sales managers sitting at a line of desks running down the middle, designers on either side of them. The managers field calls from China or Chile to learn what’s selling, then they meet with the designers and decide whether there’s a trend. In this way, Inditex takes the fashion pulse of the world. “The manager will say, ‘My customers are asking for red trousers,’ and if it’s the same demand in Istanbul, New York and Tokyo, that means it’s a global trend, so they know to produce more red pants,” the P.R. person said. Photo Workers collect and separate cloth pieces that were trimmed by an automated machine.

Credit Pedro Guimarães for The New York Times I remarked that it must be interesting to see what is fashionable in Turkey but not in New York and vice versa. I imagined that different nationalities still had different tastes, at least in terms of fashion. But I was wrong. “Actually, the customer is more or less the same in New York and Istanbul,” she said. “There are differences, like Brazilian girls like more brilliant colors, whereas in Paris they use more black. But in general when you find a fashion trend, it’s global.” Earlier, Echevarría told me that neighborhoods share trends more than countries do. For example, the store on Fifth Avenue in Midtown New York “is more similar to the store in Ginza, Tokyo, which is an elegant area that’s also touristic,” he said. “And SoHo is closer to Shibuya, which is very trendy and young. Brooklyn now is a wildly trendy place to go, while Midtown — well, no New Yorker is actually shopping on Fifth Avenue now.” The buyers there are suburban tourists, he meant.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story I recalled how I returned to my hipsterish Istanbul neighborhood after a trip to Brooklyn not long ago and discovered that the Turks were all also wearing those huge scarves wrapped around their necks eight times. I was surprised by how fast a style traveled across the globe, because I don’t see many Turks reading fashion magazines. But it isn’t just magazines that tell us what to wear. People like Ortega do. Or, more accurate, we tell each other, through the conduit of his Inditex stores and others like them. On my tour, I also visited the mock Zara and Zara Home stores that were set up inside the headquarters. The fall collection, about to be introduced around the world, sat in the storefront. There were lots of studs in brassy gold, military colors, skulls, white lace shirts and animal prints that, the spokeswoman said, “have been trendy since last season and will continue a little bit, but just until Christmas.” A trend can last a half a year, but some are finished in a month. “They thought that animal prints would finish by summer, but it kept going,” she said. “In the beginning of this season we had fluorescent colors.

It was a trend in April and May, and it was very successful and then that was it.” We stopped in at Zara Home, which the representative said operated just like the clothing stores. (Last month, the company introduced Zarahome.com in the United States, as well as Massimo Dutti, a higher-end clothing brand.) I was dubious that people throw away and replenish dishes and rugs the way they do miniskirts, but she assured me they do, especially when it was trendy. (I noticed skull-patterned stuff again.) Then we went to Zara Kids. It occurred to me that the avalanche of inexpensive clothing would likely put an end to the custom of hand-me-down baby clothes. Why deal with someone else’s stains when you can buy new (and on-trend) for $25? “The trends for kids are the same for adults,” the spokeswoman said. I looked at a jacket. “So I guess these Chanel-looking boxy things are in style for everyone.” She nodded. “Skulls for kids, too, huh?” Inditex denies that it copies other designers.

Yet in The New York Times last March, Alexandra Jacobs described a visit to the new Zara store on Fifth Avenue in New York, where she was reminded of Prada, Alexander Wang, Balmain and many other high-end brands. Christian Louboutin took Inditex to court for selling the company’s signature red-soled shoes but lost, mainly because Inditex takes care to change its designs just enough to evade copyright laws. Video Spain’s Inditex Spins Gold The parent company of Zara has reinvented fashion production and distribution, becoming the world’s largest and, some say, trendiest retailer. By Channon Hodge on Publish Date November 9, 2012. . Watch in Times Video » embed “To the luxury brands, they are copycats, they are like mushrooms feeding off the main body of fashion,” Golsorkhi says. “I was of the same mind myself, but I have grown out of that because I realize that the fashion companies also copy each other. In the end, no one’s original.” H&M also delivers frequent shipments of new items and imitates the latest trends. But even H&M offers original collections by famous fashion designers. Inditex has discovered it doesn’t need to.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story “They have done process innovation very well,” says Nelson Fraiman, a professor at Columbia Business School who has studied the Inditex model. “Product innovation? No. But tell me one Chinese company that has done product innovation very well. They are brilliant at process. I think you should give a cheer for process innovation.” Expansion, however, poses a threat to Zara’s process by putting stores far from the factories and logistics center in Europe. Echevarría said the company very carefully selects the cities where it opens new stores. Remember the slide presentation showing only 45 stores in the United States compared with hundreds in other countries? There are reasons for that. Foreign brands have a long history of failing miserably here. “The United States is a graveyard of European retailers,” says José Luis Nueno, a professor of marketing at I.E.S.E. Business School in Madrid. “Everyone who has gone there has struggled. Laura Ashley has shut down and even Benetton is declining. The U.S. is really complex because it’s about putting stores in shopping malls in the middle of nowhere. Fashionistas live on the East and West coasts. Then everyone else dresses in the Gap and Walmart and T. J.

Maxx. If you really wanted to cover the U.S., you would have to open 300 stores, and they would have to focus all their energy to make it work.” There’s also the delicate matter of sizing. “Would you expand in the United States?” Fraiman asks. “Zara to me is a European store for European style; it’s very fashion forward. And what is the problem in America? They don’t fit in the clothes. So why do it? Having to make larger sizes makes production so much more complex.” Expanding in China, however, will make production more complex and also require heavy investment. The company plans to open more than 400 stores there this year. “Even opening three stores a week is very aggressive,” Fraiman says. “Their factories in La Coruña have a finite capacity to respond quickly. You open more and more stores, and you don’t have flexibility of the last-minute response.

Once they have a big thrust in China, then what happens is that they will have to take the whole model” — the processing of customer reactions, the quick-turnaround design teams, the logistics platform — “and replicate it in China.” But the bigger Inditex gets, he says, the more it will lose control over quality and efficiency. Still, Asia remains central to Inditex’s plans, and the prospect of more than a billion Chinese consuming clothes at the fast-fashion clip worries some critics of the industry model. According to Elizabeth Cline, the author of “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion,” Americans buy 20 billion garments a year, an average of 64 garments a person. When the Chinese are consuming at the same rate, that’s more than 80 billion garments a year. Golsorkhi says that fast fashion hasn’t changed the amount of labor needed to make clothes or the waste created by their production. Your new fluorescent miniskirt might only cost $40, but Bangladeshi workers still work for low pay in poor conditions to make it.

Inditex says it works with unions and other organizations “to have the most respectful supply chain” and audits all of its partners every year, but like most major fashion companies that outsource the manufacturing of their clothes, it has received its share of complaints about factory conditions. “The reality is: a T-shirt is a T-shirt is a T-shirt,” Golsorkhi says. “It costs the planet the same thing whether you have paid £200 for it or £1 for it. It does the same amount of damage. A T-shirt is equivalent to 700 gallons of water, gallons of chemical waste, so much human labor. But it used to be that we could do with three T-shirts a year. Now we need 30. Sometimes it’s actually cheaper to throw away clothes than to wash them. That has got to be wrong.” It also may not be good for business in the long run. “Eventually, there aren’t going to be resources to sustain fast fashion, so to me it seems to be a very vulnerable business model,” says Alex McIntosh, the business and research manager at the London College of Fashion’s Center for Sustainable Fashion .

“Production costs will also get more expensive, and they won’t be able to keep this up. Value-based companies don’t have margins to absorb that additional cost. And then they will need to convince customers to spend more for clothes again.” At the end of my tour, I went to one of the Inditex factories. There were about 100 workers, I was told; huge machines do much of the work. Hundreds of bright red three-quarter-length coats were hanging throughout the building, almost ready to be shipped. A line of women stood at ironing boards, smoothing out the wool-blend, looking for defects and, the spokeswoman told me with emphasis, attaching security tags. Inditex had discovered that if that task was left to the employees in the stores, it would take an extra few intolerable hours to get that trendy red coat from Galicia into your closet. Correction: November 25, 2012 An article on Nov. 11 about the Spanish clothing chain Zara and its parent company Inditex misspelled the surname of Inditex’s communications director. He is Jesus Echevarría, not Echeverría.

Zara Leads In Fast Fashion Zara Leads In Fast Fashion {{article.article.images.featured.caption}} Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Full Bio The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Loading ... Loading ... This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe Zara, the major division of the Spanish retailer Inditex continues to change retailing through its rapid, vertically integrated supply chain. Zara has become the leader in rapid development of fast changing fashions. In fiscal 2014, (ended January 31, 2015) the company had sales of $19.7 Billion compared to H&M with $20.2 Billion, Fast Retailing (Uniqlo) $16.6 Billion, Gap $16.4 Billion, Primark $7.5 Billion, Abercrombie & Fitch $3.7 Billion, Mango $2.1 Billion. In the past year Inditex sales increased 8%, far stronger than its competitors. The secret of fast fashion retailing is the ability to generate quick turnover of merchandise in the stores.

New fashion designs are shipped at a rapid rate, there are few basics and reorders are rare. The customer knows that she should buy an item she likes when she sees it. The Inditex Group prides itself to deliver quality merchandise in as little as three weeks from its own factories. Designers develop new models daily – sometimes three or four a day – which are then reviewed and are put into production. It is no wonder that versions of new designs by fashion designers in Paris are in Zara stores within a very short time of appearing on the runway. Inditex is headquartered in La Coruna, Spain. However, several divisions have their headquarters in the Barcelona region. The company was started in 1963 by Armancio Ortega (78), who holds about 60% of the stock and is today Spain’s richest man. He is still a driving force in the company, although in 2008 he has given Pablo Isla (51) the mandate to run the company day to day. He is today the chairman and CEO of the company.

Ortega’s daughter Marta (31), who has joined Inditex, after studying marketing, could possibly be the successor to Isla, keeping the family fortune under her control. Below is a list the various divisions of Inditex. All divisions are showing strong earnings and have the potential for additional growth. In addition all divisions have a strong on-line platform. The surprise is that despite the wide global distribution of 6,683 stores in 88 countries there are only 55 stores in the United States – 53 Zara stores and 2 Massimo Dutti stores. I suspect there will be an intensification of store expansion in the United States including Zara Kids, Zara Home and one of the other labels such as Bershka. I expect that Massimo Dutti with its better fashion look will soon have more stores in some of our better shopping areas. Zara – Fast Fashion for women, men, children. 1,923 stores in 88 countries. 2014 sales $12.6 Billion with 53 stores in the United States.

EBIT contribution $2.314 Million which is an EBIT Margin of 18% and is 66% of total company profits. (Founded 1975) Zara Kids – This is a new division which has 162 stores in four countries but is still integrated in the Zara organization. No separate data is available. (Recently founded) Pull&Bear – Casual wear – Key target customers are women and men 14 to 28 years old.- 898 stores - 2014 sales $2.1 Billion. No stores in the United States. EBIT contribution $205 Million which is an EBIT margin of 15% and is 6% of total profits. (Founded 1991) Barcelona Zara: The Fashion Retailer | ShBarcelona Barcelona Zara: The Fashion Retailer 29/03/2014 Written by James Throughout the world top fashion retailers have always clamored to be the number one company in the spotlight through glitzy advertising campaigns and always showing their most forward thinking designs on runways around the world.

One company stood apart from the rest in its ideas and business acumen and has become the largest fashion retailer on the planet without spending money on advertising, an incredible achievement. The Barcelona Zara stores are hailed by most Zara shoppers as the best in the world for their selection and availability of product. When looking for great fashion, remember to come to Barcelona and stay in a vacation rental to maximize your shopping time. Early Beginnings The success of Zara traces its beginnings back to 1963 with the first store opening in 1975, first named Zorba, but changed after another local bar had brought it to their attention. Founder, Amancio Ortega Gaona, now the third richest man in the world set out making house coats and robes. Zara and a host of other brand names are now under the umbrella of Inditex, a global holding company created in 1985. From these humble beginnings grew a brand that now boasts over 5900 retail outlets, in 85 countries with reported sales over US$20 billion annually. Fast Fashion The difference between Zara and many other fashion companies is their ability to produce and market fashion trends as soon as they arise.

Most of these fashion trendy clothing is produced directly in Spain at their headquarter production facility. These trends are monitored by production managers that reach out to all their stores across the globe and monitor what current customers are asking for. This is then relayed in a meeting across all managers to recognize global trends which they then rush to waiting teams of designers for immediate design and production. This is one of the reasons why, Zara can have trends to market in as little as two weeks whereas the industry standard is almost 8 weeks. Surprisingly in an industry where most reduction is completed in China or India where labor is cheap, Inditex produces more than 50% of its clothing near its headquarters in Spain and North Africa. It has been able to keep its profit margins in line with industry standards by being the first to market as well as maintaining a close eye on inventory levels as production is closer to the markets where they are sold. Barcelona Zara Savings A little kept secret is that Zara stores in Barcelona have much better selections than most other stores across Europe and even in the US, as they are closer to the production facilities.

Another aspect that many vacationing shoppers or those looking to rent an apartment in Barcelona should be aware of is that the prices can be up to 40% less expensive than in other places. With great selection and amazing prices finding fast fashion in Barcelona Zara’s stores is easy. If you plan on immigrating to Spain and are looking for a great place to settle, not only will you find great long-term rentals in Barcelona, but great shopping deals on the best fashion produced by the largest fashion retailer in the world. Rate this post! Profile of Zara, the high-fashion chain | Fashion | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close Even for those who know everything there is to know about fashion, the name Amancio Ortega rings few bells. The fact that he is currently at number 25 on the Forbes billionaire list, with a $9.1bn fortune, has done nothing to increase his renown. That he is the richest man in Spain - and, after Bernard Arnault, head of luxury goods conglomerate LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy), the richest man in fashion - has not made the slightest dent in our collective interest.

This is, of course, exactly how the 65-year-old textile billionaire wants it to be. He's happy running his soaringly successful business from the Galician port of La Coruna, away from the political gossipmongering of Madrid and the style obsessions of Barcelona. But if he isn't the subject of discussion, his company is. Ortega is the founder and president of Inditex, the parent company for which Zara , the high-fashion chain currently rampaging down Britain's high streets, makes 78% of the profit. He has never given a media interview and only two photographs of him are available, identical but for the fact that he is smiling in one and scowling in the other. Many in the industry couldn't tell you where Zara has its headquarters (Arteixo-La Coruna is hardly fashion central, after all), though everyone knows the brand. There are no press offices outside Spain, and even the communications department in Arteixo does anything but. The company doesn't lend clothing samples for editorial fashion shoots. It does no advertising (marketing accounts for 0.4% of Zara's total spend).

What it has done is plug a gap in the market with a desirable product: high-fashion clothing for middle-class urban women. Detractors say that Zara simply rips off designers ("We spend a fortune researching and working up ideas, then Zara comes along and walks off with them for nothing," says one). But Jose Antonio Guerrero, a consultant who has worked for the company, says: "Zara doesn't copy too obviously. The results would be too rough if they did. But they do adapt and carry through principal ideas, yes." Yesterday, Zara HQ revealed that it had secured its first premises in Russia - the 44th country to get a taste of its cut-price chic. Two weeks ago, Zara's largest European store - a 3,000 sq m temple to consumption - opened on the corner of Oxford Street and Bond Street, its location rather conveniently summing up Zara's knack for offering high-style clothes at high-street prices. In typical Ortega fashion, until it opened on Friday morning, the building was completely concealed beneath hoardings with no indication of who was about to launch themselves into the Oxford Street melee. Rumours abounded.

By the time the store was ready, the Zara faithful had spread the word. Within minutes of the doors opening, the tills were ringing and shoppers leaving laden with the easily identifiable navy paper bags. Among the bewildering selection of clothes, I spotted a passable interpretation of a Christian Dior embroidered Afghan on the rails (£95), a Pradaesque brocade waistcoat (£45) and a black wool coat (£65) that was enticingly similar to something by superchic Italian label Costume National (£565). An assistant even pointed me in the direction of what he called "the Anna Sui collection", an up-to-the-minute assortment of patchwork, denim and boho chic. (Sui is a veteran New York designer who shows on the catwalk.) The speed at which Zara translates catwalk styles into high-street products is the key to its success. It can do this because it controls manufacturing more closely than any of its competitors - Gap, for example, or H&M - by producing 50% of its product in-house. Another 46% is farmed out in ready-cut pieces to workshops around the Iberian peninsula.

"It's both supplier and retailer," says Richard Hyman, chairman of retail analyst Verdict. "And that makes it incredibly fleet of foot." If a style doesn't sell well within a week, it is withdrawn from shops, further orders are cancelled and a new design is pursued. No model stays on the shop floor for more than four weeks, which encourages Zara zealots to make repeat visits. An average high-street store in Spain expects fans to visit three times a year. That goes up to 17 times for Zara. "The girls in the office know that new stock comes in on Tuesday and Thursday, and off they go," says Julian Vogel, joint managing director of fashion PR company Modus. "It's a guilt-free high." The high street holds no shame for the fashionista these days. Especially not when the product is this good. Current fashion favourite Matthew Williamson proudly announced he was dressed in H&M menswear during the latest fashion week; Dani Behr wears Zara on TV; supersophisticate designer Roland Mouret has seen his slinky tops reproduced by Morgan; and everyone under 30 knows Top Shop is the key to ultimate fashion fulfilment.

Susie Forbes, deputy editor of British Vogue, says: "My everyday Vogue life is spent in Zara: Zara jeans, a Marc Jacobs-type chiffon shirt and velvet paisley jacket. Seventy per cent of my wardrobe is from the store. My £70 pea coat is in its second year." Such adoration from the picky fashion set must be a source of at least a little astonishment for the self-made Ortega, son of a railway employee and a cleaner. He entered the textile industry as a runner for a Corunan shirtmaker. By 1963 he had accrued the handsome sum of 5,000 pesetas - £18 in today's money - and used it to set up his own small company making pyjamas and dressing gowns. In 1975, as he turned 40, he opened the first local Zara store. The brand spread slowly through Spain, and Ortega's ambition didn't become evident until 1989, when he opened first a store outside Spain (Oporto, Portugal), then outside the Iberian peninsula (Paris), then outside Europe (New York).

The company didn't reach London until 1998, but the name had. Susie Forbes says she queued outside the Regent Street store on its opening day. Ortega achieved megabucks status in May 2001 when the company launched itself on the Madrid Stock Exchange. Morgan Stanley, in charge of the IPO, refers to its "peerless track record". Ortega, who had retained a 61% interest in the business - then showing profits of around $240m - saw shares increase from their initial value of 14.7 by 22%. He was a billionaire, and celebrated by buying a Falcon 900 executive jet and a stake in Spanish football club Deportivo la Coruna. Not quite the same as splashing out £50 on a new Zara top for the weekend, but strangely enough, part of the same continuum. We gave two people £100 each to buy a whole outfit from Zara: here is what they came back with.

And Guardian fashion writer Laura Barton offers her verdict His The distinctly kaftan-esque top (£25), with its deep-cut neckline, gives a nod to Roberto Cavalli, the man we have to thank for David Beckham's splendid look at David Furnish's birthday party only last week. The sleeveless T-shirt (£9), meanwhile, will keep the cold off your chest. Cord is still big news this season, and these needle cord trousers (£35) are a dead ringer for those seen at the Dolce and Gabbana show. Long scarves are this winter's essential accessory, and Zara's version (£18) comes in nice manly, sludgey colours. Total: £87 HersThis wrap-over top (£25) is a nice example of an item which can go horribly wrong. Zara's version is in a heavy fabric which will hang well and looks a bit classier than most high-street versions. Cropped trousers have been everywhere this season, notably in the Nicole Farhi and Paula Ka collections. Zara's pair (£49) are nicely baggy, will look grand with a pair of knee-high boots, and avoid looking like the dreaded culottes.

Belts have been the hot accessory for a while now, and as we march towards 2003 the trend proves unrelenting. Zara's broad leather version (£9) will finish off this outfit perfectly. Total: £83 Zara - Wikifashion Zara 4 References About Zara ' is the flagship chain store of Inditex Group owned by Spanish tycoon Amancio Ortega , who also owns brands such as Massimo Dutti , Pull and Bear , Oysho , Uterqüe , Stradivarius and Bershka . The group is headquartered in A Coruña , Galicia , Spain , where the first Zara store opened in 1975. It is claimed that Zara needs just two weeks [1] to develop a new product and get it to stores, compared with a six-month industry average, and launches around 10,000 new designs each year. Zara has resisted the industry-wide trend towards transferring fast fashion production to low-cost countries. Perhaps its most unusual strategy was its policy of zero advertising; the company preferred to invest a percentage of revenues in opening new stores instead.

Zara was described by Louis Vuitton fashion director Daniel Piette as "possibly the most innovative and devastating retailer in the world." Zara has also been described as a "Spanish success story" by CNN . [2] News It has been confirmed that Zara will open store in South Africa and Australia in 2011. [3] It will also be launching online shopping in September 2010. Collections June 2010 Stores There are a total of 1770 Zara stores and 166 Kiddy's Class stores. Some Zara stores operate as Lefties stores instead of Zara, a brand for low-cost fashion. The number of Zara stores in each country (31/07/2013. Most of them are located in Europe. References 2014 Outlook: Zara's Fashion Supply-Chain Edge - Bloomberg @ManuBaigorri More stories by Manuel Baigorri Zara headquarters in Arteixo, Spain Photograph by Xurxo Lobato/Getty Images Arteixo is a small town in northwestern Spain near the Atlantic, surrounded by fishing villages. In its center, a glass building sits amid acres of green lawn.

It’s the headquarters of Zara, the company that introduced the idea of fast fashion some two decades ago, then developed a highly centralized and often studied—but rarely duplicated—design, manufacturing, and distribution system. The building is officially known as the Cube. Those who work there think of it as the brain. The Cube is central command for a fashion empire built on an unconventional idea: speed and responsiveness are more important than cost. Zara is renowned for its ability to deliver new clothes to stores quickly and in small batches. Twice a week, at precise times, store managers order clothes, and twice a week, on schedule, new garments arrive. To achieve this, Zara controls more of its manufacturing than do most retailers: About half its clothes are made in Spain or nearby countries. For Zara, its supply chain is its competitive advantage. Zara’s expanding global reach could finally put its Iberian Peninsula-based ecosystem to the test. Spain has always been its biggest market. But in 2013, China surpassed France to become its second-largest in terms of the number of stores (142). Expansion in China offers challenges for every retailer.

And it could put the Spanish clothier in a singular predicament, because Zara is a global company that doesn’t act locally. “The secret to their success has been centralization,” says Felipe Caro, an associate professor at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management and a business adviser to the company. “They can make decisions in a very coordinated manner.” Zara’s ability to control its inventory from Arteixo is a key piece of its business model. “As soon as they decide to localize, to have two brains, one in Spain and one in China, it will be a different Zara,” Caro says. Just outside the Cube is the company’s 5 million-square-foot main distribution center. The company produces about 450 million items a year for its 1,770 stores in 86 countries. Some 150 million garments pass through the center to be inspected and sorted, according to Zara, which declined to make senior executives available for interviews. Whether a shirt is made in Portugal or Morocco, in China or Bangladesh, it still goes to Spain before being shipped to a store. Beyond the distribution center are the 11 Zara-owned factories.

Every shirt, sweater, and dress made in them is sent directly to the distribution center via an automated underground monorail. There are 124 miles of track. Across the surrounding Galicia region are subcontractors, some of which have worked for the company since Amancio Ortega founded it in 1975. Now 77 and the world’s third-richest person, Ortega served as chairman of Inditex , the company he built around Zara, until 2011. Inditex, which includes seven other brands, has become the world’s largest clothing retailer. Last year its 6,009 stores had sales of almost €16 billion ($21.4 billion); Zara accounted for €10.5 billion of that. Inditex will open more than 400 stores in 2013—about 110 of them Zaras—according to the company. It’s expected to open at least that many in 2014. Ortega still keeps a desk at the front of the main room in the Cube, amid the designers, buyers, planners, and marketers.

There, information about what’s selling, and what isn’t, flows in from store managers around the world. This allows designers to make quick changes to garments, buyers to order more (but not too much more—exclusivity sells) of a certain coat, and planners to decide what items to cull from a store. Zara’s factories in Spain and those it uses in Portugal, Morocco, and Turkey produce its trendiest clothes, often riffs on the latest fashion trends. They account for about half of Zara’s inventory, according to the company. Its more basic T-shirts, sweaters, and the like are ordered on a traditional schedule, about six months in advance, from factories in Asia, where labor costs are often cheaper, then sent by ship to Spain. Zara executives have invested in high-tech equipment and extra capacity that allows their factories to accommodate sudden production increases or changes—something few Asian manufacturers would be able to do. At the beginning of a season, a typical retailer would have placed orders for at least 80 percent of the garments it will offer, according to a Harvard Business School case study on Zara. The chain selects only about 50 percent of its designs that far in advance.

Change doesn’t disrupt the system; it’s part of the system. Once new items have been inspected, sorted, tagged with prices, and hung on racks or folded, they’re packed overnight, loaded onto trucks, and taken directly to a store or the airport. The trucks and planes run on established schedules, delivering clothes to most stores within 48 hours. The most important business stories of the day. Get Bloomberg's daily newsletter. Zara owner’s online sales jump 42% to €553m | Business | The Guardian Retail industry Zara owner’s online sales jump 42% to €553m Spanish fashion retailer Inditex reports record internet sales for group, with turnover of €16.7bn, up from €15.9bn last year Zara launched a website on the Tmall platform in China last month because its current Chinese site is virtually invisible to Tmall users.

Photograph: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images Wednesday 19 November 2014 07.20 EST Last modified on Wednesday 19 November 2014 19.35 EST Close This article is 2 years old Online sales at the Spanish fashion retailer Inditex – the company behind Zara – have soared by 42% to a record €553m (£442m). While other chains in the fashion sector struggle, Inditex – which also owns Massimo Dutti, Pull & Bear and Stradivarius – appears to be recession-proof, even in Spain where consumer spending has slumped in recent years. The company reported a turnover of €16.7bn, up from €15.9bn last year. Although online sales only account for 3% of overall sales, the internet now represents 20% of the company’s growth over the past year. Although the company does not provide investors with separate results for online sales, the information has been obtained from the annual reports filed by its online subsidiaries Fashion Retail and ITX Fashion, which have their headquarters in Spain and Ireland.

Inditex began its online retail presence in 2007 with a website for Zara Home before setting up Fashion Retail in 2011 when all of its brands were made available on the internet. It currently has an online operation in 27 countries. Last month the group surprised the industry by appointing 31-year-old María Fanjul as head of its entire online operation. Fanjul was previously chief executive at entradas.com, Spain’s largest online ticketing agency. Last month, Inditex launched its Zara website in China on the Tmall platform, a subsidiary of Alibaba, China’s leading e-commerce group. Other retailers on Tmall include Burberry, Calvin Klein and Gap. Although it already had a Zara website in China, which accounts for around 8% of sales, the site was virtually invisible to Tmall users. The secrets of Zara's success - Telegraph Latest Beauty News The secrets of Zara's success Classy, well-tailored, cheap - and ethical. Can the world's favourite clothing store, Zara, do no wrong, asks Marion Hume.

BY Marion Hume | 22 June 2011 Blazer, £49.99, vest, £19.99 and shorts £39.99; zara.com. Silk shirt, £39.99, leather miniskirt, £69.99; zara.com. Linen T-shirt, £17.99, skirt, £39.99 and glitter court shoes, £69.99; zara.com. Shall we count the ways we love Zara? How about some numbers to start: a company founded on just €30 euros is now worth an estimated €32 billion. Last week, its parent company Inditex, of which Zara represents the lion's share (over 60 per cent), declared an 11 per cent rise for the first quarter to €2.96 billion. Related articles SHOP: best buys from Zara Translated, Zara was coining it while other retailers spent January to March moaning about recession and rising production costs.

Next quarter's financials look likely to be even more spectacular, if the response to a certain £49.95 blue dress worn by the Duchess of Cambridge after her wedding in April is anything to go by. So why do those as diverse as Catherine and the business brains at Harvard, which commissioned a study on the brand recently, as well as the rest of us, love Zara? Here's a top 10. 1. The designs work in normal life Walk into Zara. See anything you like? Thought so. A big reason for this is there is no Zara "style" - its appeal is broad. Yet you won't find everyone else in the office in the same dress, and here lies the first clue to its supremacy. Elsewhere, liking might not translate to buying, but at Zara dawdling isn't an option. Although Zara may have run up 30,000 copies of an item, supply is spread thinly over its 5,157 stores in 81 countries, plus its online shop. Scarcity + realistic design = kerching! at the cash till. 2. Fast response to city-specific trends A new white jacket arrived at the Manhattan flagship store.

But customers passed, telling sales staff that New Yorkers prefer cream. A system is in place for retail staff to transmit such information straight to the massive design team located at Arteixo, a tiny town on the north-west tip of Spain. Within a fortnight, a much bigger consignment of cream jackets had been dispatched to become a sell-out on 42nd Street. 3. It's mass, but class That Zara is headquartered in Spain is significant. While influences are global, core Spanish customers have always liked curvy cutting to flatter a proud bearing. The result is that Zara tailoring seems higher quality than others at this price point (blazers start at around £49.99), and styles are on-trend as opposed to too trendy. Hence, Catherine chose Zara, not Topshop, for that global photo op. 4. A signifier of a stylish city A Zara store opening signifies a city has sartorially arrived. "Thank God, we won't be a third-world fashion country any more," said a Sydney-residing fan at the first Australian opening in April. Such was the delight down under that crowd control barriers had to be maintained for weeks.

Those in Cape Town, Taipei and Lima may be equally excited. 5. Intrigue Just as consumers are driven by scarcity, so the press is intrigued by the greatest fashion story never told. Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, 75, the son of a railwayman who Forbes now rates as the ninth richest man in the world, has never given an interview - and he probably never will. Next month, he hands over to second-in-command, Pablo Isla, who, beyond speaking at the AGM and the shareholders meeting, is equally taciturn. 6. A brilliant brand name Those launching brands seek short, sharp names that work in every language. Yet this four-letter word is an accident. From 1963, Ortega's company, which manufactured nightwear, was called Confecciones GOA (his initials backwards, Amancio Ortega Gaona). In 1975, he started to sell direct to the public through a little shop in La Coruña - it is still there today - and decided to call it Zorba, as in "the Greek". But the owner of a nearby bar of the same name protested.

Forgoing costly new moulds, a new name had to come from those already cast. Ironically, Spain is the only country in which Zara is pronounced not "Zah-rah", but "Tha-ra". 7. The green frock Inditex ups its eco rating by using wind turbines and solar power in its headquarters. Recaptured energy is even redirected into the steamers that press every garment. Items are despatched in battered boxes, which are reused and then recycled. Bicycles are provided for workers to whizz around inside vast warehouses. Green, yes - but it also makes good business sense because it saves money. 8. Seductive, sustainable store design Store design is really working when you are too busy shopping to notice. Zara stores are built to seem airy and light - even on a busy Saturday - while the current in-store look, closely inspired by Prada, is for squadrons of mannequins gathered together to show off the season's many looks. To decide on its global stores should appear, Inditex tests entire "streetscapes" of prototypes for new-look Zara stores within a vast hangar at Arteixo.

The radical Rome store, the prototype for all new builds, is on target to receive a platinum standard in LEED, a seal of sustainable architecture which is one of the most demanding of its kind. Older sites are also being transformed to ensure savings on water and energy use, and to reduce carbon emissions. 9. A hooray from Harvard The ultimate business plaudit is a study by Harvard Business School. What do the money men love? That Zara turns the fashion system, which usually starts with the whim of a designer, on its head, by putting the customer at the heart of a unique business model. But there's a downside: for this model to thrive, Zara's "designers" are strongly "inspired" by the creations of others who are neither acknowledged or paid. Not for nothing has Daniel Piette, fashion director of Louis Vuitton, described Zara as "the most innovative and devastating retailer in the world". 10. Ethics appeal Following the Haiti earthquake, Inditex sent two million euros of emergency reconstruction relief as cash, not clothes.

You might think that those who have lost everything would need clothes, but as a result of other fashion giants sending these, local clothing industries have never recovered, leading to a greater dependency on aid, rather than trade. Inditex is not only intelligent in its generosity abroad: in Spain, some stores' employment practices make it possible for those with mental and physical disabilities to join the workforce. But let's hold back on awarding Zara that tenth love point for now; a somewhat murky supply chain makes all fast fashion tough to love. Potentially vulnerable garment workers are involved in manning sewing machines in countries as far from Zara's Oxford Street megastore as Bangladesh, Turkmenistan and Pakistan. In Zara's favour, though, much of its production is in factories it owns in Spain, meaning it can guard against the scary labour practices that haunt the high street. However, you can help by letting them know how much that matters and even that you are prepared to pay a little more and wait a little longer to ensure fashion is fairer. Remember how they listened to customers asking for cream jackets? Use that system to ask for clean jackets at the cash till or via zara.com .

You could also suggest that Zara provides "swing tags" (viewed online, to save on paper) that trace your garment's journey to you. Why would the world's biggest fashion force care what you think? Because Inditex has conquered the world by putting the customer at the centre of the story. Do speak up.

Question: The fashion retailer 'Zara' has its headquarters in which country?
Answer: Spain