Company History & Business Goals
The first Zara store opened in 1975 in central A Coruña, Galicia, Spain. It featured low-priced lookalike products of popular, higher-end clothing fashions. During the 1980s, the company changed the design, manufacturing, and distribution process to reduce lead times and react to new trends in a quicker way, like "instant fashions". The improvements included the use of information technologies and using groups of designers instead of individuals.
In 1985, founder Amancio Ortega set up a parent company for Zara before going for the global expansion, and in 1988, the company started its international expansion through Portugal. Today, it has over 2.200 stores in 96 countries and is Inditex's biggest brand. In 2010, Zara launched its online boutique, which began in Spain, the UK, Portugal, Italy, Germany and France and was extended to the US in 2011 and Brazil in 2019.
According to the brand's website, "the customer is at the heart of our unique business model, which includes design, production, distribution, and sales, through our extensive retail network."
Zara's main business goals include:
- Contributing to the sustainable development of society and that of the environment with which we interact;
- Quickly changing designs to accommodate dynamic demand for various styles, encouraging customers to buy in a timely manner;
- Working in a vertically integrated manner (managing design, production, shipment, display, promotion, sales, and feedback itself, relying only diminutively on outsourcing). This vertical integration approach gives Zara a lot of control over how it operates.
zara.com Statistics
