What Is The Core Of Zara'S Success?

According to the world clothing shoes and hats net, SA La (

Starting from La Coruna, Spain, the pace of international expansion began in 1988 years. In recent years, it has been growing at a high speed. It not only threatens many traditional clothing brands, but also is called fast.

Though the Zara itself does not like this name, the success of Zara is that the speed of design is much faster than that of the traditional process, and the number of designs is even more amazing. It can also be used at high speed to match this advantage.

There is a suspicion of plagiarism. However, many pirated garment manufacturers in Asia have never been able to become multinational brands. Zara is obviously not the "copy cat" depreciated by global anti business and conspiracy theorists. Its business model must have something special.

The easiest way to see the business strategy of Zara is that the supply chain management is different. Nowadays most of the garment industry in the world takes Asia as the main foundry base, including China, Vietnam and India. However, the supply chain of Zara is widely distributed in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Turkey and many other countries. The top 3 countries account for 6 of the production capacity, and supply the European market in the near future, so that Zara can quickly play fast strategy, which can play a strong role. Because when other competitors' products are pported from Asia to Asia, Zara can design from the design to manufacture, and immediately respond to market changes.

Other competitors, because of the long sea pportation, conform to the development mode of the same design, which is mass production and one breath pportation. Otherwise, if the market reaction is good, it is too late to increase delivery. This also creates the corresponding risk. That is, if the design is not as popular as expected, it will lead to a large amount of inventory and have to give a big discount. The Zara, because it has the advantage of close proximity to the market, can produce a small quantity of trial production first, react quickly and add up, and react quickly. It will still be able to get through quickly without any discounts or flowing to the free cargo center. This will ensure the profits of Zara and its storage cost.

Because of the pressure on competitors' brands to sell large quantities of products that they need to sell, the business models they conform to are large amounts of money, massive exposure, overwhelming marketing advertisements, and comprehensive distribution of goods to the channels to ensure that consumers will pay. This is even a fast fashion H&M which is also categorized as fast fashion. It can not be vulgar. About 4% of the revenue is hit by advertising budgets. Zara has not been able to clear the mass of manufacturing products under pressure, and has also adopted a business model that does not attach importance to advertising. Zara's marketing mainly focuses on social marketing.

Save storage and marketing costs, so that Zara can maintain parity.

This part, if other competitors are willing to move big in the supply chain, can also be done, but it also has to match with the annual design of 1.2 million new designs, and it can attract a lot of design skills. This is not easy to imitate. The result of the massive design of Zara, is unavoidable that there is a coincidence of "bump shirt", or there are occasionally a few designers suspected of "too much reference", and many opponents and conspiracy theorists attack it as plagiarism. However, countless "genuine Shanzhai" clothing factories in Asia are not copying 1.2 million designs every year.

The amazing design productivity of Zara comes from the whole organizational structure and management culture of Zara.

In the past, the mainstream management of enterprises was "up to down", which was ordered by layers of supervisors. But with the explosion of information in the digital age and the new management needs in the knowledge economy era, the demand for knowledge workers was different from that of the workers. The work of knowledge workers was to think about the past, the commanding of a whip. Only the supervisor was thinking and wasting human resources. Now the new idea is "bottom-up" to fully promote the productivity of knowledge workers, and Zara is the leader.

Unlike other competitors, Zara does not have a design director. The 350 person design team does not even have a distinct hierarchy. Everyone has the right to independently decide the design and marketing rights. Everyone can make comments in the process of design. This kind of talk is seemingly out of order, but it takes full advantage of everyone's brain to make the team a "multi-core computing" and quickly process large amounts of information. Zara also collects a lot of information for team reference.

Zara, every two weeks, goes to the apparel products on the channel renewal rack, together with the sales information and customer response information, and immediately feedback to the design team to find out which designs are sold and what are unsalable, and then change several designs immediately after that.

Like "multi-core computing"

Zara CEO Pablo Pablo (Isla) said that in Zara, there was no designer magic program, nor did the star designer respond purely to the changing data in the whole season.

Business managers and analysts are always discussing the sales information with designers. A design is red, and the design team takes it as the foundation to create a series of products with different materials, different patterns and different prices, so as to maximize the total revenue through the pursuit of success. Finally, Zara will provide consumers with fashionable clothes.

Since 2004, Zara's performance has grown by 240%, while H&M has grown by 180%, but Gap is almost zero growth, not to mention two American bankruptcy Apparel, while Gap revenue declined in the first half of 2016, H&M profits declined, and Zara's 2/3 revenue grew by 11%.

Many competitors want to plagiarize Zara's success mode, but they are always unable to catch up. Because of the success of Zara, the special business model based on the management style of the design team, the way to absorb information, and the supply chain mode and marketing mode are all mixed together.

In the face of the digital economy, Zara is more prudent to adapt itself to slowing down the expansion of stores, and to concentrate on a few flagship stores while vigorously developing online shopping. This strategy makes market analysts worry that growth will slow down. But Zara is not as rambling as many other businesses are often bent on market pressure. Its prudent adaptation will keep its online shopping trend sweeping through many channels and competitors, and it can still be firm and steady. This is a more valuable era in many traditional channels.

Zara CEO believes that the most important factor of success is not the supply chain management that the media has focused on, but also the refusal of fast fashion. It does not mean that the name can not reflect the efforts of Zara in every dress design. Success is not derived from a winning procedure, but most importantly, the human factor. Design is everything.

In other words, the key lies in the management of the design team.

The front-line staff can master the most information. In the bottom-up management mode, the superior is in the role of assisting and coordinating subordinates, which is conducive to the organization to present the most information. Compared with the traditional whip type leadership, the subordinates tend to conceal information, "there are policies under the counter measures", because the more the superiors know, the more negative they are to themselves. Therefore, the higher level is often out of line with the real situation, and the wrong decisions are made erroneous. The bottom-up management philosophy holds that

The "bottom up" organization also helps to deal with a large amount of information, such as "multi core operations". Everyone helps to calculate a part of the organization, instead of concentrating all the data on the superior to think and decision. In the traditional organization, the data are all concentrated to the upper level, which will cause the superior information to be flooded and the decision is downtime, but if the information is screened before, information distortion will occur, or the lower level can borrow a variety of concealment such as "report grated and no worry".

The success of Zara shows the productivity advantage of "bottom-up" thinking in the knowledge economy era.

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