Introduction: There is a Spanish clothing brand called Zara. It is famous in the fashion clothing industry for its quick response. It is not only a clothing brand, but also a chain retail store brand specializing in Zara clothing brand. It is one of the top three clothing manufac

Introduction:

There is a Spanish clothing brand called ZARA. It is famous in the popular clothing industry for its quick response. It is both a clothing brand and a chain retail store brand specializing in Zara clothing brand. It is one of the top three clothing manufacturers in the world. Production efficiency, turnover rate, and product variety are all far ahead of its peers. On average, it only takes 10 to 14 days from having a design idea to putting clothes on the shelves at Zara, while most clothing companies take 6 to 9 months or even longer. In terms of inventory turnover, the world's first-class clothing companies can do it 3 to 4 times. Zara's annual inventory turnover reaches an astonishing 12 times, while most Chinese clothing companies only turn over 0.8 to 1.2 times. In terms of product variety, Zara launches more than 12,000 products every year. First-class international clothing companies can only launch an average of 3,000 to 4,000 products each year, while very few domestic clothing companies can launch thousands of products.

Zara’s success is the success of supply chain management.

Zara’s outstanding achievements are largely due to its excellent supply chain management capabilities. Supply chain refers to the network chain structure formed during the production and circulation process, involving the provision of products or services to end users. Enterprises generally adopt effective supply chain or reactive supply chain according to their own industry characteristics for supply chain management.

Effective supply chain refers to a supply chain that meets customers' functional needs at a lower cost;

Reactive supply chain focuses on responding to market demand quickly and does not care about costs.

Zara belongs to the latter, taking building a supply chain that can quickly respond to market demand as its core advantage.

ZARA's overall operation flow chart

design

Zara made such a choice because of its unique product design model. Different from the traditional design model of other clothing companies, Zara adopts a new product design model in which buyers and designers coordinate. , a large number of professionally trained buyers travel around the world to collect information. The main job content is to purchase trendy products of high-end clothing brands and new products of the season from competitors, and participate in the latest and hottest fashion shows to integrate the market. The popular information on the website is collected into the hands of designers at the headquarters for certain processing and modifications, and then put into production as Zara's new products. When existing new clothing styles cannot meet demand, designers will combine and innovate new trend features collected by buyers, and launch new products based on these popular features. This design model effectively saves design costs. and time, while also reducing the possibility of misjudging market demand. Although products designed in this way can meet the needs of the current market, fashion trends are always short-lived. Once the product is put on the market for too long and the style becomes outdated, this model will fail. Therefore, Zara has made careful arrangements in procurement, production, logistics and sales to adapt to its competitive strategy of quickly responding to market demand.

Procurement

The main raw materials of clothing factories are mainly all kinds of fabrics. In the procurement process, Zara uses the information collected by buyers to the headquarters to analyze the future trend of material demand for popular clothing. arranges the procurement of materials for the next stage of production in advance. Proactively drive supply chain processes forward. In addition, Zara implements decentralized procurement and distributes purchase orders to multiple suppliers to avoid supply chain risks caused by a single supplier.

production

During the production process, Zara arranged most of the clothing that needed to be quickly put on the market for production around the headquarters, established a production system with a central base that radiates outward, and integrated design within this small radiation range. , dyeing, cutting, sewing and other functions to achieve seamless production.Zara only hands over a small part of the production process that has simple processes and a high degree of standardization to overseas manufacturers, and the rest is allocated to outsourcing manufacturers at its headquarters in Spain. The purpose of this is to make the production process controllable and ensure that the product is produced quickly.

Logistics

In the logistics link, , clothing in each Zara store is uniformly distributed by the headquarters, ensuring that products reach the market simultaneously around the world as soon as possible.

sales

In the sales process, Zara focuses on collecting timely sales data from all its chain stores, analyzing market preferences based on the data, deciding on the next launch strategy, minimizing the backlog of goods in stores, and ensuring that products are sold out in the short term. At the same time, it also creates a phenomenon where the supply of products exceeds the demand, thereby motivating consumers to pay decisively. Zara's efficient supply chain integration capabilities have strongly supported the successful implementation of its fast fashion strategy.