Zara, why is this happening?
Closed 1,200 stores, with a net loss of 3.26 billion in a quarter, continuous 50% off promotions, inventory clearance…
Please, is this still the “King” Zara who pressed Lv and Dior to the ground and rubbed them?
After all, when Zara became popular, even Gucci issued a warning: “You must closely observe and learn from Zara.”
However, Zara’s mistake is: nothing has changed. Because the market has been turned upside down.
The wave of consumerism has receded, the market has entered a new stage of transformation, and practicality and environmentalism have gradually become the mainstream of the market.
The early market dividends have been exhausted, and Zara’s advantages are slowly disappearing. On one side, emerging brands are eyeing the market, and on the other side, there is the revival and rise of old domestic brands.
At this moment, every step Zara takes seems crucial, but unfortunately, every step reveals arrogance.
Can Zara, which is waiting for help, make a comeback?
▲Zara with the door closed
Only fast but not broken? Fake
Zara, born in 1975 in the early days of Spanish democratic reform, is the “savior” of a group of civilian girls.
At that time, the consciousness of Spanish women was awakening. Women were stepping out of the family and entering society, and they were in urgent need of a fashionable outfit that could slay the whole audience.
However, fashion at that time was monopolized by European aristocrats, and the price alone was prohibitive for ordinary people.
▲The “source” of Zara, Ramaha high-end clothing store
As the saying goes, where can I find it? Where there is demand, there are business opportunities.
Ortega, the founder of Zara, aimed at this gap and quickly seized the low-end market with the brand concept of “first-class design, second-class fabrics, and third-class price”. For a time, there was a hot scene where supply exceeded demand.
▲Zara’s first store is located in La Coruña Center Street
This is the first time Zara has launched a “fast delivery” The second “move” was in China, and it also targeted market vacancies.
After 2000, the fashion wave across the ocean swept across the mainland with the spring breeze of reform and opening up, and the cool guy soul of every young man and woman was burning.
However, it is obvious that the domestic clothing market cannot keep up with the ever-changing fashion trends, and the growing fashion needs of boys and girls cannot be met.
In 2006, Zara entered the Chinese mainland market and just filled the demand gap.
Cheap, good-looking and trendy, Zara once became a trend-setting trend for boys and girls.
As the saying goes, the only martial arts in the world that cannot be broken is fast, and Zara understands this truth well.
New products are released twice a week, and the process from product design to store shelves is completed in 15 days. 25,000 new products are designed every year, of which the average design time for each product is only 20 minutes.
Compared with the 6 to 9 months it takes for traditional clothing sellers, Zara is ridiculously fast.
Fast is Zara’s external strength; and the internal strength that supports it is Zara’s business model of contracting the entire industry chain from design to sales.
Zara has its own independent factory and 2 aviation bases. The former controls the production process without errors, and the latter ensures that there will be no delays in the transportation process.
Even to meet the needs of online shopping, Zara has prepared 10 photo studios to take promotional photos of new products every day, send them to the backend for processing in real time, and then put them online immediately.
However, experts also make mistakes sometimes. Zara, which has always been known for its speed, missed the e-commerce bonus period.
It was not until 2012 that Zara developed e-commerce channels. At this time, the long-term online vacancies had been filled by Internet celebrity sellers, which was always slow.
One wrong move and the whole game is lost.
Relying on the big data of e-commerce platforms, Taobao brands can obtain consumer feedback faster than Zara, which relies on offline stores.
At the same time, they have a supply chain that is not inferior to Zara, and the production cycle is 7 to 11 days ahead of Zara.
Not only are they faster than Zara, but more importantly, their prices are also lower.
The secret trick of “Only speed and failure” failed.”Quality fashionable clothing”.
While enjoying the early dividends, Zara did not choose to settle down and improve the hard power of design and quality, but blindly increased the brand’s “high-end sense”.
▲Zara’s regular model Anja Rubik is the spokesperson for major blue blood brands
However, there is no profound cultural heritage and trend-setting ’s original design, where does Zara’s high-end sense come from?
It’s just tied up by quality.
This show-off “sense of high-end” has also become the key to hindering Zara’s subsequent development.
For first-line consumers, Zara is a “defective product” with incorrect goods, and the quality cannot keep up. Its so-called “high-end sense”.
For third- and fourth-tier consumers, it is too “high-end” and not as cost-effective as Taobao brands.
This situation of neither going up nor down has not opened up new markets for Zara, but has caused Zara to lose some old customers.
In the final analysis, Zara is “floating”.
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▲In 2018, Zara officially announced its local spokesperson, 5 years later than Uniqlo.
As Zara’s second largest market in the world, Zara is “floating” in China A bit high.
For example, regarding a small pattern issue, Zara, which used to respond quickly to customer opinions and meet customer needs, was “deaf” and “blind” at this time.
I have been waiting for more than ten years for a piece of clothing suitable for Asian body types, but I have never found it.
If Zara doesn’t like it, don’t blame old fans for turning to Uniqlo. At least, the style is more suitable for our Asian body types.
Normally, it is acceptable to be “floating”, but if it repeatedly jumps around the bottom line of principle, it is a bit too “floating”.
As a foreign company, it has been named and questioned by the People’s Daily and the Communist Youth League many times. I wonder how Zara feels.
But whether it is unintentional or intentional, it can only show that Zara does not pay enough attention to this second largest market after the local market.
After all, due to the particularity of the Chinese market, there are many lucky factors that make Zara popular in China.
However, this information gap caused Zara to be immersed in its own sense of superiority and miss opportunities again and again.
▲Zara new product series promotional photo
The current market is a competition between multiple forces, with e-commerce raids, the rise of established brands, and big brands As the market sinks and consumers mature, what are Zara’s advantages?
Although Inditex, Zara’s parent company, is expected to invest tens of billions to expand online business and upgrade offline stores.
But after all, it is treating the symptoms rather than the root cause. How long can it last?
After ignoring crisis warnings from consumers for N times, poor quality, poor styles, and plagiarized designs have become Zara’s old problems, and it is not easy to cure them.
Now, I have to admit that Zara’s golden age has passed. In other words, the spring of fast fashion brands is no longer there. </p
