Zara's Adaptations: Future of Retail Stores and Customer Focus

This report provides an analysis of the future of Zara retail stores, examining key strategies and trends in the fashion industry. The study explores Zara's current operational model, including its supply chain, fast fashion approach, and customer-focused brand identity. The report highlights the increasing importance of mobile apps and online stores in enhancing customer experience and facilitating convenient shopping. Furthermore, it emphasizes the significance of customer relationship management in building trust and loyalty within a competitive market. The analysis draws on academic sources to provide insights into Zara's adaptations to evolving consumer behaviors and technological advancements, predicting a future where customer-centric services and product differentiation will continue to drive success in the retail sector.

Running head: FUTURE OF RETAIL STORES
Future of Retail Stores
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1FUTURE OF RETAIL STORES
Zara is a Spanish retail stores that specializes in the sales fashion garments, clothing and
accessories. It is a Spanish organization and is operational throughout the world, like in Portugal,
France, Greece, Belgium, Russia, China, Australia South Africa and other parts of the world as
well. Clothing of Men, women and children are available at the stores of Zara. They have total
1,770 stores in 86 countries all around the world. Zara has its own factory in La Coruna, it is a
city that is known for its textile industries, and they upgraded their milk run type production and
distribution facilities. This particular approach was inspired by the JIT system, which helped the
company to be self contained in all the stages of operations. The company achieves growth with
the help of its diversification strategy. They adapt the couture designs, manufactures, distributes
and retails within a period of two weeks from the day the original design first appeared on the
catwalks. The company has its own supply Chain and it competes at a very fast rate to deliver
their products in the market (Cook et al. 2017).
Zara is much updated and keeps pace with the latest trends of fashion industry. The
company makes more styles rather than more quantities so that they can lessen the exposure of
clothes manufactured in a particular style. It is a customer focused brands and customer; they
focus on the needs and wants of customers. One of the most striking features of Zara’s
operations is that the organization has its production factories and the production units close to
their stores. The company keeps the inventory less so that not much will be required to be sold in
the markdown (Magrath and McCormick 2013).
According to Magrath and McCormick (2013) the mobile apps is a big revolution when it
comes to fashion retail stores, earlier there were online websites but now almost all the brands
have their websites and mobile apps. The number of mobile stores is expected to increase in the
future because this stores are very convenient for the customers to keep track of the latest

2FUTURE OF RETAIL STORES
fashions and moreover clothes are available at cheaper rates. It facilitates the buyers to save their
time in visiting the stores and buy online. Zara already has its fashion online stores and app as
well that helps the customers to check the latest fashion that is available at the stores, customers
can even buy from the online stores. This particular trend has seems to be very advantageous to
the organization and is predicted to continue to play a very important role in the fashion industry.
Another most important aspect that the brands in retail stores are focusing on according is
Customer relationship management (Blázquez 2014). Building trust and gaining the loyalty is
considered very important because in there is too much competition and a better customer
service can help to the retail stores to increase their customer base. The services in future will
become more customers oriented because the competition will keep on increasing forcing the
firms to not only have product differentiation but also focus on service differentiation.

3FUTURE OF RETAIL STORES
References
Blázquez, M., 2014. Fashion shopping in multichannel retail: The role of technology in
enhancing the customer experience. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 18(4), pp.97-
116.
Cook, S.C., Cook, S.C., Yurchisin, J. and Yurchisin, J., 2017. Fast fashion environments:
consumer’s heaven or retailer’s nightmare?. International Journal of Retail & Distribution
Management, 45(2), pp.143-157.
Magrath, V. and McCormick, H., 2013. Marketing design elements of mobile fashion retail
apps. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal, 17(1), pp.115-
134.