Zara Case Study

Assignment #1: Zara case

1. How would you characterize the business strategies of Zara in terms of price, product

quality, time to market and product variety? Rank the relative importance of these four

factors in Zara’s business strategies.

Business strategies : “cutting-edge” accurate fashion in time at affordable prices.

Rankings:

1) product variety

Zara react to what the customers are or are not buying accurately. They send to stores exactly what the customers want in the correct amount.

Zara introduce about 18000 new products every year.

2) time to market

all stores worldwide place orders and receive shipments twice per week, on time.

3) price

4) product quality

2. What are Zara’s operations strategies that support their business strategies? That is,

does the company focus on building capability in cost efficiency, product quality,

supply chain responsive time or production flexibility to create competitive advantages?

production flexibility

Zara constantly optimize and differentiate retail proposition. They have many product variety themes every year. The company fly designer teams from headquaters to set up stores and follow up in order to mentain a same image worldwide for each peroid.

The store managers influence decision making process by capturing the preference and demand of customers, and passing the information to seniors.

The garments are mixed together and displayed for better presentation. And the presentations are refreshed regularly.

In order to increase sales, Zara train their sales people hard and encourage internal promotion. The store manager usually act as the head of women's section as well, since women's wear accounts for more sales.

supply chain responsive time