What Is Zara Doing To Adopt Digital Transformation?
The recovery in store sales and the strong momentum in online sales are the results of the Group’s strategic commitment to quality across all stages: design, product, store space and service standards.
What Is Zara Doing To Adopt Digital Transformation?
The collections created by the design team were met with an enthusiastic response from customers in the third quarter, which marks the start of the autumn-winter season. This engagement with customers was bolstered by the new technology tools being enabled by Inditex’s unique integrated store-online platform.
The Group continued to make progress on this strategy throughout the nine-month reporting period, developing its proprietary software, the Inditex Open Platform, expanding its integrated stock management system, which is now operational in 6,000 stores, and offering the ‘Store Mode’, a digital feature currently offered to customers by Zara and Massimo Dutti which enhances the ability to engage with fashion in stores.
As part of this transformation, the Group’s brands continue to open larger stores equipped with next-generation technology, absorbing smaller units in the process. As of the October close, the Group had 7,197 stores located in prime shopping areas all over the world.
During the nine-month reporting period, the Group opened stores in 25 markets, of note was the launch in October of the iconic Zara store on Wangfujing (Beijing), one of the Chinese capital’s most important shopping streets. With over 3,500 square metres spread over four storeys, this new flagship store is now our largest in Asia.
The store, which meets all of the Group’s latest eco-efficiency standards, showcases the strategic integration of store and online sales with a dedicated area for the fulfilment of online orders.
Other highlights for Zara included store opening in the Kingdom Center in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) and the reopening in the Bahía Sur shopping centre in Cadiz (Spain). Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho, Zara brand Home and Uterqüe meanwhile launched new stores in China, Russia, Romania, Colombia, Mexico, the Philippines, Indonesia and Kazakhstan, among other places, and reopened existing stores in countries such as The Netherlands, Germany and France during the reporting period.
In parallel, all the Inditex brands continued to extend the reach of their online sales platforms, to the extent that their various collections are now available online in more than 200 markets.
Zara’s online sales are already integrated into its local store networks in some 85 markets, complemented by online sales in 106 additional markets through Zara.com/www. Zara.com launched in 12 new markets, including Chile, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Tunisia during the quarter. Subsequently, during the fourth quarter, the integrated platform has been introduced in Iceland, Puerto Rico, Panama and Cyprus, having been rolled out in Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania or Algeria during the first two quarters of the year.
The rest of the brands having been following suit, deploying their integrated online offerings in a host of markets, including Serbia, Ukraine, Israel, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, South Africa and Morocco, while Lefties launched its online platform in Spain and Portugal.
