Zara, when the consumer sets the trend
The majority of Zara's new design ideas do not come from fashion shows in Milan, Paris or New York. They actually come from the sales staff. Every week, store managers meet to take stock of trends and products that customers are asking for but can't find in stores. All this information is directly sent and analyzed from the headquarters in Spain, to then be transferred to the style team.
Data processing for optimal efficiency
The Inditex group operates more like a tech company than a traditional fashion retailer. Software (ERP) allows you to plan large deployments in advance, teams provide small, regular updates in batches, improving the product they build with each new batch in response to customer requests collected by sellers.
Here is an example of the database of a Zara Store.
In the database, the sales assistants enter the type of article, the references and the number of times it was sold during the week.
When the manager of the point of sale considers that an item comes up very often in the database, he creates a file with these most famous items which he then sends to Zara's headquarter. Then, the headquarter will analyze the store sales through the database and then ask the style team and the production team to restart production.
Zara wants to know exactly what the customers are looking for and this obsession with customer's demand, whether online or offline, is the key to success. And the only tool capable of gathering all of this information is the database.
