Zara Production

According to Inditex, the main factor contributing to the company's success is the ability to adapt to rapid change in fashion. It marketed over 30,000 different items in the 2010 fiscal year, each of these was developed by Inditex's creative team with 300 designers (200 of which work full time for Zara). This large team enables Inditex to achieve 4-week of product life cycle on average for new items.

Production cycle starts with customers' opinions on new designs and staff members also travel to fashion cities, attend fashion fair, exhibition, observe people and browse publications. Design team use customers' judgments to modify, adding new color, and pattern to existing design or to create new designs.

Most of its manufacturing is done at its own factories, especially fashion-forward items. Only basic clothing, which is not subject to seasonal change, is outsourced. Inditex directly control fabric supply, marking and cutting. With external suppliers, mostly from Europe, Inditex provide fabric and all the necessary elements for making garments unlike H&M, which outsource all of its production and does not directly deal with material suppliers. This help Inditex to remove the need for information to travel through dispersed channel. Therefore, this shortens delay, minimizes bureaucracy, allows faster decision making and reduces the impact of changes, such as in retail orders so overproduction is decreased.

In addition, Inditex achieves speed and flexibility by purchasing 50% of its fabric plain, which is not dyed. This help the company to reduce the risk of wrong forecasting in seasonal colors and response quickly to demands for colors. ((Ferdows et al., 2004). From Postponement

It also does not work at full capacity on order to quickly react to changing demands. In addition, the company offers only small batches of stock regularly give space for newer lines. The limited availability of products makes customers to buy quickly without waiting for discount season and visit stores more frequently. Inditex estimated that customers visit Zara stores 17 times a year on average, compared to four visits to other brands (Castro, 2003) from Internationalization of .... Therefore, the company is able to enjoy higher profits, less percentage of unsold items low working capital.