Why Can'T China'S Fast Fashion Brands Keep Up With Zara?

For modern

Spanish brand Zara is an absolute example.

They sell 11000 styles on average every season, while most of the other bulk brands are 2000 to 4000 styles.

The average number of customers entering Zara is 17 times a year, while other general brands are 3 to 4 times.

Zara averages 2 to 4 weeks from development to new products. The average time of H&M is 3 to 5 months, while most Chinese brands are now in the range of 6 to 9 months.

Rich product selection and high-speed turnover make Zara a competitive imitation of Chinese local clothing brands.

However, many Chinese brands, which are known as fast fashion, do not seem to grasp the fundamental reason why Zara can achieve fast fashion.

So that China has a number of famous but no facts.

"Brand".

In fact, the reason why Zara is fast is that it has a flat organizational structure, a large and complete retail format and a high-tech supply chain.

Most store managers, if they need to report any questions to the company headquarters or report any work, usually need to pass their supervisor Regional Manager (district head), then the district manager will report to the retail (Sales) manager, then the manager will report the brand or business director.

For the retail industry, the store manager is actually one of the most important posts.

But most businesses set them at the lowest level.

The authority of a store manager is basically limited to selling goods, managing the shop staff, maintaining the display, and making no mistakes in the shop.

And most of Zara's single store annual sales amount to hundreds of millions of yuan.

Managing the size of such a shop requires the manager to have the qualities of a general manager of a small and medium-sized enterprise: apart from the work that ordinary shops must do, such as selling goods, warehouses, personnel and cash management, the biggest difference between them and ordinary shop owners is their right to manage goods.

This includes orders, replenishment and display of goods.

In this way, these front-line staff can issue replenishment orders to the company timely according to the actual sales situation.

In other Brand Company, these jobs are basically completed by the commodity Department of the company headquarters, and the defect of this process design is that the people sitting in the office can only wait for the system data to react and make judgments, and the efficiency is obviously much lower.

The store manager of Zara will hold a meeting with the Spanish headquarters every 1-2 weeks to discuss new product design, sales feedback, replenishment needs and so on, while the general brand store manager can hardly have such an opportunity to communicate directly with the relevant departments of the company.

This makes the Zara shop's first line problems feed back to the top of the company in the fastest time.

There is no doubt that all this also shows that Zara shop manager is unusual outstanding: they must at least graduate, know English, excellent execution, hardworking and hard working, and work overtime there until dawn.

Of course, the matching treatment for them is also first-rate in the industry.

In the first tier cities, store managers usually earn 5000 to 6000 yuan per month, while Zara shop managers are more than 10000 yuan.

Whether or not the Chinese brand can give the manager the same rights and responsibilities.

In fact, the reason why Zara can set up such an organizational structure is closely related to its retail mode.

Zara basically store 1000 to 2000 square meters, and as far as possible in the business center location.

The vast majority of China's offline apparel brands are mainly in department stores.

Although department stores are facing unprecedented challenges, it is still the main form of China's retail industry.

For the shopping malls that care about the performance of each square meter, the area they provide to Brand Company is extremely limited.

For such small and medium size shops, Zara store manager mode is difficult to promote.

The sale of single brand stores in the mall is only a few million dollars a year. It is impossible to produce hundreds of millions of benefits like Zara, and it is impossible to allow Brand Company to hire senior shop managers.

However, the mode of Chinese clothing brand is mainly based on franchisees and direct stores, which lengthens the length of the whole information decision process, and also determines that the organizational structure of Zara can not be adapted to Chinese brands.

Another advantage of Zara is its excellent supply chain system.

The founder of Zara decided to make fast fashion very early, so he paid no attention to the supply chain system and related information technology input.

They own their own factories, and more than 60% of the world's products are supplied by their own factories.

These factories are all near headquarters.

At the same time, it also works with some workshop family factories in Europe.

These small factories provide considerable convenience and flexibility for their small order tests.

Usually, Zara will test the sales feedback in some stores first.

These orders are small, so they are completed by small factories.

Then, after the order test is successful, they will immediately make up the order and increase the quantity, and complete it by their own factory or cooperative factory.

Most of China's local enterprises do not have their own factories, but rather outsourced production.

Even with their own factories, the supply chain system construction is far less than the Zara profession.

Zara in order to continuously optimize its order and replenishment process, accurately predict sales and optimize inventory management, it will cooperate with international first-class institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and explore suitable models for optimizing inventory management in MIT.

And this is the weakness of Chinese enterprises.

Although there are many colleges and universities in China, the study of many disciplines is divorced from the actual needs of enterprises.

Chinese enterprises also do not believe that professors from academics can bring better benefits to their enterprises, but they do not have the ability to self organize the system. This is also the reason why Chinese local clothing brands can hardly replicate Zara.

In short,

The case only shows that many of our domestic brands may be just playing the same role in the East.

They know it, but they do not know why.

Such imitation may eventually be a waste of time and energy.

Of course, this is not to say that Chinese local enterprises can't get out of the fast fashion mode, but they must explore a road suitable for their brand positioning and business mode.

In fact, some Chinese brands have been exploring their fast fashion.

For example, the Korean dress house, which is a brand name, breaks the situation of the design department, the production department and the sales department in the traditional organizational structure. By setting up the 3 party department, "designers, production merchandisers, market promotion", they integrate their original state into a department.

Speed up product development and marketing cycle through integrated small teams.

La Natsu Bell company relies on the "partnership system" of shops, which only sells the traditional shop staff, and profits from the wage plus sales commission. The conversion to stores requires control of operating costs and profitability.

In return, store employees share the profits of the shops as well as shareholders.

This is actually encouraging every shop member to regard the shop as his own company rather than working at a part-time job.

This incentive system has greatly enhanced the company's operational efficiency and made it possible to "fast".