Industria de Diseño Textil, S.A. is a Spanish multinational clothing company headquartered in Arteixo, Galicia, in Spain. Inditex, the biggest fast fashion group in the world, operates over 7,200 stores in 93 markets worldwide. The company’s flagship store is Zara, but it also owns a number of other brands such as Zara Home, Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Pull&Bear, Stradivarius, Uterqüe and Lefties. The majority of its stores are corporate-owned, while franchises are mainly conceded in countries where corporate properties cannot be foreign-owned.
| Website | www.inditex.com |
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Inditex’s business is centred around one simple premise: to be quick at responding to the market. Whereas it would take almost a year for a traditional fashion company to get its products out, from conception to runway to stores, for Inditex, this process takes less than two months to replenish stores with new and different products weekly and respond quickly. This is not without consequences on the earth and people, as it is the biggest fast fashion brand in the world. New styles are prototyped in just 5 days, and 60% of the manufacturing happens locally to shorten lead times. In Zara stores, it can take a new garment as little as 15 days to go from design and production to store shelves.
“Inditex History
The company started out by introducing a new concept of fashion design; instead of long lasting pieces of clothing, they offered a great variety at affordable prices. In the beginning, Zara became famous by offering clothing at low prices and then slowly worked its way up to match the quality of today’s best brands.
The group started it’s activity in 1963 as a dress maker; but it wasn’t until 1975 that Zara shop opened its doors in 1975 in A Coruña(Galicia, Spain), the city which saw the group’s early beginnings and which is now home to its central offices.
The international expansion of the group began in 1988, with Inditex opening its first foreign store in Oporto, Portugal. Today, Inditex’s stores can be seen in places like New York’s Fifth Avenue, Milan’s Piazza Duomo, London’s Regent Street and Oxford Street, Frankfurt’s Zeil, Shanghai’s Nanjing West Road, Tokyo’s Shibuya, Istanbul’s Nişantaşı, Seoul’s Myeong-dong, and Vienna’s Kärntner Straße.
In the 1990s, Inditex began creating or acquiring subsidiaries to manage different collections: Bershka, Pull and Bear, Massimo Dutti, and Stradivarius.
In May 2001, Inditex turned into a publicly traded company, being valued at USD $8 billion (€9 billion at the time).
Inditex won the 2006 Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award for their innovative and successful implementation of information technology to drastically decrease the time it takes to get new merchandise from the design stage to the in-store stage.
In 2008, Inditex launched Uterqüe, the new accessories brand of the company. Three inaugural flagship stores were opened in Madrid (Calle Serrano), Barcelona (Passeig de Gràcia) and A Coruña.
On 22 September 2008, Inditex opened its 4,000th store in the Ginza in Tokyo, considered one of the most important shopping areas in the world.
In 2010, Zara has sales of € 12.5 billion with only twice a year newspaper advertisements.
On 20 April 2011, opened the first Zara flagship in Australia. Thus, the Inditex group was present for the first time in 5 continents, and in 86 countries.”
*Information from Forbes.com and Wikipedia.org
**Video published on YouTube by “Inditex Careers“
