Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A New Generation of Even Faster Fashion
A New Generation of Even Faster Fashion
Marc Bain
Zara and H&M are the world’s two largest fashion retailers. Not by
coincidence, they’re also the pioneers of fast fashion. Zara is able to
take a coat from design to the sales floor in 25 days (paywall), and
it can replenish items even more quickly.
Speed
wins. (Screen capture of Goldman Sachs note to investors)
It helps that both ASOS and Boohoo are online retailers, meaning
they—unlike many of their fashion rivals—aren’t suffering from
an overabundance of brick-and-mortar stores whose sales are
being cannibalized by ecommerce. (Zara and H&M, after years of
rapidly expanding, have recently announced plans to ease back on
their rate of opening new stores to shift focus online.) And while
both ASOS and Boohoo are starting from a smaller sales base,
making it easier to achieve high growth, the analysts at Goldman
Sachs still argue that their roughly “four-week design-to-store
model is integral to their success.”
Both Zara and H&M saw a slowdown in sales growth this year, and
their margins are also under pressure, leading some to wonder
whether the fast-fashion industry is crumbling under the same
forces as other retailers. On the contrary, it’s getting even faster.
https://qz.com/951055/a-new-generation-of-even-faster-fashion-is-leaving-hm-and-zara-in-the-
dust/