Essay On Apparel Industry

The apparel retailing industry consists of companies that design and sell clothing, bags, footwear and accessories. The industry becomes one of the fastest growing and highly competitive industries because of the globalization. The global apparel industry is worth$1.2 trillion revenue in 2012, growing to $1.3 trillion in 2016. (OTEXA 2013), Sales of women's clothing is nearly 53 percent of the total industry revenue.

The fashion apparel industry is very challenging and consistently changing; trend and consumers preferences change almost every month. Therefore, companies have to respond to changes in the market, and changing consumer preferences, to remain successful and to sustain their share in the market. One growing phenomena in apparel industry is fast fashion brands such as H&M, Zara, Mango and Top shop, which means “low-cost clothing collections based on current, high-cost luxury fashion trends—is, by its very nature, a fast-response system that encourages disposability” (Fletcher 2008) “A formerly standard turnaround time from catwalk to consumer of six months is now com- pressed to a matter of mere weeks by such companies as H&M and Zara, with heightened profits to match “(Tokatli 2008). Zara ability to react quickly to changes and customer fashion needs by focusing on the latest fashion trends instead of creating new designs, so Zara is a trend chaser, which helps Zara to save costs on product development and design. Using information technology (IT) becomes an important tool that helps fast fashion companies in capturing and analyzing real-time data to drive growth and anticipate better consumers preferences. Zara has successfully used high-integrated information technology system to dominate the retail fashion and...

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...managers, from store managers to specialists and designers, from the designers to the staff of production, from the various buyers to the subcontractors, from the warehouse managers to the distributor’s etc. Zara has strived enough to ensure that all the performance measures, operational procedures, and also the store and office layouts are designed in such a manner to make the transfer of information very easy. It can be rightly said that information management is one of the most important core activity of ZARA.

The core characteristics of the target group for Zara are the women from 18-40, who are trend followers, price conscious, and impulse shoppers. The target group of Zara has very unique characarteistics. The followers of Zara are trend conscious, upbeat, impulse shoppers and Zara has been spotting on the unique customer behaviors to get a hold on the market.