Refering back to one comm296 student Steven Xie\’s Blog of Speed of Fashion_Zara, Steven mainly talked about one characteristic of Zara which their high speed of switching clothing and trend of their retail stores. Indeed, Zara is really successful in doing this to create an overall higher value of their products from the latest fashion and trend they have. Also, they have a high turnover of the goods which required an accurancy in supply chain management and business infromation collection. No wonder why last time my girlfriend wanted to buy a dress in Zara, and after one night of consideration, she couldn’t find the dress anymore.
To talk about creating value of products and companies, socialists always focus on the issue of commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism is that companies use whole bunch of advestising, packaging, communicating skills, and even the decoration of the stores to provide their customers a valuable image and high value of their products; at the same time, let them forget the cost and the quality of the products and the working situation of the production workers. For example, Zara changes their series of clothing really fast to fulfill their customers’ wants, but the providing products with best quality may not be their mainly concern. According to my friend and my experience, the “life expectancy” of Zara’s products usually is lower than the other companies’ products which have the similar price level such as Tommy Hilfiger’s and Banana Republic’s. However, for fashion pursuers they may not really care about the quality of what they buy based on the fact that they won’t wear a same cloth lots of time; wears differently everyone is the key. Also, so far there is no evidence that Zara is using sweatshops for their production, their employees working in their retail stores did complain about the working conditions in retail stores (in Hong Kong for example). Also I found a news Stop Unfashionable Conduct at Zara which says the same situation in Montreal.
There is nothing right or wrong; commodity fetishism is also a trend of doing business nowadays.
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