After reading the “Fast Fashion Lessons” article and attending the two lectures given by our awesome guest prof, Mahesh Nagarajan. I agree that fashion nowadays must be highly flexible and adaptable, whilst having the traditional quality brands on the higher-end, the huge portion of the young working class would much likely prefer fashion which is trendy and affordable. For this reason it gives rise to fashionable brands like H&M, The Benettons and Zara to penetrate the market with designs changing on a weekly basis.
It is no surprise that Zara is able to deliver the trendiness products, a simple look into their supply chain shows that instead of traditional fashion supply chains which may take weeks to make a prototype, it will take hours for Zara to do it. This is because of their flat hierarchy allows conversations to make quick decisions, store managers are actively keeping count on inventory (by the hour) to provide real time needs and adjustments from their manufacturers and only the automated processes are kept local, all other labour intensive jobs are outsourced to further decrease costs. Also with Zara’s humble marketing strategies it is no wonder it has stepped up in becoming the hottest brands in town; a simple supply and demand equation.
