Zara how many stores in china

Xu Wei. DATE: Jan 08 Editor: Kim Taylor. Follow Yicai Global on. In the week of Sep. Privately-owned Shein, which also sells on Amazon, does not publicly disclose sales or other financial figures. The company did not respond to emails or phone calls. The funds did not respond to interview requests. On the one hand, a new generation of consumers is becoming more and more concerned about environmental issues.

The fast fashion model, which is believed to induce overconsumption by constantly creating demand, has been criticized globally for producing too much fashion junk — cheap, low-quality clothing products that quickly iterate are junk itself.

On the other hand, the new generation of consumers is more in pursuit of personalization. Fast fashion mode determines that brands need to copy fashion elements in large quantities. It is worth mentioning that the fast fashion model requires companies to utilize a global supply chain to replicate captured trends in large quantities into standardized products at the lowest possible processing cost, and then sell those products to global consumers at a lower price.

In other words, at its best, fast fashion brands need to be able to reach the global market with a single set of products. This makes it almost impossible for brands to gain recognition in all regional markets. In fact, no matter from the perspective of product design or brand construction, international fast fashion brands have been operating in the Chinese market for many years, but they have not been able to adapt to the Chinese market well, especially considering that China is still a vast country with great differences in consumption habits and cultural characteristics between cities.

This is another reason why many brands are struggling in the Chinese market. One of the main reasons why brands like Forever 21, Topshop and ASOS eventually withdrew from the Chinese market was that most of their product designs failed to appeal to most Chinese consumers.

Lu Beiye, an investor in the luxury and fashion industry, said in an interview that differences in culture and lifestyle to some extent have influenced international fast fashion brands born overseas to fully resonate with Chinese consumers. Taking Topshop as an example, the brand takes cocktail dresses designed based on the British party culture and social scene as its core category.

However, these categories are not consumed frequently by the domestic mass class in China and there are alternatives with higher cost performance. Therefore, the difficulties in growth of these brands in the Chinese market are gradually emerging as the first and second-tier cities become increasingly saturated. China has become the most important overseas market for Uniqlo. As of August , the number of Uniqlo stores in China reached , surpassing the stores in Japan for the first time.

Uniqlo has a natural advantage because of its similarities to China in culture, aesthetics and even the size of its consumers. Inviting spokespersons is also a direction of effort. ZARA, which never had a spokesperson, officially announced two Greater China ambassadors — actors Wu Lei and Zhou Dongyu — for the first time in , and launched a limited collection with the same spokesperson at Tmall.

Ng highlights that a key characteristic of the fast fashion market in China is that the consumer landscape is changing even faster as compared to Western markets. Thus, retailers will need to learn how to keep up with this pace, especially now that local players are emulating the production cycles of their international counterparts.

Photo by bfishadow via Flickr. China Business Review is the official magazine of the US-China Business Council, a nonprofit and nonpartisan trade association that represents more than American companies doing business in China. Trending Tags Intellectual Property innovation cybersecurity ecommerce tech. Home Uncategorized.

February 24, Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Linkedin. After years of extraordinary growth, has fast fashion peaked in China? Apparel smorgasbord Fast fashion is defined by the velocity with which apparel companies can get styles from the catwalk to the consumer. What is key about the expansion tactics is not just the volume, but also the geography.