Case

Zara (Inditex) as a fast-fashion comparator

A lead time under two weeks according to Pavlidou and Tsami (2025); about 20,000 SKUs a year according to Lan (2024).

Industry
Apparel retail
Frameworks applied
Lean versus agile supply chains
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Frameworks applied

This case is read through the frameworks below.

  • Lean versus agile supply chainsShould an operations manager run a product's supply chain lean to cut waste, or agile with spare capacity to respond fast, when its demand is hard to forecast?

Sources

References

Listed A–Z by author surname, Harvard style. A source with a DOI links to https://doi.org/…; one without links to its page or says plainly that it has no DOI.

  1. Lan, Q. (2024) ‘Advantages, problems and strategies of Uniqlo supply chain’, Journal of Business and Marketing, 1(3), pp. 1–5.doi:10.62517/jbm.202409301Source page
  2. Pavlidou, V. and Tsami, M. (2025) ‘Success through strategic supply chain practices in fast fashion: lessons learnt from Inditex-Zara & Shein’, Universal Journal of Management, 13(1), pp. 12–21.doi:10.13189/ujm.2025.130102Source page
  3. Yang, B. (2025) ‘Analysis of Zara's fast fashion supply chain rapid response strategy’, in Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research. Atlantis Press, pp. 1339–1352.doi:10.2991/978-2-38476-440-2_151Source page