Zara Schmara
OK people, I'm about to utter the unthinkable: If I hear one more industry expert oohing and aaahing about Zara I'll eat my size 14 body shaping granny pants. Can someone please say something about fast fashion without wheeling out jolly old Zara as if it's the elixir of life? I've been attending retail seminars for years, and I don't think there's a single one in which it hasn't made a star appearance in the form of snazzy looking flow charts emblazoned with arrows and phrases like 'highly responsive communication channels' and 'scarcity value creation'. It's all wonderful, well done you Zara.
The problem is, it's been said before... about a gazillion times. More to the point, flow charts notwithstanding, no other fashion retailer seems to be able to replicate what Zara is doing... Or not doing in fact, and this is the real reason for my current gripe. After one such seminar at a recent trade fair in Hong Kong I huffed out of the auditorium and a cheering idea pinged into my head, whose whopping irony somehow failed to penetrate... (what can I say? My right hand - the one that signs the credit card dockets - was on Australian time, my brain was on Hong Kong time).
"How about some therapeutic credit card action at Hong Kong Zara?" I thought to myself. All those affordable designer rip-offs, a favourable exchange rate and the promise of walking into a Zara store having been starved of their supposed excellence in Australia for so long... why, fortune really seemed to be smiling. Ten ill-fitting, generic items later, my own smile had turned to the fixed grin of incipient madness and I was having a hard time getting excited about the big Z.
Aside from a decidedly 'beige' (and I don't just mean the colour) offer, Zara's 'international' tags, which show European, UK, US, Mexican, Turkmenistani, Siberian, Congolese and Arctic Circle sizing, also had my teeth grinding. Suddenly I seemed to have inflated to a UK XXXXL as I attempted to squeeze my usually 12-14 girth into a pair of bone-coloured chinos claiming to be 'UK L'. For those of us of 'statuesque' dimensions, shopping in Hong Kong is an unnerving experience at the best of times.
Every time I walk into a store and lumber past those beautiful, petite shop girls, I know how Alice in Wonderland must have felt after her 'Eat Me' experience. But when the one shop you've always held in esteem lets you down, vengeful thoughts take hold. While I'd like to retract previous comments about ingesting body shaping granny pants because a) I'm now watching my figure and eating anything that large is a no-no b) I need them, I will however be asking some tough questions at the next retail-seminar-cum-Zara-appreciation-fest... questions like 'if Zara can't get sizing right, what hope is there for lesser retailers?', 'What's with the beige?', and 'When did you, Mr. suited supply chain management guru, last shop there?'.
By Kat Walker