Zara Opens Two Stores in Southern California
Spanish fashion giant Zara has set its sights on California.
The company’s booming sales have funded the expansion of stores in nations including Russia, Sweden and Switzerland during the past few years. This summer, Zara will stake a claim to Southern California by opening two stores.
Zara’s 10,000-square-foot store at the Costa Mesa, Calif.–based South Coast Plaza is opening on May 28. Another store, located on the 1300 block of the Santa Monica, Calif.–based Third Street Promenade, will open this summer.
Zara and its parent company, the Inditex Group, based in La Coruntilde;a, Spain, are notoriously press-shy, and true to form, company officials in New York did not return repeated phone calls.
The company Web site noted the Inditex Group—which also owns apparel companies Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius and Oysho—earned 4,599 million euros in net sales in 2003, a 16 percent increase over 2002.
The company operated more than 1,922 stores worldwide in 2003, but only six of those stores were in the United States. Inditex Chief Executive Officer Joseacute; Mariacute;a Castellano Riacute;os was wary of building more stores in the United States, according to a 2002 Zara case study written by Columbia University business school professors Nelson Fraiman and Medini Singh.
According to the case study, Castellano feared that Americans, outside of those living in the big cities, were not interested enough in high fashion to warrant building many Zara stores in the United States.
The study also found that Castellano was hesitant to go native. Advertising and publicity, a business necessity in the United States, was alien to Inditex’s corporate culture, according to Castellano. —A.A.
