11/26/2004 » Entrepreneurs, Fashion

It seems appropriate on Black (Ink) Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, to share with y’all a business idea which I desperately hope someone runs with: a desi-friendly Zara.

Zara is paradise for sexy men’s clothing. It’s my all-time favorite store; as I’ve traipsed around London, Barcelona, Madrid, New York, Vegas, I’ve shopped in every city’s Zara. It’s a Galician chain which designs its own clothing, and it solves some key problems for me:

• It’s one of the vanishingly scarce stores in America which do fall colors and deep jewel tones, like Indian formalwear, instead of those sickly pastels which look terrible on desis
• Its fabrics are beautifully textured, like sherwanis, so subtle details appear upon closer inspection
• It does dramatic tapered cuts rather than the shapeless American box cut; it’s the only non-designer store where I can get any semblance of a V-shape and waist
• It sells at mass-market prices

Fortune has smiled upon Zara. It’s growing fast, has made its founder Amancio Ortega Spain’s richest man, and is taught as a case study at Harvard b-school. The Economist compliments its speed:

Zara is the world’s fastest-growing retailer... Zara can make a new line from start to finish in three weeks, against an industry average of nine months. It produces 10,000 new designs each year; none stays in the stores for over a month. Jose Maria Castellano Rios, the firm’s chief executive... rather prosaically compares the shelf life of a new frock to that of a tub of yoghurt... Whereas most retailers have committed 60% of their production at the start of a season, the figure at Zara is 15%, so it is easier to dump a range that turns out to be unpopular...

Forbes extolls Zara’s daily sales reporting:

We happened to be in a big Zara outlet in Madrid as it was closing. As final sales were rung up and customers were being shooed out of the store, salespersons equipped with wireless handsets were communicating inventory levels to the store manager, who in turn was using his internet-connected phone line to pass the numbers on to both the design/order and distribution departments in La Coruña. The same thing happens at closing time at all the other 449 Zara stores...

However, while Zara carries clubwear and upscale autumns with attitude, it also spends a lot of square footage on ratty Madrid casual. It designs for skinny hipsters, maxing out at a U.S. medium (42 chest) and labeling it XL. Its rapid turnover and breadth-centric manufacturing often leaves its stores short of supply and sizes. It doesn’t have the real-time inventory database in the store to tell customers which stores have scarce items in stock. And it’s got poor availability in the U.S., with no West Coast stores and no online shopping.

Someone please clone this store, quick. The number of dark-haired people in the U.S. (black, Latino, Asian, desi) is enormous and growing. Zara with a more desi-friendly line and deeper supply chain could be an absolute gold mine.

Also focusing on the underserved dark-haired, olive-skinned market is fellow Berkeley grad Lubna Khalid’s startup, Real Cosmetics:

A part-time model in high school, Lubna, a Pakistani-American, was unable to find foundations and powders to match her skin tone. There were no consumer products in stores, and even professional make-up artists had difficulty mixing realistic skin shades. Lubna noted a conspicuous lack of cosmetics designed for women who did not fit neatly into typical categories of beauty and skin color... After graduating from U.C. Berkeley in 1997, where she majored in business and ethnic studies, Lubna gathered classic marketing experience at Proctor & Gamble.