UNIQLO ENTERING SPAIN, WILLING TO BE BIGGER THAN INDITEX
UNIQLO is a casual wear designer, manufacturer and retailer. The company has a leading position in Japan which is growing in the Asian market and willing to expand internationally. Indeed, UNIQLO has recently opened its first store in Barcelona and it wants to expand in Spain through entering Madrid as next step.
The Japanese leader is willing to compete with Amancio Ortega’s Zara. UNIQLO founder says: “We want to be bigger than Spain’s Inditex”. The company is willing to get over Inditex through supplying its stores with the latest fashion and getting customer-made products to shoppers. Moreover, it plans to shorten the time it takes from design to delivery, being even faster than Zara.
UNIQLO is able to compete with Inditex mainly due to its similar management of the supply chain. Indeed, the Japanese retailer has adopted “Toyota’s Just-in time inventory procurement”. UNIQLO’s CEO said: “We approach clothes as an industrial product. We figured that since Japan is good at making things like cars and electronics, we should use that knowledge.”
Thus, following JIT production system has led the company to reduce significantly its levels of inventory in the supply chain. In fact, they are able to apply this system, because they analyze sales patterns every week. This enables the company to supply clothes just before customers need them. So knowing exactly what consumer will need reduces highly the costs of storage as it usually does not over-order.
Moreover, the key of UNIQLO is their highly fast supply chain. Even though they have really high-technology systems to predict demand, in case they do the wrong predictions they are able to manufacture new clothes almost instantly.
Indeed, in case they produce a type of clothes that are not accepted by consumers they are able to reproduce another type of model recycling the same clothes. For example, in case they produce jumpers which go out of fashion, they might be able to convert those into scarves.
Finally, they do very strict inventory controls in order to ensure there is no inventory left. So to do it, the commerce and marketing department work together to sell out the entire inventory. One of their strategies is to special sales periods, 20-30% discounts over the clothes they want to sell out.
Carla Casas
REFERENCES
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario