Such improvements are growing more urgent. Arguing that fast fashion’s explosive growth has exacerbated the climate impact of apparel in general, they have begun pressing for change. “It is why this company survives.”īut that core-high speed, big volume, low prices-is also deeply damaging to the planet in the view of environmentalists, labor activists, climate scientists, and a growing number of governments.

So how important is the fast turnaround? “For us, it is the core,” she says.

New styles arrive at stores twice a week, which draws millions to walk inside simply to look at the ever-changing show, or perhaps for impulse purchases at modest prices.

Then a batch is ordered from Inditex factories, with final garments shipped about three weeks later. Conti (who calls Zara a “fast-fashion brand”) says designers scour Instagram, the streets, and nightclubs, and quiz store managers around the world to discern what people are wearing, then whip up patterns “in a couple of days.” Within days after that, cutters sew prototypes, testing them on real live models. Inditex eschews the term “fast fashion,” preferring “affordable fashion.” But this is affordable fashion at warp speed: More than 90% of the clothes Zara sells are created here, on the design floor, by Zara’s 350 designers and 160 patternmakers. (The company does not disclose those figures publicly.) By some estimates, Zara sells a head-spinning 450 million items a year-about 856 every minute, round the clock, with Conti’s teams creating about 1,000 designs a month. Its campus, too, has doubled in size, and features a giant crater where a new wing is being built. Zara, which has 1,946 stores in 95 countries, could yet tap other markets, despite nearly doubling its revenue since Fortune last visited 10 years ago. “We have complete confidence in our ability to grow our unique business model,” CEO Oscar García Maceiras cooed to analysts. They would have been even higher had Inditex not shut 502 stores in Russia and 84 in Ukraine after Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine those two countries contributed 9.6% of earnings before interest and tax. On the rainy September morning when Fortune visited Conti’s design team at Inditex headquarters in Arteixo, just outside A Coruña, execs gathered in the same building and announced that net income for the first half of 2022 had shot up 41% over the year-earlier period, to $1.9 billion, and that gross profit margins were the highest for the period in seven years. No matter that Europe faces a winter of power shortages and sky-high prices or that the pandemic has mangled the world’s supply of raw materials. These days, the data seems to defy reality. Decades on, the brand accounts for nearly 74% of Inditex’s mammoth revenues and has made Ortega (who owns about 59% of Inditex) one of the world’s richest people. Founder Amancio Ortega launched Zara in A Coruña, a small port city on Spain’s windswept Atlantic coast, picking the new company’s name at random. That stream of data is key to keeping Inditex-Zara’s parent company, a $33-billion-revenue juggernaut-atop the industry it helped invent in the 1970s: fast fashion. “Everybody arrives, gets a seat, and we sit together and look at the sales.” “Every morning, everybody, no matter what job they do, the first thing we do is check the sales,” says Annalisa Conti, a design team head at Zara Woman. The figures-real-time data-have zipped in from hundreds of stores worldwide, ranking each garment by sales so far that day. Its screen features blurry photos of garments, with numbers that flash upward precisely every three minutes, like times on an airport departure board. But some of the most crucial action takes place on a computer monitor fixed to a wall in a far corner.

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