In the beginning of the year and in summer season, is produced the biggest movement of products between seller and consumer, this is the sales period. Nowadays, with sales on internet, this movement increase considerably. I want to focus on textile sector, more concretely in Zara, from Inditex.

Zara is one of the largest international fashion companies. It belongs to Inditex, one of the world’s largest distribution groups with eight brands (Zara, Pull&Bear, Bershka, Stradivarius, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Zara Home and Uterqüe) and 7504 stores in 94 markets around the world, of which 2266 are Zara shops. The customer is at the heart of their unique business model, which includes design, production, distribution and sales through their extensive retail network.

In last winter sales period I went shopping and I thought about the big logistic organization must exists in order to supply the needs and requests of customers in shops and online orders.

When you buy a product in Zara webpage you can choose the store in which you are going to pick up your purchase. In my case, my delivery would be in Valladolid, city with 5 Zara stores, then I get a question, the delivery time will be the same if you choose any store in the same city? or on the contrary, does it depend on the store you choose?

This both previous questions make me think about more issues:

• How they plan which product must be delivered in one store or another?
• All the products which are delivered to the same city come from the same warehouse? If this is not the case, what is the meeting point to gather all the products?
• Are they shipped in the same truck?
• If a store has more order volume, do they get the orders quickly due to transportation costs will be lower since the transport truck will be full?
• Exists movement of products directly between stores or they must go to warehouses firstly?

In order to answer some of these questions, you can see the following video, where is explained that the suppliers send their merchandise to their distribution center in Spain and from there, all of these clothes are distributed to each of their stores around the world. Distribution is done twice a week and in this way what they achieve by this is that what is being offered in the stores is constantly updated.

Inditex has 10 logistics centers located in Spain, close to the head offices of our eight brands. Most production is also carried out in proximity, cutting travel distances, and reducing energy consumption and emissions.

Their logistics centers are next ones: Arteixo (A Coruña), Cabanillas del Campo (Guadalajara), Elche (Alicante), Meco (Madrid), Narón (A Coruña), Onzonilla del Campo (León), Palafolls (Barcelona), Sallent (Barcelona), Tordera (Barcelona) y Zaragoza.

You can find more information about Inditex logistics in the link below:

https://www.inditex.com/how-we-do-business/our-model/logistics

Of course, this information is not enough to answer all the questions in detail, because it is more concrete and specific of the internal management of the company.

Zara is an example, but all the questions proposed can be applied for other companies which distribute a lot of different products to stores located throughout different places in the world with several stores in the same city.

Sources:

https://www.inditex.com/