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Hi friends,

Here are 3 ideas, 2 quotes, and 1 question from the story of Zara.

Inditex did €38.6 billion in revenue last year across 5,563 stores in 97 countries, at a 57.8% gross margin and around 20% operating margin. Its founder is worth something in the region of $108 billion.

It does almost no advertising. No campaigns, no celebrity faces, no shouting. The window is the advertisement.

Most fashion runs forwards: design a collection months ahead of the season, manufacture it, ship it, then find out whether you guessed correctly.

Zara runs it backwards. Small initial batches go to stores, the stores report what is actually selling within days, and production chases demand that already exists rather than demand somebody forecast a year earlier.

The result is that Zara is rarely wrong about what to make, because it doesn't decide until customers have already said. Guessing is replaced by listening — and the entire supply chain exists to make the listening fast enough to act on.

This is Principle 1 of 10 in the full Inditex playbook →

The engine has started running in reverse.

Velocity was the moat. Shein now moves faster on a lower cost base, and the speed that let Zara beat traditional retail is being used against it from underneath. At the same time the model's arithmetic — volume, turnover, disposability — has become the first thing regulators and customers ask about.

A company built on being fastest eventually has to answer what happens when somebody is faster, and whether the speed was ever the good part.

"Our business model is the opposite of the traditional model. Instead of designing a collection long before the season, and then working out whether clients like it or not, we try to understand what our customers like, and then we design it and produce it."

— Pablo Isla, former Chairman and CEO of Inditex

"Bear in mind that for us, diversification is key. We are producing in almost 50 different markets with non-exclusive suppliers so we are more than used to adapt ourselves to change."

— Óscar García Maceiras, CEO, Inditex, BBC interview, May 2025

One question: What are you forecasting that you could be measuring instead?

Cheers,
Alex

P.S. Every issue distills one playbook from the Research Library — 810 of history's greatest people and companies, sourced.

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