Zara’s Elevation Push Lands in London

Zara’s Bond Street flagship has an upscale new look.

The 3,185-square-metre store on the corner of London’s Oxford Street and New Bond Street, which reopened Thursday after a five-month renovation, is the latest example of Zara’s steady effort to elevate its image and customer experience.

Larger front windows allow in more natural light. The ceilings have been lifted, giving Zara’s revamped store a more open feeling, while earth tones and textured materials like wood and stone dominate the walls and fixtures. There are also more fitting rooms, a larger selling floor and new tech-enabled checkout counters intended to reduce long queues.

“Our main focus when we were designing the store is how the customer can really enjoy the experience,” said Pilar Losada, UK country manager for Zara’s parent company, Inditex. “The street is quite busy, so in this kind of store, the customer demands a bigger space.”

Larger spaces in prime locations have been key to Zara’s strategy in recent years. Since 2022, the company has reduced the number of Zara stores, including Zara Home, from about 2,000 locations globally to around 1,500, while total selling space has grown in the same period, according to company filings. The brand has also been refurbishing its top stores, creating a more experiential, upmarket environment as it strives to differentiate itself from cut-price disruptors like Shein and attract shoppers priced out by luxury players over the past few years.

The approach appears to be working. “The strategy has been extremely successful with higher sales density and the nicer store locations and store environment giving Zara more ability … to stretch the price architecture to higher price points,” Adam Cochrane, analyst at Deutsche Bank Research, wrote in an email.

That success was evident this week as Inditex reported that currency-adjusted sales in the quarter through April grew 8.8 percent from the prior year to reach €8.7 billion ($10.1 billion), beating analysts’ estimates. In May, sales growth accelerated to 11.5 percent, though partly because of favourable calendar effects.

The company may find it hard to maintain that level of performance, but Zara, which accounts for roughly 70 percent of group sales, continues to attract shoppers with its more refined image and improved customer experience.

Technology is vital to that endeavour. In the newly refurbished Bond Street store, all the clothing is outfitted with radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags, which can be quickly read by sensors. They allow the self-checkout tills to know exactly what a customer wants to purchase without them having to scan items individually, the fitting rooms to know which items a customer has brought in and store associates to more easily determine what needs to be replenished on the shop floor.

There is also a machine Zara calls “the sorter” that runs on a track and whisks items on their hangers from the fitting room to the stock room, where they can be sorted and then, if needed, put back on the sales floor more efficiently. It’s also used for new deliveries. According to Losada, all the technology lets staff spend less time on tedious tasks and more time helping shoppers.

“It’s changing [the] employee and customer experience,” she said. “It’s changing everything.”