Zara enters/should enter/should not enter India - Part 3

There are alredy 2 blogs written on this topic earlier. Assuming you’ve read them already, I’ll not waste time on the technicalities of the Zara model, and get to the point.

Should Zara (really) enter India or not? If you look at it in that sense, perhaps every other international brand should enter India. And why not? A sizable part of the population of India is under 30 years of age; disposable incomes are rising, so are aspirations, living standards, customer awareness, and all the economic lingo stuff.

But that’s not the point. Just because things are getting better in an economy doesn’t mean that we have graduated to any other brand/product in the world. As a primer to this statement, lets take the example of a microwave. I think about 7-8 years ago, microwaves were first introduced in India. I really don’t know when, but what I do know is that consumer acceptance of that product wasn’t exactly high. For any American, a microwave is a necessity. Probably an American can live without a stove for a while, but not a microwave. That clearly didn’t happen in India. Heating cold food and feeding it to the children was like a disgrace on a mother’s part.

Today, after such a long time, things are changing aren’t they? And mind you, they’re still in the changing mode. Microwaves still haven’t received absolute acceptance even after giving the consumer so much amount of time to graduate to one.

Same goes for Zara. We as Indians used to wear only traditional dhotis and salwaar-kamiz 80 odd years ago. The transition to the western clothing apparently began during the British rule. So firstly in absolute numbers we’re about 300 years behind the Europeans as far as fashion for western clothing goes.

Think about it; even today, if you wear your dad’s shirt and go out, no one would be able to point out that this is an ‘old cut’. The cuts, the stitching techniques have remained the same since a really really long time.

Think about women’s formals for instance. There’s an extremely short range of women formal shirts available in India. And mind you, I’m talking about the design and cuts, not the color of the shirt.

To put it in simple mathematical sense, this is how the 2 ideologies differ:

For Indian Fashion Industry its –
few cuts x lots of color variations

For the Zara Model its –
many cuts x very few color variations

And even if we take colors as a basis, even that sadly isn’t our strongpoint. We were shades of red in summer and wear shades of yellow during winter.

We wear linen in winter sometimes and synthetic materials in summers as well.

There’s no synchrony in us as far as colors, shades, cuts, fabrics go. We wear whatever we feel looks good on us. Every season, has its own shade, color swatch, designs, cuts etc. etc. We’re never so detailed as far as these attributed go. And the Europeans are extremely fetish about these minor details; the same way we’re fetish about cricket maybe.

Also, India follows a 2 season process; Summer/spring collection & winter/monsoon collection. While in Europe there are 4 different collections released for all the 4 different seasons.

Also, I don’t know how many of the readers have seen a Zara store, but Zara doesn’t play with colors a lot. It plays with cuts. And to save on its supply chain costs, you wont find colors other than white, black, grey, cream, red and a few more. Their color swatch is extremely limited, and their design swatch is much higher than an average Indian apparel outlet. You really think Indians will gladly buy only base colors and wear them, when they have so many other vibrant colors being offered by other apparel retailers?

Mango, one of the leading fashion wear brand for urban women has a few stores in India. The collection that it keeps on the Indian stores is one season old already in the International markets.

After reading all this some might see this as a drawback in us Indians, that we’re not so sensitive towards colors and cuts etc; that we haven’t graduated to these details like others have. But honestly are we supposed to graduate? Were shirts and trousers a part of our cultural heritage? We have our own saaris and salwar kameez. That’s where our forte lies. And that’s precisely the reason why Zara originated in Spain and not some shady town in India.

Zara has not been quite a success in the US, and for the simple reason that an average USUS, not in Europe. citizen wants clothing that is completely relaxed, functional and rugged. That’s why jeans were invented in the

Europe has its own fashion, US has its denim jeans, India has its bandhani.

Its seriously wrong for any of us to expect to graduate to the fashion sense that Europeans have. Simply because their definition of fashion is different than ours.

In Gujarati, there’s a saying, ‘gaam khase ke gaadu?’ (should the village move or the bullock cart?)

P.S. Thanks a lot to Sharimbal Kanishk (ex-Globus merchandiser & a NIFT grad) for all the info on Indian Fashion Industry.