 |
|
|
|||||
Few brands have been more associated with the fast-fashion boom of the last two decades than Zara, the flagship apparel chain owned by Spanish clothing giant Inditex SA. It may surprise some consumers to learn, then, that Zara has in fact reduced its global footprint over the last few years since the pandemic. The brands decline in physical storefronts has been moderate but meaningful, from a third-quarter peak of around 2,139 stores in 2019 to just under 1,800 stores five years later, according to earnings statements from Inditex. Thats a reduction of 16%. Now, thanks to new accounting metrics from the company, weve learned that Zaras physical footprint is even smaller than we thought. Earlier this year, Inditex began breaking out store count numbers for Lefties, its discount chain. Lefties is small but growing. According to earnings data posted earlier this month, the chain had 213 global locations as of the third quarter of 2025, up from 203 locations from the same period last year. What’s more, Lefties stores had previously been counted as Zara stores in Inditex earnings reports, a spokesperson confirmed with Fast Company. That means Zara’s reported store count is now lower than it had been in earlier filings: Under the new metrics, it had just 1,528 stores as of October 31. Amaya Guillermo, who heads corporate communications for Zara USA, says the decline reflects a shift toward Inditex’s “optimization plan,” which began several years ago. “Under this strategy, smaller stores have been absorbed into larger, upgraded locations,” Guillermo said. “Creating distinctive retail spaces allows us to enhance the customer experience by incorporating the latest in-store technologies, including assisted checkouts, among many other features.” Guillermo further points out that while Inditex has fewer stores, its commercial space grew by 2% as of 2024, with sales up almost 5.9% that same year. Inditex’s stock price reflects the appeal of its more-with-less strategy among investors. Madrid-listed shares of the group have more than doubled over the last five years. window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}); Where have Zara locations closed? Inditex breaks down Zara location counts by country in its annual reports each year. Comparing 2024 figures to 2017 reveals some interesting trends. The brand’s store count has declined in many of its core European markets, including its home country of Spain, where it reported 256 stores in 2024 compared to 306 in 2017. It has also seen declines in France, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe. Perhaps the most dramatic decline has been China, where Inditex reported just 73 Zara stores in 2024, compared to 183 in 2017. Zara’s store count has also grown in some markets over that same period, including the United States, where it reported 98 stores as of last year versus 87 in 2017. According to Guillermo, the United States remains a key market for Zara, with recent openings at the Las Vegas Forum Shops at Caesars Palace and in Charlotte, North Carolina. Could Lefties be the new Zara? Lefties is not new, but Inditex clearly sees the fast-growing chain as vital to a future. The brand began in the 1990s as an outlet for Zara “leftovers”hence the namebut it has become more popular and more important to Inditex’s portfolio as consumers have grown increasingly price conscious. With Gen Z shoppers flocking to ultra-cheap online platforms like Shein, Lefties has been called Inditex’s “secret weapon.” While store counts for Lefties are now broken out separately, sales are still reported as part of Zara’s overall sales. As of now, the Lefties chain operates in 18 countries, mostly in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Expect that number to grow in the years ahead.
Category:
E-Commerce
TikTok has signed agreements with three major investors Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to form a new TikTok U.S. joint venture, ensuring the popular social video platform can continue operating in the United States.The deal is expected to close on Jan. 22, according to an internal memo seen by The Associated Press. In the communication, CEO Shou Zi Chew confirmed to employees that ByteDance and TikTok signed the binding agreements with the consortium.“I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued dedication and tireless work. Your efforts keep us operating at the highest level and will ensure that TikTok continues to grow and thrive in the U.S. and around the world,” Chew wrote in the memo to employees. “With these agreements in place, our focus must stay where it’s always beenfirmly on delivering for our users, creators, businesses and the global TikTok community.”Half of the new TikTok U.S. joint venture will be owned by a group of investors among them Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX, who will each hold a 15% share. 19.9% of the new app will be held by ByteDance itself, and another 30.1% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors, according to the memo. The memo did not say who the other investors are and both TikTok and the White House declined to comment.The U.S. venture will have a new, seven-member majority-American board of directors, the memo said. It will also be subject to terms that “protect Americans’ data and U.S. national security.”U.S. user data will be stored locally in a system run by Oracle. The memo said U.S. users will continue “enjoying the same experience as today” and advertisers will continue to serve global audiences with no impact from the deal.TikTok’s algorithm the secret sauce that powers its addictive video feed will be retrained on U.S. user data to “ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” the memo said. The U.S. venture will also oversee content moderation and policies within the country.American officials have previously warned that ByteDance’s algorithm is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect.The algorithm has been a central issue in the security debate over TikTok. China previously maintained the algorithm must remain under Chinese control by law. But the U.S. regulation passed with bipartisan support said any divestment of TikTok must mean the platform cuts ties specifically the algorithm with ByteDance.The deal marks the end of years of uncertainty about the fate of the popular video-sharing platform in the United States. After wide bipartisan majorities in Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed a law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. if it did not find a new owner in the place of China’s ByteDance, the platform was set to go dark on the law’s January 2025 deadline. For a several hours, it did. But on his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep it running while his administration tries to reach an agreement for the sale of the company.Three more executive orders followed, as Trump, without a clear legal basis, continued to extend the deadline for a TikTok deal. The second was in April, when White House officials believed they were nearing a deal to spin off TikTok into a new company with U.S. ownership that fell apart after China backed out following Trump’s tariff announcement. The third came in June, then another in September, which Trump said would allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States in a way that meets national security concerns.TikTok has more than 170 million users in the U.S. About 43% of U.S. adults under the age of 30 say they regularly get news from TikTok, higher than any other social media app including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, according to a Pew Research Center report published this fall.Shares of Oracle jumped $9.07, or 5%, to $189.10 in after-hours trading. Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
Thank you once again for reading Fast Companys Plugged In. A quick programming note: We will be taking the next two Fridays off. Happy holidays to all, and I look forward to resurfacing in your inbox next year. For any number of reasons, 2025 has hardly been my favorite year. But if I were to make a list of things that went well, my relationship with AI would be on it. This was the year I went from being an AI dabbler to a daily user. And while some of that usage still amounts to messing aroundhello, Sora!even more involves tasks that make me more productive. More importantly, it brings me better results, a goal I hold dear. (Sadly, not every AI enthusiast agrees.) Here, then, is a look at how Im using AI as 2025 winds down. I covered some of this ground in a September Plugged In. But since I wrote that, the technology has become even more core to my workflow, and my AI A-team has shifted pretty dramatically to Google products for the first time. So a year-end update seemed worthwhile. First, Ive finally figured out how to use chatbots such as OpenAIs ChatGPT, Anthropics Claude, and Googles Gemini as research tools. I remain wary of accepting anything they say as the truth, since AI still has a devious knack for hallucinating fantasies that sound like fact. But its dawned on me that I dont need to take AI at its word. Starting a research quest with a detailed AI prompt is often more effective than trying to boil it down into keywords of the sort I would have typed into a search engine in the past. And every self-respecting chatbot now provides citations for its work, at least when I ask for them. They lead to web pages written by actual humans, which are far easier to assess than wordage extruded by an LLM. After spending most of 2025 weaving between ChatGPT and Claude as my chatbot of choice, I was (mostly) wowed by the new Gemini 3 Pro-powered version of Gemini that debuted in November. Its become my default bot. But the frenzied pace of competition in the category argues against long-term loyalty: I need to spend more time with the new GPT-5.2 version of ChatGPT, which arrived last week. More than any garden-variety chatbot, I have found Googles NotebookLM utterly essential this year. Instead of trying to be an expert on human knowledge in its entirety, it just digests files you feed to it. Then it lets you ask questions about them and responds with startlingly useful summaries and citations. They frequently lead to insights I wouldnt have managed if left to my own devices, and have never mischaracterized anything or otherwise led me astray. For me, NotebookLM is most valuable as I spelunk through transcripts of the interviews that provide raw ingredients for articles I write. (In the case of our five-part oral history of YouTube, there were dozens of them, about 168,000 words in total.) For you, the source material might be internal documents, white papers, or something else relating to whatever youre working on. Either way, this free tool, like most of historys best software, is a bicycle for the mind. (Disclaimer: Im not talking about NotebookLMs best-known featurepodcast-like audio overview synthetic conversations based on your sources, which are an astounding magic trick but have never left me feeling smarter about a topic.) Finally on the AI good news front, theres vibe codingcoming up with ideas for apps and having AI do nearly all the work of turning them into functioning software. When 2025 started, it didnt even exist as a thing, at least under that name. Now I cant imagine working without it. That started back in April, when I used a vibe coding tool called Replit to build the note-taking app of my dreams. The project required dozens of hours of effort and hundreds of dollars in usage fees. But eight months later, I use the app I created every day, and it still makes me unreasonably happy. Lately, I have been vibe coding with Googles AI Studio, which is powered by Gemini 3 Pro. So far, the results have been less quirky and buggy than Replits sometimes are, making whipping up my own apps even more irresistible. Case in point: Last month, I bought a ScanSnap document scanner and soon discovered that its cloud service gave the resulting PDFs incomprehensible names. With Geminis help, I constructed a smart PDF-naming utility. It reads the files and renames them with clearer descriptions than Id write myself. Problem solved, in about 20 minutes. Too much AI in all the wrong places For all the ways AI speeded my work in 2025, its been far from an unalloyed blessing. Notably, all the tools I praise above are newish and AI-first. When existing products are retooled to emphasize AI, the technology often feels bolted on. Its not just that it isnt dependably helpful; sometimes, its an obstacle to progress. For example, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Gmail, and Outlook would all be delighted to compose text for me, a feature that has become as prominent an element of their user interfaces as the 58-year-old blinking cursor. I have no interest in turning that job over to them. And yet I cant ignore the various icons, widgets, and promos dedicated to these tools, which stare me in the face every time I sit down with these products. Its an ongoing mental tax levied for alleged benefits Id prefer to avoid. In other cases, its obvious that AI features have been rushed to market without sufficient quality control, as if the bragging rights for havng shipped them were all that mattered. I have learned to tamp down my expectations, or even assume that new functionality will perform as advertised at all. In August, for instance. I discovered that ChatGPTs new Agent feature couldnt perform some of the tasks in its own list of things I should try. It was also incapable of reliably determining the current date. A month later, I was intrigued enough by Perplexitys Email Assistant to briefly spring for a $200-per-month Perplexity Max account. I never got it up and running, in part because Perplexitys own explanation of its new tool was notably short on, you know, explanation. I might have felt less lost if it had just included a screenshot or two. Whether or not theres an AI bubble, the industry responsible for the technology is still in the process of confronting its legacy of overpromising and underdelivering. But with the good stuff getting really good, anything that fails to live up to its own hypeor simply meet reasonable standards of utilitywill only look more ridiculous. May the momentum recently seen in AI productivitys best products continue in 2026 and beyond. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company These sites and apps will help you assemble the perfect holiday reading listEven in the AI era, bookstores and online reading communities still rely heavily on human expertise and personal recommendations. Read More The Warner Bros.-Netflix merger could doom Hollywood film workersFor media moguls, maximizing shareholder value is the only metric that counts. Read More With Apples help, storytellers are figuring out Vision ProThe headset opens up immersive new opportunities for dramas, documentaries, music videos, and beyond. Some filmmakers and developers are diving right in. Read More Robinhood knows you want to trade on everythingPrediction markets boomed in 2025. Now Robinhood wants to cash in. Read More This guys obscure PhD project is the only thing standing between humanity and AI image chaosA virtual watermark thats nearly impossible to remove. Read More Deepfakes are no longer just a disinformation problem. They are your next supply chain riskMost companies are woefully unprepared, and the traditional cybersecurity playbook isnt enough. Read More
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||