Can Zara Be Fast. Cheap and Green?

Lightning-quick product releases and low prices propelled Zara to the top of the fashion industry. But the climate costs of "fast fashion" have become impossible to ignore. It will be up to Marta Ortega, the new head of Zara's parent company, to thread the needle.

- Vivienne Walt

ON THE VAST design floor of Zara, the world's biggest fashion retailer, banks of gleaming white desks stretch as far as the eye can see. Designers and cutters sit at their posts, poring over patterns and huddling in groups to discuss the day's business. Models hover, waiting to be summoned for fittings.

But some of the most crucial action takes place on a computer monitor fixed to a wall in a far corner. Its screen features blurry photos of garments, with numbers that flash upward precisely every three minutes, like times on an airport departure board. The figures-real-time data have zipped in from hundreds of stores worldwide, ranking each garment by sales so far that day. "Every morning, everybody, no matter what job they do, the first thing we do is check the sales," says Annalisa Conti, a design team head at Zara Woman. "Everybody arrives, gets a seat, and we sit together and look at the sales."

That stream of data is key to keeping Inditex-Zara's parent company, a $33-billion-revenue juggernautatop the industry it helped invent in the 1970s: fast fashion. Founder Amancio Ortega launched Zara in A Coruña, a small port city on Spain's windswept Atlantic coast, picking the new company's name at random. Decades on, the brand accounts for nearly 74% of Inditex's mammoth revenues and has made Ortega (who owns about 59% of Inditex) one of the world's richest people.