RECOMMENDATIONS

We recommend that Zara should adopt this trend, integrating it through The Upcycling Movement. The Upcycling Movement will be a collection that incorporates sustainability throughout the production, to care and disposal of the products; to aim to make our planet more environmentally friendly in order to help tackle the worldwide issue of climate change. This collection will include a variety of different garments and accessories, that have been made through the use of recycled fabrics and will be a development in addition to Zara’s ‘Join Life Collection’. This trend is relevant to Zara’s brand because sustainability through clothing manufacture and purchase is now seen as a ‘must’ from customers, evidently proven within ‘Industry Report 1’ were individuals voted for sustainable fashion, as people now have more knowledge on climate change and the impact the fashion industry contributes towards the carbon footprint, it is essential Zara follow a sustainable approach to please the environmentally conscious consumer, reducing detrimental emissions and landfill also through this process. Customers purchasing this range will have a sense of self-satisfaction as the items purchased are environmentally friendly. The buyers of Zara are young, price-conscious and highly sensitive to the latest trends in fashion. The customer is at the heart of our unique business model, which includes design, production, distribution and sales through our extensive retail network (Zara, 2020). This outlines how Zara's main value is their consumers and through every process from start to finish the consumer in the main focus in mind and these values create practical and fashionable clothes that make their customers happy in every way by using renewable resources. By following this trend, not only Zara’s existing consumers will purchase more sustainable items, but this will also draw new consumers in as this brand concept will bring interest towards the fashion-conscious consumer. As mentioned in the Industry Report 3 analysis, Zara can use a recycling service in order to get additional fabrics to use within The Upcycling Movement. This will bring more hype to the brand as people who contribute will feel like they are helping the environment through their small contribution, ‘If a multitude of people made alterations to their personal habits, the collective impact could be substantial’ (Miller, 2015), this mirrors how a little can come a long way regarding environmental change, therefore, other people will begin to follow these actions creating a positive effect on the environment. The customers who donate recycled items, will be rewarded with a discount code to use within the collection, raising the hype of the brand, spreading awareness and more people will want to join in in order to earn these rewards and will therefore want to make a positive impact. As Zara’s target consumer are 18-35 year old middle class individuals, there may be an issue with younger people investing within the movement as of the collections exclusivity, the prices set will be higher than the average product, however, the discount service may help battle this factor, also the graph on the left depicts how millennial's, 'The Green Generation', would pay more for products that have the least negative impact on the environment by 31%. Currently Zara is “highly focused on making clothing in a responsible, sustainable way that limits the impact on the environment" (Carmen Busquets, 2019). Zara’s goals are to sustainably produce fabrics, for stores to become eco-efficient, recycle packaging or find green alternatives, creation of an instore recycling donation program and to launch its eco-conscious Join Life collection (Holgate, 2019). Zara has also remained faithful to its core values, expressed simply in the same four key words that define all our stores and online platforms: beauty, clarity, functionality and sustainability (Inditex, 2020). However, Zara focuses on the distribution of their products and turnover of their products and getting items to their customers, this needs to change by steering away from bulk fast fashion as a brand and using a closed loop system, using more recycled fibres where possible in addition to this, for instance, textiles made from orange peel (refer to Editorial Report 2). By doing this, the brand will gain a good reputation and be seen as trustworthy and more affluent, gaining the brand many more opportunities within the future. Other brands will follow these steps in order to make a positive change to the environment for the foreseeable future.