ZARA manufactures 60% of its products. By owning its in-house production ZARA is able to be flexible in the amount, frequency, and variety of new styled products. ZARA has outsourced less manufacturing than its peers. It has 22 factories and runs many of them often only in one shift leaving extra capacity to respond quickly to seasonality and unforeseen demand. Comparing to peers which rely heavily on overseas suppliers/manufactures which don’t provide same flexibility as these suppliers could request orders to be placed few months in advance.
Zara is outsourcing all the labour intensive tasks mainly the sewing, while the cutting is done in-house. This produces of saving labour cost, flexibility of meeting deadlines, keeping the designs/fashions strictly controlled.