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Zara has opened its first ever store designed primarily for ordering and collecting of online orders.
The store will be open until May at London’s Westfield Stratford shopping centre, while the chain’s flagship store in the centre is refurbished and extended.
The flagship store is being doubled in size to 4,500 square metres. When it reopens in May, it will feature a new store concept focused on technology with an aim to transform the customer shopping experience.
The pop-up store spans nearly 200 square metres and offers a select choice of women’s and men’s clothing for online purchase directly in-store, along with the rest of the brand’s fashion range.
Store staff will be on hand with mobile devices to assist customers, who will be given the choice of receiving their orders within the same day, if placed before 2pm, or the next day, if placed in the afternoon. The store will also handle returns and exchanges.
The pop-up store will also have a product recommendation system based on information screens embedded into mirrors.
When customers scan an item using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, the system can bring up, in the right size, multiple choices for coordinating and combining the item they are trying on with other garments and accessories.
Once refurbished and reopened, the flagship Westfield store will add a dedicated area for the collection of online orders.
Pablo Isla chairman and CEO of Zara’s parent company, Inditex, said that both concepts marked “another milestone in [Zara’s] strategy of integrating [its] stores with the online world, which defines [its] identity as a business”.
