Dive Brief:

• Spanish fast-fashion company Inditex, owner of Zara, reported earnings for the first five weeks of its financial year Wednesday that beat expectations and overshadowed many competitors’ results.

• Sales at Inditex brands rose 15% during the period, boosted by sales of Zara's spring collection. 

• The retailer opened 330 stores globally in 56 markets in 2015, and currently runs 7,013 stores. But CEO Pablo Isla said in a conference call Wednesday that it would slow its store openings to focus on building up its e-commerce and omnichannel operations, a move that analysts hailed according to Reuters.

Dive Insight:

Zara’s name comes up a lot in discussions about apparel retail, mostly because the company continues to shrug off the many challenges faced by rivals, including slow traffic and minimal shopper interest.  

There are several reasons Zara so often escapes, and above all is its supply chain. The retailer, which invented fast fashion and continues to master it, runs most of its own factories and controls most of the supply chain. This helps Zara order up small batches of inventory on the fly and get them into stores in record time. That approach—small batches, record time—helps it adjust more quickly to phenomena like warm weather at the holidays, which tripped up many apparel retailers and left them with winter gear on racks well into January.

For the past several months, Zara’s European production base has also allowed it to avoid the profit-eating effects of the strong dollar that hits retailers sourcing their goods in Asia, where the dollar is the prevailing currency for business.

And by the sounds of it, Zara is also on top of the need for omnichannel and sees no strict lines between e-commerce and stores. Allowing returns of online orders in stores has actually helped, Isla told analysts.

"In many cases this is an online return but a store sale because the customer goes to the store to change the size," he said. "The business is integrated from every point of view."