Amazon Vs Zara

Will Spanish Fast Fashion or American Big Data win the battle for control of the new us$1.5 trillion high street fashion market?

- John Arlidge

On the blissed-out Seattle winter sunshine, the glass and steel conservatories – known as The Spheres – that mark the entrance to Amazon’s head office seem to sweep you up off the pavement with the promise of a glimpse into the future – and a good time. It is 9am and battalions of Amazonians, laptops and lattes in hand, head into Day 1 Building – it’s always Day 1 at Amazon, to remind workers that rest is for wimps. Once inside, they slice and dice the quadrillions of bytes of consumer data that surge through the retail giant’s servers and crash on to our mobile phones, computers and smart speakers, and encourage us to shop, shop and then shop some more. ‘People who bought this also bought...’ It’s optimistic, infectious stuff.

Walk the few blocks to Pine Street, Seattle’s main drag, and the mood is very different. The Westlake Center is so quiet that entering a shop feels like intruding on the retailer’s private grief. In Nordstrom Rack it’s 60 per cent off the designer gear that Nordstrom’s flagship store two blocks away could not shift. The only shop doing brisk full-price trade is Spain’s Zara.

It might not look like it, but this corner of Seattle is ground zero in the biggest battle in fashion – an epic global struggle that will determine the future of the high street. Not the battle between bricks-and-mortar and clicks – Amazon and other e-tailers have already won that, as the dismal Christmas trading figures from Marks & Spencer, Debenhams and House of Fraser in the UK showed. This is the battle for the new high street; part bricks, part clicks. And there are only two contenders for the US$1.5 trillion prize – that’s the global annual value of all clothing and footwear sales, online and bricks-and-mortar, excluding ‘high fashion’, according to Euromonitor International.