Zara opens world-first online-focused store at Westfield Stratford

Zara has opened a temporary store at Westfield Stratford focused primarily on the ordering and collecting of online orders.

This is the first Zara store of its kind in the world and has been put in place while the global fashion giant completes the refurbishment and extension of its 4,500 sqm store at the supermall, which is due to open in May and which will feature a number of technological innovations and design features.

In the meantime the radical new digital-format store has been put in place and has been designed to transform the customer shopping experience. Chairman and CEO of Zara parent Pablo Isla said its opening marked “another milestone in our strategy of integrating our stores with the online world, which defines our identity as a business”.

The facade of the temporary pop-up

The pop-up store spans nearly 200 sqm 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 on the same day, if the order is placed before 2pm, or the next day, if placed in the afternoon. Payments are made via Bluetooth-enabled terminal.

Among other innovations, this pop-up store boasts a product recommendation system based on information screens embedded into mirrors. Once 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.

The newly expanded Stratford store will be another world-first and will also seek to bridge the online and offline worlds. The store will be the first to feature four sections, men's, women's, kids and a space dedicated to the collection of online orders.

A hi-tech, newly expanded store is a work in progress

A new interior design will also be introduced for the two-storey façade which is without windows on the first floor, providing a completely transparent view of the store's architectural features and the collections. The glass façade on the second floor will be equipped with a number of sensors which will project images from the current collections onto the glass when shoppers approach it.

An automated online order collection point serviced by two small warehouses will enable shoppers to pick up purchases made on www.zara.com whenever it suits them. This system is designed around an optical barcode reader which scans the QR code or accepts the PIN codes received by customers when they place orders online. In just a few seconds, it delivers the order to a mailbox from which the customer can collect it. Behind the scenes, a dynamic robot moves through a small warehouse with the capacity to handle 2,400 packages simultaneously.

Store customers will be able to pay using their mobile phones, via either the Zara app or the Inditex Group app, InWallet, and there will also be a self-checkout area to complement the regular cashier desks, which will speed up the payment process. This system will automatically identify the garments being purchased so that customers only have to confirm their items on a screen before using their card or mobiles to pay for them. Then they can choose to print out their receipts or store them automatically in their mobile handsets.