Zara’s Three Sister Brands Exit Chinese Market

A staff member sorts clothes inside a clothing store of Inditex's Zara brand at a newly opened shopping mall in Beijing, China on April 16, 2021. (Tingshu Wang/Reuters)

The three sister brands of Spanish Fast Fashion brand ZARA: Bershka, Pull&Bear, and Stradivarius, recently announced they will officially withdraw from the Chinese market by the end of this month, joining an ongoing wave of international fashion giants withdrawing their operations from China.

Bershka, Pull&Bear, and Stradivarius, under ZARA’s parent company Inditex, issued closure announcements in their respective e-commerce flagship shops, announcing that from July 31, their official flagship online stores on Alibaba’s Tmall platform will stop selling the brands’ collections, and the brands’ online customer service and brand customer service hotline will close after Aug. 31.

Inditex has not yet released a public statement regarding the matter.

Publicly available information showed that Bershka, Pull&Bear, and Stradivirus had already started closing around 50 stores across China between 2016 and 2019. According to Chinese media reports, the three brands closed the last of their stores earlier this year.

Other multinational fast fashion giants like H&M and Uniqlo have also experienced a slowdown in development in the China market and have also closed some stores. In addition, fast-fashion brands such as Superdry, Old Navy, and C&A have exited China.

The parent company of fast fashion giant Uniqlo revealed in its Fiscal Year 2022 interim report that Uniqlo has temporarily closed 133 shops in the Greater China region after declining sales revenue in the Chinese market.

This May, Danish fashion group Bestseller—the first of its kind to enter the Chinese fashion market—announced that it would close all 1,300 retail shops of its retailer Selected in China by July 31 this year.

The Bestseller group is one of the largest fashion groups in Europe with more than 20 individual fashion brands.

Also, on March 31 this year, Swedish retail giant H&M’s sister brand MONKI closed its official Tmall flagship store and the entire brand was taken off the shelves on April 1.

The 2021 Xinjiang forced labor incident was a turning point in H&M’s development in China. In 2020, H&M issued a statement saying that it does not work with any garment manufacturing factories in Xinjiang nor source products or raw materials from the region, responding to reports and allegations of Uyghur forced labor. A number of major fashion brands had also issued statements for similar reasons.

H&M has been suppressed by the Chinese authorities for the above statement, with its online platforms censored, and was fined by Chinese regulators at least eight times in 2021. Internal trolls pushed campaigns encouraging customers to boycott the company. For the second half of 2021 onwards, H&M began to close down a series of its shops in China. This culminated in it closing its three-storey flagship store in Shanghai on June 24. The store was the first to open in the country 15 years ago.

H&M still has 26 stores in Shanghai.