PARIS — Zara unveiled its latest flagship on the famed Avenue des Champs-Élysées, which integrates futuristic tech, with a deal with fashion and customer support.

It’s all a part of Zara’s drive to upscale the client experience and produce a luxury feel to the fast-fashion brand under Inditex non-executive chair Marta Ortega Perez, who took the reins last 12 months.

Her aesthetic is integrated into the shop’s design, with marble floors and ceilings to bring light into the cavernous 29,100-square-foot space. Display furniture is made from limestone and oak, and the shop features brushed steel racks and plenty of open space. Guests see moving artworks on a wall of sunshine, in addition to hologram mannequins wearing this week’s drops.

It’s the second store on the Champs-Élysées for the Spanish fast-fashion behemoth. The brand new flagship will likely be focused on showcasing the total men’s and ladies’s collections. The upper priced SRPLS and Origins lines even have their very own corners.

There are specific departments dedicated to accessories and lingerie. The shoe section could have its own staff and stock room to tell apart the offering.

The prevailing store just half a block away will remain open and carry a smaller mixture of products, in addition to kids.

France is the third largest marketplace for the brand, executives estimated during a preview tour of the shop, behind its home country of Spain and the U.S. France was the second foreign marketplace for Zara within the late Nineteen Nineties; it now has greater than 110 stores within the country.

Executives imagine the foot traffic on the famous avenue is dense enough to support two stores, and estimates that roughly half of its in-store traffic comes from tourists. Online sales in 2022 doubled over 2019 numbers, but sales per store are up resulting from increased foot fall, based on parent company Index’s latest results.

In one other effort to enhance customer experience, omnichannel services are only an app away.

Guests are in a position to see what items can be found in the shop right down to the situation of a garment on a map, book fitting rooms ahead of time, or buy online and retrieve the item inside two hours. There may be a special customer support desk dedicated to picking up online or in-app orders.

A row of self-service checkouts in sleek black glass greets customers with moving touch screens that routinely adjust to a customer’s height. The corporate can be introducing a mobile checkout function, which allows customers to purchase items by scanning them with their phones. Among the tech has been trialed at its Battersea Power Station store in London, but the corporate has continued to hone and improve services, executives said.

Dressing rooms are also high tech. Gone are item limits and taking number tags from an attendant; as a substitute, guests swipe clothes past a screen upon entrance and exit, which reads the items’ internal RFID chips.

Despite the emphasis on the app and electronic take a look at, executives said the shop will still prioritize the human touch with employees available to help at any point in these transactions, and says it has increased hiring and training. The brand new store could have 230 employees, most moving over from other stores and constructing on their previous experience. The corporate is now hiring to fill positions in those locations.

The brand has prioritized its brick-and-mortar and online integration during the last three years, executives emphasized. The technique to upscale the stores also comes with space and customer flow in mind. The corporate’s goal is to “have larger stores with specific areas for customer support” and to avoid the overstuffed feeling that may plague high street shops.

The corporate is refurbishing stores on a continuous basis to integrate this latest design and flow, including the Rue de Rivoli store in Paris, which can be slated for a revamp in the approaching months.

The U.S. can be ripe for brand expansion, with the corporate seeking to confide in 30 stores in the subsequent three years. “This can be a key market….We now have Zara stores in not that many cities so there’s a still numerous potential for us on this market,” a spokesperson said.

Though the corporate increased prices within the last 12 months in response to provide chain and inflationary pressures, that has leveled off and costs are set to stay regular through the remaining of the 12 months.

To have a good time the opening, Zara has enlisted celebrity pâtissier Cédric Grolet to create special pastries and rosette pops for the primary weekend.