> What H&M had, Zara somewhat still has, but Uniqlo doesnt have is the must buy or might not see it again.
And this is why I shop at Uniqlo, not at H&M or Zara. I like to ensure that my favourite basics will always be available for repurchase 2+ years after the original purchase, so I can replace a worn item.
Yeah, seriously, this is a solved problem in inventory management and we have the technology to spin up some infrastructure for that without too much effort nowadays, even for multinational brands. QR codes, a database, a REST API, and a static site generator. Literally that's it. You don't even need to store the webpages you generate, just generate them on-the-fly and discard them for rarer items.
I was looking for some specific bike parts and found the exact serial numbers for exactly what I need and there's no way to determine if anything similar still exists.
That being said, I wish semantic web blew up like it was supposed to. If we had ontologies for describing products that could be searched to find an appropriate item, that would be huge. But the scale was always limited by the nonzero rate of human error and the high rate at which humans lose interest in maintaining systems manually.
You can't sell in markets where you don't have stores and people don't know your brand. I was delighted when I visited a Uniqlo store in Barcelona, but there isn't one anywhere near me.
I just read somewhere that their plan from 2017-2020 is to increase the number of stores in Europe from 50 to 100.
For comparison H&M has 100 stores in Belgium alone.
> What H&M had, Zara somewhat still has, but Uniqlo doesnt have is the must buy or might not see it again.
Uniqlo actually does this too, just in a rather different way. The company tends to make annual revisions to various products, sometimes changing minor things like cutting the shoulders more closely (which may even be mentioned, changelog-style on Uniqlo.com) to completely restyling the garment.
As an example of the latter, I had been thinking about getting one of their mountain parkas last year but decided to wait. The 2020 revision looks very different – fortunately in a way I still liked – but if I’d had my heart set on the 2019 version (or I had an older version that I needed to replace), I’d have been out of luck.
Uniqlo does a good business selling decent quality clothes at a decent price that are modern classics.