Well, Zara in MY is distributed by RSH Group while Uniqlo is distributed by Wing Tai with shares from Uniqlo Japan.

Among the 3 mentioned brands here, only H&M is opened by the principal itself from Sweden.

This 3 brand represents what they called "Fast Fashion", which are supposed to mean low cost and stylish fashion. And thanks to our weak MY currency and super high import tax, all these "supposed to be super cheap brands" become something "not as cheap at all".

I'm quite a big fan of H&M shirts myself. I am also quite surprised to see that a lot of H&M shirts that are selling for, say SGD 39.90 in Singapore, are actually selling for RM 39.90 here in MY, which is quite comfortable for most of us, since if you taking into accounts for most brands (say Uniqlo, Adidas, Nike, Aldo, etc), something selling for SGD 39.90 is usually sold at RM 100 (taking account of the conversion rate) -- most people assume that's normal since 1 SGD = 2.5 MYR, but they forget that if you were to buy something at MYR 100 because it's sold at SGD 39.90, then if someone around your age/ experience/ qualification make SGD 4,000/ month, then your salary here should have been 4000 x 2.5 = RM 10,000 instead.

I have also been to many many countries where as Zara shirts are super cheap.....it's really a shame that most of us here assume Zara as high end branded stuff. Another example is Topman where as their cheapest shirts are sold at SGD 7 onwards in Singapore. I've bought a Topman T shirt that costed SGD 18 but weeks later i saw the exact same shirt selling at MYR 99 at Topman One Utama. Something's not right here, since if you're an engineer making RM 5k per month, don't forget that a Singaporean engineer around your qualifications is also making SGD 5k/ month, where you spend 0.02% of your salary for that shirt, the Singaporean "YOU" only spend 0.004% of his salary on that same shirt.

Don't get me wrong guys, I'm not complaining..just thought it'd be interesting to share my thoughts.

Speaking from years of experience in the fashion retail industry.

Cheers.

Interesting fact:

- Zara claims that chances of bumping into someone having the same shirt like yours is 20,000:1
- Zara in Europe changes their collections in most of their boutiques in European countries as fast as 12 days per change. It's a little slower here..

It is also worth noting that Inditex's (zara) other brand, Bershka, is targetted at teens under 20 years old, but looking at our spending power here...you get what i mean.

This post has been edited by EricLow: May 26 2013, 05:20 AM