Behind ZARA's entry, fashion brands are collectively flocking to JD.com
A new trend is sweeping the fashion apparel sector.
On September 16, ZARA officially launched on JD.com, with its full product portfolio available and synchronized new releases globally. This is not an isolated case. Over the past few years, luxury brands, international fashion groups, influencer-operated stores, designer brands and other players have successively settled in JD.com, and ZARA is the latest milestone on this expanding growth curve.
Fashion brands of vastly different scales and demands have made the same directional choice, and a collective influx is taking place.
The starting point of this influx lies in the fundamental changes of the apparel business itself. When consumers buy clothes, they are paying increasing attention to fabrics and craftsmanship, with parameters such as yarn count, gram weight and ingredient content incorporated into their purchasing decisions. When brands expand channels, they no longer only pursue a one-off sales surge, but a fertile ground that supports long-term sustained growth driven by brand accumulation.
On one side are consumers in pursuit of certainty, and on the other side are operation methodologies that enable brands to grow bigger. JD.com's accumulation and efforts in the apparel sector in recent years precisely match the demands of both sides. As brands select platforms by new standards, the competitive coordinates of the apparel e-commerce industry are also shifting.
Fashion Brands Are Accelerating Their Influx Into JD
ZARA's entry into JD.com is a microcosm of international fashion brands adjusting their channel strategies over the past two years.
Facing the slowing down of traffic dividends and the year-on-year rise of customer acquisition cost, apparel brands' understanding of channels has also changed significantly. For brands, investing a large budget to drive a one-off transaction is far less valuable than owning a business that can operate sustainably. Their criteria for selecting platforms are also changing simultaneously: traffic scale is no longer the only consideration, and the certainty of growth has come to the forefront. Accurate consumer insight, stable daily sales, and reliable fulfillment capacity have become new hard indicators.
International fashion brands' responses to these changes are reflected in their actions. In the past, their standard channel configuration consisted of offline flagship stores and self-operated e-commerce, supplemented by one or two third-party platforms, which worked smoothly in the era of incremental growth. Nowadays, the crowd and the market are becoming increasingly segmented, with different consumer groups behind different platforms, and the old structure has begun to fail. In 2025, UNIQLO connected its official mini-program to JD.com, and its international designer co-branded series made its debut directly on the platform. Massimo Dutti under Inditex had already settled in earlier, and now ZARA has entered the platform with its full range of products.
Screenshot of JD.com store
What ZARA values is exactly the "dual certainty" represented by JD.com and its user base. The head of JD Apparel told 36Kr that before ZARA officially settled in, millions of users had already actively searched for ZARA on JD.com every year, and this number is expected to exceed 10 million after the launch.
Active search means clear demand, and behind these millions of searches is a market that exists prior to supply. With over 740 million annual active users, JD.com's users have long developed shopping habits of clear purpose, high emphasis on quality and service in the 3C, home appliance and daily consumer goods categories, forming a group of users who come with clear goals and do not place orders on impulse.
In terms of operation, this translates to higher conversion rate and average order value for the same brand on JD.com: clear demand leads to short decision-making paths, and the established mindset of genuine products and services further lowers the purchase threshold for high-unit-price goods. For ZARA, this is not a new market that needs to be educated from scratch, but a business with clear and visible certainty.
Apart from international leading brands represented by ZARA, emerging brands are also speeding up their pace of moving to JD.com.
In 2025, the number of newly settled merchants in JD Apparel and Beauty category increased by 89% year on year; in the first half of 2026, the total transaction value of new merchants doubled year on year, with nearly 900 emerging apparel brands and over 1000 emerging sports brands seeing their transaction value double.
Influencer-operated stores, content IPs, niche brands... Representative players of all types of emerging brands can be found in JD's settlement list. MARIUS started from sharing personal outfit content and has become a highly representative brand in the high-end commuter women's wear track. BLACKNINI, which also runs influencer-driven business, has achieved monthly sales of over 100 million yuan with clothing products of average unit price above 3000 yuan. STORMCREW under Storm Games Media is backed by a content IP with over 30 million fans across all platforms. There are also aromatherapy brand Full Moon that received strategic investment from Yingtong Holdings, MSQ that has become a new top player in the men's makeup track, and many others.
The common point of these brands is that they have no shortage of traffic entrances. Influencer-operated stores build trust through their founders, content IPs complete cold start with the support of fans, and niche brands rely on highly loyal and sticky customers. However, traffic can only boost short-term sales, but cannot necessarily support the long-term development of a brand.
What MARIUS needs to cross is the threshold from an influencer-operated store to a long-standing classic brand. After entering the new user field, consumers began to recognize MARIUS through its fabrics, cuts and clothing quality, instead of only relying on the popularity of the founder. MARIUS also got rid of the involution-style promotion mode, and shifted its business focus to service and efficiency. The data responded quickly: during the "Elite Wardrobe" campaign in September 2025, its transaction value on JD.com increased by 20 times month on month, and its sales during the Double 11 event in the same year increased by 10 times month on month.
STORMCREW has crossed the same threshold. In the past, its sales were tied to Tim, the founder of Storm Games Media. After entering JD.com, with the help of JD's category penetration operation strategy, it upgraded its core hit product "Cooling" T-shirt. After the launch of the 2.0 version, its sales in the first seven days exceeded that of the previous generation, expanding its market from the fan circle to the mass consumer market.
Screenshot of JD.com store
For brands like MARIUS and STORMCREW, entering JD.com means gaining an additional market that can grow independently: turning the "fan-dependent" business into a stable operation that does not rely on any single exposure event.
International leading brands come to JD to capture incremental growth in their channel map, while emerging brands come to JD to cross the threshold from traffic-driven growth to brand-driven growth. One brand's settlement may only be an individual choice, but when the trend gradually takes shape, it becomes the answer given by the entire industry.
JD Has Its Own Solution For The Apparel Sector
The reason behind brands' influx can be seen by reviewing JD's moves in the apparel sector in recent years: JD has always been operating the fashion business in a way completely different from the traffic logic. It does not bet on a single explosive growth event, but focuses on consolidating the certainty of sustainable operation.
The premise of this operation method is a fact often ignored in the industry: fashion apparel is never a single uniform track. Women's wear relies on styles and new release speed, sportswear focuses on functions and usage scenarios, and underwear, footwear and bags all have their own unique consumption cycles.
Even within the same category, brands face vastly different situations. Mature brands like ZARA already have high public awareness and complete supply chain, what they lack is new user groups and methods to deepen the operation of new channels. Emerging brands that have just completed cold start lack the methodology to grow from single-product explosion to stable operation. Facing different challenges, JD provides a complete set of systematic solutions.
First of all, for the problem of "what to sell and to whom to sell", JD's solution is called "category penetration".
Most platforms operating apparel business take traffic as the core operation object, arrange products on shelves by category, and drive transactions through paid traffic placement and large-scale promotion events. In contrast, JD takes the product itself as the core operation object. It splits the footwear and apparel categories into extremely fine granularity, and further divides them into nearly a thousand "quality × price" grids according to price, style, material, color, regional preference and other dimensions under each major category. For example, for a men's T-shirt, JD will split it into hundreds of sub-grids according to fabric, craftsmanship and collar type, each corresponding to a specific group of people and a specific cost structure. Where there is unmet demand, and where the market is overcrowded and worth avoiding, all can be seen clearly at a glance in the grid system.
Down jacket brand Tanboer has experienced the power of this mechanism. In the past, it made annual plans based on experience, betting that certain products would become hits, which would lead to overstock of inventory if the bet failed. In the second year of cooperation with JD, the platform's grid data showed that among the two conventional down jacket categories, puffer jackets had significantly higher conversion rate than quilted down jackets. This feedback prompted Tanboer to shift its development focus to puffer jackets, launched its signature hit Puff series, and extended a complete product line along the scenarios of sports, light outdoor activities and daily outings. Now this series has gained high popularity across all channels.
Behind this are two completely different platform roles: on platforms that are good at traffic operation, brands purchase exposure from the platform, and one paid traffic placement only corresponds to one transaction. On JD, brands and the platform discuss together how to develop the next batch of products. The purchased exposure expires after use, but products verified by data can achieve long-term stable sales. The gravitational force that attracts brands to gather is hidden right here.
Based on the grid system, JD also provides tiered support of "Brand 3×500" for brands: leading brands can get support for creating million-level hit products and accelerating new product promotion, emerging brands can get resource tilt as well as operation guidance from JD's procurement team, and authorized brands can obtain lower operation thresholds. For daily operation, a complete set of Merchant Growth PLUS methodology is also provided, which connects product portfolio planning, stable daily sales and brand growth into a complete path, supported by generous exclusive incentive policies for new merchants, so that brands and merchants at every stage of development can find corresponding solutions that fit their needs.
This operation method has been verified by a number of brands that have found their own accurate positioning. UNIQLO, which settled in last September, participated in JD's Double 11 event for the first time and topped the apparel brand sales ranking, with over 50 SKUs selling more than 10,000 units in the whole cycle, the classic fleece jacket selling over 30,000 units, and the popular trend hit curved pants selling over 25,000 units. New Chinese-style women's wear brand Sanji Heihua locked in the segmented track, its "Gold and Silver Everywhere" series of dresses became the top product in the category, with its transaction value in the first half of this year increasing by more than 3 times year on year. Xiahu Shijia, a brand that originated from OEM factories, applied its years of experience in quality control to basic apparel products, making 100-count cotton T-shirts from short-term popular items to long-term classic products, expanding from third-party stores to self-operated stores, with its performance multiplied several times. Different tracks, different scales, but all of them can find their own growth space in this grid system.
The "category penetration" strategy helps brands answer the question of "what to sell and to whom to sell", but there is a more difficult problem in the apparel business: through the screen, why should consumers trust the quality of a piece of clothing?
This is a long-standing pain point in the industry. Product pictures are for reference only, and the fabric quality is only described by the seller, which leads to high trust cost and high return rate, the "nightmare" of most apparel brands.
JD's solution is to endorse brands with its platform reputation, reduce users' decision burden with platform screening, so that consumers can buy with full confidence: by building industry standards from scratch, and adopting more scientific and strict platform checks, consumers no longer only buy products, but buy the certainty guaranteed by the platform's screening process.
The "JD FASHION" quality label launched in September 2025 cooperates with national-level quality inspection institutions to carry out quantitative grading of fabrics, craftsmanship and functions, and each labeled product is attached with a quality inspection report. After that, JD cooperated with China Certification & Inspection Group, Bureau Veritas, SGS and other authoritative institutions to establish the Apparel Quality Alliance, bringing quality control to the whole industrial chain. At this year's China International Fashion Week, JD presented five major fabrics including cotton, linen, acetate, silk and functional fabric on the T stage, and the transaction value of labeled clothing doubled month on month. Up to now, more than 3000 labeled SKUs on JD platform have achieved annual sales of over 1 million yuan.
Screenshot of JD.com store
For consumers, this set of standards saves their decision-making cost, and for the first time, parameters like yarn count, gram weight and ingredient content of clothing are endorsed by the platform. For brands, it provides something more scarce: quality can be quantified and verified. Brands that focus on product quality no longer need to compete for the same trust with products that do not match their description.
A positive cycle is thus formed: quality standards screen out high-quality products, high-quality products retain users who are willing to pay for quality, and user assets further attract more high-quality brands to enter. From global groups like ZARA to newly established founder-led brands, what JD has really built in recent years is not just a longer list of recruited fashion brands, but a set of effective methodologies applicable to brands of all tiers.
As the apparel industry shifts from traffic competition to operation competition, what brands need is a platform that can support them to build strong brands and achieve long-term growth. JD has responded to the demands of brands with its own methods, more and more brands have settled in, and changes have already taken place. The upcoming Double 11 event will be a centralized major test for this system.
With Double 11 Approaching, The Apparel Game Is Being Restarted
ZARA's opening date on JD.com itself is a clear statement: it settled in on September 16, less than two months before the Double 11 event. According to 36Kr, this time point was jointly decided by ZARA and JD.
For international brands of this scale, settling in a new platform is far more than simply uploading product listings. The construction of product portfolio, user operation configuration, inventory preparation, and fulfillment experience debugging all take months of preparation. Entering the platform in September leaves a complete cycle for running in. The product portfolio construction and user accumulation can be completed during the season transition period, and the sales volume can be directly released when the Double 11 event starts.
On the other side of the game,