Everlane vs Zara: Why the Two Have Unexpected Parallels in Customer Satisfaction

Purpose of Analysis

The go-to assumption most people make is that a more sustainable brand = higher quality, especially when it comes to the fashion industry. And for the most part, that’s pretty true.

But when we say “higher quality,” that implies that it must be higher quality than OTHER, less sustainable brands. And I don’t JUST mean superior product quality — I’m talking better customer service, better shipping, better fit/sizing, and even better style.

These are super common expectations that tend to come with labeling your brand as sustainable and authentic, as opposed to fast-fashion.

So we wanted to run an experiment comparing two apparel companies with drastically different brand images — Everlane and Zara — to compare and contrast what customers REALLY think about each company. Our goal here was to try to understand how big a difference a brand’s public perception can really make on customer satisfaction.

The Analysis

To do this, we first gathered thousands of reviews from both Everlane and Zara. Then, we filtered them through our AI program to break them down by positive/negative sentiment across different categories - a quick process which took us fewer than 10 minutes to do. We ended up with some pretty interesting results.

So our program split all the reviews into 6 different categories (customer service, fit/sizing, price, quality, shipping, and style) and omitted any irrelevant commentary.

This is the distribution we ended up with for Everlane.

There’s nothing too shocking about this data on its own — we can see that sentiment is largely positive across the board. The categories with the highest proportion of negative sentiment (still low at only 6%) were fit/sizing and shipping.

Then, we looked at the distribution for Zara.

This was certainly a bit more shocking. You’d think that a lower end fast-fashion brand would end up with much worse sentiment toward quality and fit/sizing. But this wasn’t the case it all. In fact, the side by side distribution for both these brands were shockingly similar.

Zara even seemed to outrank Everlane in categories like customer service, shipping, and style.

So why did we end up with these results?

Meaningfulness of Results

When two companies sell the same products at drastically different price points, they’re bound to have differences in product quality and maybe even in customer experience. Zara objectively uses lower quality materials (rayon, polyurethane, etc.) than Everlane (which uses materials like recycled polyester and nylon).

But if this is the case, the logical train of thought would be to assume Everlane’s customer satisfaction numbers would be significantly higher because their product quality is higher. The reason why these sentiment distributions instead ended up almost the exact same between both brands is simple.

With a higher price, comes higher customer expectations as well. Consumers measure their satisfaction levels based on whether they felt the product was actually worth the money they spent for it.

So although Zara’s product quality and even customer support might not actually be as commendable as Everlane’s, our sentiment analysis showed it doesn’t really matter. Everlane’s customers simply have higher expectations for the brand because they’re spending a LOT more money for their products, while Zara’s lower prices lead customers to lower their expectations instead.

On the flip side, Everlane and Zara are technically in two different markets. The type of people who shop at each brand tend to be pretty different. But it’s not unlikely that the type of people who shop at Zara might be willing to splurge once in a while by shopping at a higher-end brand if they see that the difference in quality, service, or style is drastically superior and worth the extra few bucks.

So if Everlane really wants take advantage of opportunities like these, our data tells us that they need to amp up their customer service, shipping logistics, and improve the trendiness/style of their clothing to meet customer expectations at the same rate as a leading lower-end brand like Zara.

And finding out exactly where to start or what specifically to improve can be easily uncovered with a deeper analysis on our end using a bit more data. This way, when customers do consider buying from more upscale brands, Everlane can guarantee themselves a spot at the top of their consideration sets.

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