Will YOU be wearing Zara’s little sister this summer? LAURA CRAIK writes as it launches a chain of bargain ‘robot stores’ across the UK

It’s a 70-minute cab journey from central Paris – a far cry from the dreamy French fashion houses of Chanel and Schiaparelli – but I’m surprisingly excited to visit new fashion store Lefties.

Dubbed Zara’s cheaper little sister, Lefties is the latest offering from Inditex, the hugely successful Spanish retailer behind not just Zara, but Massimo Dutti, Stradivarius, Bershka, Oysho and Pull & Bear. And the first of three Lefties stores opens in the UK in a couple of weeks’ time.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ve made Zara my whole personality, I find its affordable distillation of seasonal catwalk trends very useful on those occasions where I have to look smart, fashionable and savvy.

But as the price of designer clothes has sky-rocketed, Zara’s prices have increased too. Its most expensive jacket, a leather biker, currently costs £219. Can new store Lefties step up and deliver the Zara aesthetic for those who can no longer afford Zara? I set off to find out.

Lefties has had a presence in Spain since 1999, originally serving as an outlet for unsold Zara clothing (which explains its name: Lefties refers to ‘leftover’ stock).

But while the branding remains, it stopped selling Zara’s leftovers ten years ago. Today, it has a dedicated buying team and is touted as a one-stop shop for all the family’s needs. Clearly Inditex chair Marta Ortega Perez, 42, who took over from her 90-year-old multi-billionaire father Amancio in 2021, is hoping Lefties will now do the same for British families.

No doubt to the delight of new Prime Minister Andy Burnham, Lefties has chosen a northern city for its UK launch. Liverpool gets the first branch, opening its doors to shoppers on August 27. That’s followed by stores in Lakeside Shopping Centre, Essex, in early October, and the Metrocentre, Gateshead, in November.

From there, you can only assume every high street is a potential target. ‘We do not see any place in the UK where we could not be,’ Lefties’ global director Xavier Ruz Riera has said.

The timing of Lefties’ launch in the UK is interesting, too. Less than a month after the Liverpool opening, Zara is set to launch a capsule collection by John Galliano, the divisive British designer whose anti-Semitic outburst in 2011 will never be forgiven by some, even if others argue it shouldn’t affect his status as one of the best designers of his generation. 

Without a doubt, this will be the most exciting, coveted, and no doubt expensive collection Zara has ever sold.

With Zara being positioned in an ever more ‘premium’ slot, is Lefties poised to inherit the vast UK consumer base it leaves behind?

On the evidence of Lefties Paris, well, no, it’s not. Especially if you are a fashion conscious mid-lifer like me.

My mission is to find an outfit that ‘looks Zara, but without the price tag’. However, after ten minutes roaming the huge, clean white store – which offers clothes for men, teens, kids, babies and items for the home as well as womenswear – it becomes apparent that even trying to find a look that’s ‘Primark, and never mind the price tag’ is going to be a challenge.

Now, I realise that just because I’m not in the market for some €17 (£14.60) polkadot jeans and a €12 (£10.30) striped rugby shirt with lace-trimmed asymmetric hem, doesn’t mean they’re not another person’s fashion nirvana.

Taste is subjective. I know a ton of people who would look inside my own wardrobe and laugh.

Still, it seems a mystery why some of these items were ever sketched, much less brought into production.

My pet peeve is the T-shirts whose slogans seem to have been generated by AI, for surely no human would be daft enough to dream up ‘Ocean Cowboys’, ‘Cold Sand’ or – my favourite – ‘Athletics? I Thought You Said Aesthetics’. That these cost €9 (£7.70), €12 (£10.30) and €4 (£3.40), respectively, feels less like a bargain and more of an insult.

Granted, Lefties is cheap. A pair of drawstring trousers also costs €12, an ombre bikini top €9, a padded T-shirt bra €7 (£6) and a pair of flip-flops €3 (£2.57). But just because things are cheap doesn’t mean they are a bargain.

Some of the fabrics are poor: a pair of black balloon trousers (€19/£16.30) come in cotton so thin I can see my fingers through it. All the biker and blouson jackets are in shiny faux leather, as opposed to the realistic matte ‘is it or isn’t it’ dupes you find in Zara.

While Lefties competes with Primark on price, it doesn’t offer nearly as much choice or point of view. There’s a surfeit of slogan T-shirts, but a paucity of skirts. The jeans are either skinny, culotte-style or with raw, unfinished hems, and not a single straight-leg or boyfriend style in sight. Nor can I find any tailored jackets or blazers. When I search for a pair of shoes to complete my look, there are barely any in my size 5.

Maybe I caught Lefties on a bad day, but after an hour of valiantly trying to find something I’d be seen wearing in public, never mind be photographed in for a national newspaper, I head to the changing room with just eight items, including a tailored jacket from the menswear section, a white T-shirt, a pair of jeans that are two sizes too big, and some toe-post mules that are a size too small.

The cubicle is dispiritingly tiny. The high point of the experience is pushing the clothes I don’t want through a hatch onto a motorised conveyor belt, where they are spirited away in the hope that some other poor sod will buy them.

Lefties’ biggest sell, if that’s the right word (which it’s not if you’re one of the nation’s unemployed) is its use of robotics and other automated technology that purports to do some of retail’s dreariest, most repetitive jobs, while also speeding up the shopping experience.

This is most apparent at the returns desk, which is manned by humans but aided by a mechanical pulley and a robotic ‘hanger sorting machine’ which goes through the returns and whisks them back to their position on the shop floor. Inditex is proud of its new ‘digital store’ format.

Last month Ruz Riera told a reporter: ‘What this robot does is a very repetitive task. It segregates the different hangers, and sales people only have to take a box with the hangers. This improves their work because they don’t waste time on a non-productive task and have more time to attend to the customer.’

Well, they didn’t attend to this customer – although, to be fair, I neither needed nor asked for assistance. Despite spending an hour there, I didn’t have a single interaction with a human being.

The changing room was unmanned (a live map on the wall tells you which cubicles are occupied) and the checkout process was automated, although a staff member was on hand to direct you to a vacant check-out desk.

On Trustpilot, the user experience isn’t positive. Lefties has a low score of 1.4 out of five stars, gleaned from 823 global reviews.

Several customers wrote they’d been accused of shoplifting, claiming the store’s automatic checkout malfunctioned. ‘Would give zero stars if I could,’ wrote one. ‘I spent €200 (£171) and was accused of shoplifting twice, once as I left the payment machines and again when I walked out of the front door.

‘Wasted 20 minutes of my time and, guess what, they found out I hadn’t shoplifted anything.’

What fashion-loving Liverpool will make of Lefties later this month remains to be seen. Ditto Essex and Gateshead. Certainly, the website is compelling and UK shoppers can already browse and shop there. 

As with the Zara website, no expense has been spared on models, lighting and other high production values that elevate the clothes and make them look premium. But there’s a vast disconnect between the online store and the shop floor.

For me, the womenswear was the weakest element – inferior to the menswear – although the lingerie was decent: lots of basics in neutral hues. The strongest section was homeware, which at least bore some resemblance to what you would find at the highly regarded Zara Home.

But while some UK customers will appreciate that Lefties is a ‘one-stop shop’, others may well question whether you’d want to stop – or shop – there at all.