Ground Floor I've been waiting with bated breath for Zara to open its doors in Dublin ever since rumours of its imminent appearance at Roches Stores started circulating about two years ago.

I'm kicking myself that I wasn't one of the many people who oversubscribed for the shares when parent company, Inditex, floated on the Madrid stock exchange a couple of years ago because I'm a big believer in the store and the company. Actually, I was in Spain at the time of the floatation, which turned founder and current chairman, Amancio Ortega, into Spain's richest man.

The Inditex group of clothing companies includes brands like Massimo Dutti and Pull & Bear, and its retailing stores currently number 1,836 in 48 countries, but it's Zara that is the most instantly recognisable brand name because word of mouth has spread throughout Europe of the store that turns over stock every two weeks and where prices are breathtakingly low.

The low prices astonish all the more because the company manufactures 50 per cent of its clothes in Europe and 80 per cent of its product is European sourced. The designs are produced in-house, sent to workshops in Portugal and Spain for sewing and finished off in the main HQ area of La Coruna before being shipped, twice-weekly, to the stores. Shop managers report back every day to the designers on which lines are moving and which aren't and then a decision is made on what to keep or what to immediately discontinue.

Costs are kept down by keeping stocks low and the design team produces around 11,000 designs and 90 million garments a year.

I have to admit to being a Zara addict. A trip to Spain isn't complete without a cull of the nearest store where I usually pick up a few different items in a range of colours and blink a couple of times when I realise how little damage I seem to have done to my credit card for the number of carrier bags I'm touting.

Already, though, there have been questions about the pricing policy in the Irish store since the company has different pricing throughout Europe (there's a store in Belfast, for example, but the clothes there are definitely more expensive than mainland Europe).

Obviously there are associated costs with shipping goods abroad but I hate to think that the concept of low-cost Irish pricing is actually significantly more expensive than low-cost European pricing.

However, the fact that the pricing is low-cost at all does tend to run counter to the received wisdom of other fashion-ista stores. After all, if the product is mainly sourced and manufactured in Europe which is a high-cost location relative to the Far East or the Philippines, how is it that Zara can keep its prices so low? Mainly it seems to be because of its advertising policy. Amancio Ortega believes that advertising is a distraction. His view is that the shop window is all the advertising a store needs. (The layout of the windows is also decided in La Coruna). Because it spends a fraction of what others do on advertising, it can afford to keep the production in Europe.

This is a major issue. In Naomi Klein's No Logo she looked at percentage changes in employment in the textile, clothing, leather and footwear industries between 1980 and 1993. Finland saw falls of 71.7 per cent, Spain 35.3 per cent, the UK 41.5 per cent and the US 30.1 per cent, while at the same time there was an increase of 344.6 per cent in Mauritius, 177.4 per cent in Indonesia, 57.3 per cent in China and 31.8 per cent in the Philippines. Meanwhile, spending for leading national advertisers in the States grew by over 100 per cent.

Fashion retailers spend an average of about 3.5 per cent of their revenues on advertising, but Inditex spends about 0.3 per cent. Yet sales continue to grow. For the first half of this year net sales reached just under two billion, an increase of 19 per cent on the same period last year, while net income is up 21 per cent. The area with the highest growth both in sales and profits is Europe excluding Spain.

It isn't all rosy in the garden, of course. Some of the Inditex group stores aren't performing as well as they once were - Pull & Bear's contribution to the bottom line is down - and sales growth was slower than expected at the beginning of this year partly due, according to the company report, to a difficult trading environment caused by unseasonably high temperatures in Europe. Nevertheless, with a two-week turnaround time, the company was pretty confident that this blip could be sorted.

I like this company and I like the shops. Analysts like the rapid growth although, if anything, that's the one thing about it that makes me nervous.

There is a constant demand on public companies to grow every year, either by acquisition or by opening new stores. Inditex opened 137 new stores in the first half of this year with the prospect of between 300 and 360 in total during the year (compared with 274 last year).

Nevertheless I do hope that the strategy pays off. It's nice to think that not all companies work on the basis of moving their manufacturing operations to where labour is cheapest and potentially exploitative. It is a real demonstration of what capitalism should be - providing the product at the right price to the marketplace and bringing a benefit to the employees and the community. At the same time it is returning dividends to shareholders.

The problem will be if and when the management style of Senor Ortega is deemed to be suddenly out of touch with reality: if shareholders think that the same turnaround could be achieved at a cheaper cost by outsourcing production, or if sales fall and the management board believes that advertising is the only way to reverse it.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to checking out the Dublin store and the Dublin pricing. However, a warning to future customers. My normal size is small or medium. In Zara, it's large! www.sheilaoflanagan.net