It’s a family affairOrtega integrated GOA into holding group Inditex, which he set up with his first wife, Rosalia Mera, and which floated on the stock market in 2001. Their daughter Marta, 31, who has undergone training at the firm, including working in a store, is widely expected to take over, although the firm has yet to confirm her as a successor. Meanwhile 79 year old Ortega somehow finds time, between tending to his beloved chickens, to remain very much involved with all his brands. Ortega’s business model for Inditex has been so successful for so long that fashion insiders, from competitors to industry analysts, study his strategies carefully.
In 1991, in addition to geographic expansion, Ortega began to expand Inditex’s retail portfolio beyond the flagship Zara format, with the launch of Pull&Bear, an urban fashion chain, and the acquisition of 65% of Massimo Dutti, then a men’s fashion brand. (It acquired the remaining 35% in 1994 and soon added a women’s line.) In 1998, Ortega introduced Bershka, another entirely new retail format targeting the young female market. Mr Ortega is one of the world’s richest men, with an estimated net worth of $77.8bn (£58.3bn), according to Forbes. If there is a secret to Inditex’s success it is the connection between stores, the in-house designers, and its factories. This is a rare glimpse into the world of Inditex, the owner of zara brand owner of Zara – a company that does not advertise, still manufactures products in Europe and relies heavily on its store managers.
At one point, Ortega owned the Pazo de Dodro farm and estate near La Coruna. The estate was the site of his daughter Marta’s first wedding, Spanish news site El Mundo reported. Pull&Bear was started in 1991, according to the official company website. Other Inditex brands include Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, and Zara Home.
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Isla grow to expand the company’s shop space by eight to 10pc every year for the next three to five years. This includes in the UK, where Inditex has 99 stores and which Isla describes as a “very good environment to do business”. At the present rate of growth, China could become Inditex’s biggest market ahead of Spain within a few years. This flexibility and efficiency has remained at the heart of Inditex, the company built from Zara that now runs 6,500 shops in 88 different countries and includes seven other brands, including Bershka, Pull & Bear, and Massimo Dutti. Ortega and his business partner Rosalia Mera opened their first store in the city of A Coruna, close to Arteixo, in 1975. They wanted to call the shop Zorba, after their favourite film, Zorba the Greek.
New arrivals in the Zara stores were not limited to the traditional fashion seasons of fall, winter, spring, and summer; rather, they were received year-round, on a weekly basis. The fast-fashion concept was so popular with customers that Zara, with more than 1,000 outlets worldwide, spent relatively little on advertising. Amancio Ortega (born March 28, 1936, Busdongo de Arbas, Spain) is a Spanish fashion executive and founding chairman (1985) of the Spanish clothing merchandiser Inditex (Industria de Diseño Textil, SA), which included the Zara chain store. Reuters reported that Ortega held around $6.6 billion in real estate assets by the end of 2015.
In 1988, he created Inditex, which today operates numerous global fashion brands, including Zara, Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, and Bershka, among others. Inditex is now the world’s number one clothing retailer, with more than 7,300 retail outlets in 94 countries, employing 150,000 staff. Ortega owns 59% of Inditex, which is now the world’s largest clothing retailer, according to Bloomberg. Inditex owns a portfolio of fast-fashion brands, including Zara, one of the best-known and most successful fashion brands in the world with nearly 3,000 stores in 96 countries, according to Forbes.
In November 2018, Marta married Carlos Torretta — then a model agent and the son of designer Roberto Torretta — at her family’s home in Galicia, Spain, W Magazine reported. He stepped back from company operations in 2011, but his family is still heavily involved with Inditex. His daughter, Marta Ortega Perez, is the non-executive chair; his son-in-law, Carlos Torretta, has held the role of head of communications at Zara; and his brothers-in-law have worked as managing directors at Inditex-owned brands, according to the Financial Times. Her new job will be as the company’s chairwoman, helping steer a retail behemoth with nearly 7,000 stores, more than 8,000 factories and a market value of $100bn. And, despite stepping down as chairman of Inditex in 2011, Ortega continued to go to the office every day to sit with his young designers and buyers. This highlights how far Inditex has come from its first store in A Coruna, which still exists on a street corner next door to a dentist.
He gradually gathered further experience with other retailers and by the early 1960s was ready to set up in business with members of his family and his future wife, Rosalia Mera. They launched first a textile manufacturing company, then later, the Zara brand. The mysterious Zara founderwas briefly the world’s richest man back in 2015, Forbes reported.
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He bypassed the then-richest person, Bill Gates, when his net worth peaked to $80 billion as Zara’s parent company Inditex’s stock peaked. Over the next 10 years, Ortega took the business through a rapid series of expansion milestones. In 1977, company headquarters and Zara’s first garment factories were established on the outskirts of La Coruña. By 1983, there were nine Zara stores in shopping districts across cities in Spain; in 1984, the company’s first logistics center opened in that same central hub outside La Coruña. In 1985, as Ortega was preparing to launch the Zara brand internationally, Inditex was officially incorporated as the parent company for Zara.
Inditex has grown into a fast-fashion behemoth.
Ortega founded fast-fashion giant Zara with his then-wife Rosalia in 1975. Today, his retail company Inditex SA which owns eight brands including Zara, Massimo Dutti, and Pull&Bear has more than 7,500 stores around the world. The commercial and design teams are vast – covering a large proportion of the 1.7m sq ft of offices at Inditex HQ. The result of this structure is that the product range in Zara stores evolves rapidly. Rather than relying on one product range per season – like Marks & Spencer will for autumn and winter – the retailer will enjoy four or five waves of new products after the initial seasonal launch.
- A spokesperson for Mr Ortega says the scale of his success has rather taken the company’s founder by surprise.
- Bershka was its second-biggest brand by revenue in fiscal 2023.
- Meanwhile 79 year old Ortega somehow finds time, between tending to his beloved chickens, to remain very much involved with all his brands.
- When he resigned as chairman in 2011, he didn’t put his feet up.
- Despite Ortega’s impressive net worth, many people have never heard of him.
A mock high street of Zara stores, built within the headquarters, allows store managers and the commercial team to examine the new ranges. Today, the retailer has 1,500 stores in 70 countries around the world and is changing retail forever. In the fast-fashion model that Ortega built, Inditex spends more initially to keep production close to home, but its short supply chain means that the entire design-production-delivery team can keep their fingers on the pulse of emerging trends and produce only what will sell. Rather than cutting costs by outsourcing to China and waiting months for delivery like their competitors, Inditex drives profit by selling at full price and rarely getting stuck with unwanted stock. Alongside new chief executive Óscar García Maceiras, Marta Ortega Pérez will face a number of challenges.