Zara Story Profile, History, Founder, Products, Stores, Locations, Founded, CEO Clothing Companies
After launching their first company, Confecciones GOA (his initials reversed), in 1963, Ortega and Rosalia Mera spent the next decade expanding their client base and building their production capacity. Within 10 years, their business had grown so rapidly that GOA had 500 employees. A key driver of GOA’s growth throughout these early years was that Ortega eliminated middlemen and controlled manufacturing and the supply chain by organizing thousands of women into sewing cooperatives and trucking in textiles from Barcelona. After getting permission from his employer to produce his own designs, Ortega, his future wife (Rosalia Mera), and his three siblings set up a workshop in their home to sew quilted bathrobes and lingerie based on designer brands and then sell them at budget prices to retailers. After that first brainstorm, Ortega never veered from the two core principles—customer preference and speed—that enabled him to build Inditex.
When Inditex went public in 2001, Ortega established a family office, Pontegadea Inversiones, as the vehicle through which the Ortega family operates as majority shareholders of Inditex. The family office, in turn, channels most investments through Ortega’s real estate investment arm, Pontegadea Inmobiliaria, one of the biggest property companies in Spain. In addition to industry-leading design-to-store turnaround speed, another strategy of Ortega’s that sets Inditex apart from competitors is its minuscule advertising spending. According to the only authorized biography of Ortega, his lifelong drive for success was triggered by a traumatic incident that happened shortly after the family arrived in their new town. One evening, as he was walking home with his mother, he witnessed her pleading for credit to buy groceries and coming out of the store empty-handed because the store owner refused. At that moment, Ortega was so humiliated that he decided he would drop out of school and start working—a decision that turned out to be the first step in one of the greatest retail careers in history.
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. Sometimes he sits down with the Zara Woman design team and they kick around ideas for the coming weeks and months – the new layout for a store, a new design for the upcoming winter collection. After all, he has 60 years’ experience in fashion retail, built up from humble beginnings. 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.
The Principles of Fast Fashion
He started making clothes with his siblings and future wife, Rosalia Mera, in their home in the early 1960s. In 1975, Ortega and Mera opened the first Zara store in downtown La Coruna, Spain, according to Bloomberg. In 1949, at the age of 13, Ortega went to work as an assistant to a luxury shirtmaker in his hometown of La Coruña, where he learned to make clothes by hand. Over the next 14 years, he was promoted to assistant manager and shop manager, gaining direct experience not only in dealing with customers but also in purchasing fabrics and other supplies to manufacture apparel. Zara is also known to be one of the few clothing brands that produces 100 % toxic-free clothing, but not until after the uproar that was caused on how it was using the cancer-inducing azo dyes in its clothing. Oysho doesn’t currently have a store presence in the US, and much to the annoyance of some shoppers, you are unable to order items online and have them delivered to a US address.
While it made a brief foray into men’s wear in 2017, this trial was axed in 2018. The retailer has over 970 stores in 76 markets around Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and South America, some of which are franchised locations. Bershka is the second-largest chain by store count in Inditex’s entire operation. It has over 1,000 stores in 70 markets, and its sales represent 9% of the total revenue for the whole group.
Ortega is very reclusive and keeps a very low profile.[28] Until 1999, no photograph of Ortega had ever been published. You can buy anything from bed linens to home furnishings and kitchen wares. While it is certainly not a budget brand, it’s considered to be a stylish alternative to more expensive brands such as Pottery Barn. This owner of zara brand teen-focused brand has a very similar price point to Bershka, and there’s a lot of overlap in the core customer and the style.
Ortega also owned an $84 million superyacht named Drizzle, but he reportedly put it up for sale in 2022.
Their daughter has an estimated $9.7 billion net worth and controls 4.5% of Inditex, though she’s not involved in the company. She’s the second-richest person in Spain behind her father, according to Forbes. Other Inditex brands include Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, and Zara Home.
… he reportedly bought an office block in London’s affluent Mayfair neighborhood that borders Hyde Park …
One of its teen-focused brands, Pull&Bear, launched online in the US in February. While many of these other Inditex brands do not currently have a presence in the United States, they are found in hundreds of countries around the world and make up a mammoth combined store count of more than 7,400 locations. What gave him the edge, and made Zara and its parent company Inditex such a success, was one particular insight. Yet compared to the world’s other richest people, he has chosen to keep a low profile, avoiding interviews and media appearances whenever possible. In August 2013, Ortega’s ex-wife, who had become Spain’s richest woman, died at age 69.
Giorgio Armani S.p.A SuccessStory
- “He’s not one of the rich people who looks at you from the height of his success.”
- The retailer has over 970 stores in 76 markets around Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and South America, some of which are franchised locations.
- Amancio Ortega Gaona was born in a small village in northern Spain in 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, and moved with his family to Galicia, a region in northwestern Spain, in 1949.
- At the turn of the 21st century, as Ortega approached retirement, he decided that taking his family-owned business public was the best path forward.
- He stepped back from company operations in 2011, but his family is still heavily involved with Inditex.
The first Zara store outside of Spain opened in Portugal in 1988, followed quickly by New York (1989); Paris (1990); Mexico City (1992); Athens (1993); Belgium and Sweden (1994); Malta (1995); Cypriot (1996); Norway and Israel (1997). Zara has become one of the best-known and most successful fashion brands in the world. However, US consumers tend to know little about not only the parent company driving its success but also its sister brands around the world. Even when Zara began to expand internationally in the 1990s, Ortega kept most of the production local, which gave the company ownership of a short supply chain—another secret of Inditex’s exceptionally rapid design-production-delivery turnaround time.
Otherwise his life revolves around life with his children and grandchildren. He seldom ventures far from A Coruna – he has a second home nearby – and if he does go for a stroll around La Marina, locals know he prefers no fuss. And because Inditex manufactures, not predominantly in Asia, but in Spain, Portugal, Turkey and Morocco, it can react quickly, ordering more of popular products or changing styles. The son of a railway worker, he was born in 1936, just before the outbreak of Spain’s civil war. The family struggled to make ends meet, which made a lasting impression on him as a boy.
Products
In 2001, Ortega founded the Amancio Ortega Foundation, a charitable organization focused on education and social welfare. Ortega protects his privacy so fiercely that, when he made his first public appearance in 2000, in advance of the Inditex IPO, the fact made headlines in the Spanish financial press. Until 1999, no photograph of Ortega had ever been published—and he has granted very few interviews to journalists over his entire career. In the street, I only want to be recognized by my family, my friends and people I work with.
Every day he still makes the 10km journey from his town centre house to the Inditex headquarters, based just outside the coastal town of A Coruna where he first launched the Zara brand. Even this week, when the company’s rising share price made him the richest man in the world for two days, he wasn’t ready to retire. 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.
By the 1990’s the store had expanded into the United States, France and most of the Europe. Today, Zara has close to 6500 stores across 88 countries around the world. With around 90 stores globally, Uterqüe is Inditex’s smallest and most exclusive brand, selling women’s clothing and accessories for the more mature shopper. Since Inditex’s initial public offering in 2001, Ortega has received more than 12 billion euros, or about $13 billion, in dividends. Most of that cash has been reinvested in real estate through his company’s investment arm, Pontegadea, per Bloomberg. Ortega and Perez share two children, including a daughter, Marta, who began in the family business nearly 16 years ago, according to the Financial Times.
He also built an equestrian center near La Coruna, as his daughter Marta competes in show jumping, according to Bloomberg. Reuters reported that Ortega held around $6.6 billion in real estate assets by the end of 2015. Ortega picked up another New York property in 2016, this time a hotel at 70 Park Avenue in Murray Hill for $67.6 million, according to The Real Deal.
