Amancio Ortega

Amancio Ortega Gaona left school at fourteen to deliver shirts. He built Inditex, the owner of Zara and the largest clothing retailer in the world, while giving almost no interviews and appearing in public so rarely that for years few people knew what he looked like.

A Railway Family

He was born on 28 March 1936 in Busdongo de Arbas, a small village in the mountains of León in northern Spain, months before the start of the Spanish Civil War. His father, Antonio, was a railway worker; his mother, Josefa, worked as a housemaid. He was the youngest of four children.

When he was a child the family moved to A Coruña in Galicia, where his father had been posted. Money was very tight. He has said that seeing a shopkeeper refuse his mother credit made him determined never to be poor.

The Shirt Shop

At fourteen he left school and went to work as an errand boy for a shirtmaker in A Coruña called Gala. He delivered orders, learned how clothes were cut and sewn, and watched how customers chose what to buy. He then moved to a larger clothing shop, La Maja, where he rose to manager.

The lesson he drew was that the business was not in making clothes or in selling them, but in connecting the two: working out what customers wanted, and getting it to them quickly and cheaply.

Dressing Gowns

In 1963, with his first wife, Rosalía Mera, and members of his family, he set up a small workshop, Confecciones GOA, making quilted dressing gowns and lingerie in their living room. They sold them to shops. The business grew into a network of small workshops and cooperatives around Galicia, employing many local women.

The First Zara

In 1975 a German customer cancelled a large order. Rather than take the loss, Ortega opened a shop to sell the clothes himself. The first Zara opened in 1975 on a main shopping street in A Coruña. He had wanted to call it Zorba, after the film Zorba the Greek, but a bar nearby already had the name. The story of the shop is told in the site’s Zara business profile.

The shop sold fashionable clothes at low prices, and it was a success. He opened more across Spain, and in 1985 created Inditex as the holding company for the business. The first shop outside Spain opened in Porto, Portugal, in 1988, followed by New York and Paris.

Speed

Zara’s advantage was speed. Most clothing companies designed their collections months in advance, had them made cheaply on the other side of the world, and hoped they would sell. Ortega kept design, much of the manufacturing and distribution close together, at the company’s headquarters in Arteixo, near A Coruña, with factories in Spain, Portugal and Morocco.

Shop managers reported every day on what was selling and what customers were asking for. Designers in Arteixo responded, and new clothes could be in shops within a few weeks. Zara made small quantities of each item and restocked twice a week. Because items sold out quickly, customers learned to visit often and buy straight away. It spent very little on advertising, relying instead on the shops themselves.

This became known as “fast fashion”. Inditex added other brands, including Massimo Dutti, Pull&Bear, Bershka, Stradivarius and Oysho, and became the largest fashion retailer in the world, with thousands of shops in dozens of countries. Fast fashion has also drawn strong criticism for its environmental impact and for conditions in the wider garment supply chain, which the company says it works to address.

The Private Man

Inditex listed on the Madrid stock exchange in May 2001. Ortega kept a majority of the shares, and still holds around 60 per cent through his investment company.

He avoided publicity almost completely. He gave very few interviews, did not attend award ceremonies, and for many years the company published almost no photographs of him. He is known for not wearing a tie, for eating in the staff canteen at Arteixo and for working at a desk among his designers rather than in a private office.

He and Rosalía Mera had two children, Sandra and Marcos, and divorced. Mera kept a stake in Inditex and became Spain’s richest woman; she died in 2013. In 2001 Ortega married Flora Pérez Marcote, a long-time Inditex employee. Their daughter is Marta Ortega Pérez.

Property and Succession

He stepped down as chairman of Inditex in 2011, handing over to Pablo Isla. His dividends have been invested through his holding company, Pontegadea, mainly in property: office buildings, shops, hotels and logistics centres in Spain, London, New York, Paris and elsewhere. Pontegadea has become one of the largest private property investors in the world; in 2025 it reported profits of more than €10 billion.

In April 2022 Marta Ortega became chair of Inditex, after years working in the company, beginning on the shop floor. Her father remains its largest shareholder.

Through the Amancio Ortega Foundation he has given hundreds of millions of euros to Spain’s public health system, especially for cancer diagnosis and radiotherapy equipment, as well as to education.

The System

The heart of Inditex is its logistics. Clothes from its factories and suppliers pass through large distribution centres in Spain, where they are sorted and sent to shops around the world, by lorry to Europe and by air further afield, usually within a couple of days. Shops receive new items twice a week. Because stock moves so quickly, Zara sells more of its clothes at full price than most rivals and needs fewer end-of-season sales.

Zara began selling online in 2010, and Inditex later linked its shops and websites so that the same stock could serve both. The group now has thousands of shops in dozens of countries and sells online in many more.

Giving

His best-known gift came in 2015, when his foundation gave €320 million to Spain’s regional health services to buy modern equipment for diagnosing and treating cancer; further donations followed. The gifts were widely welcomed, although some doctors’ groups argued that public health care should not depend on private charity. The foundation also funds scholarships for Spanish students to spend a year studying abroad.

Among Pontegadea’s best-known purchases is the Torre Picasso, one of Madrid’s tallest office buildings, bought in 2011.

Inditex Today

Inditex now sells close to €40 billion of clothing a year. It has continued to invest heavily in its logistics centres in Spain, and in recent years has tried to answer criticism of fast fashion by increasing its use of recycled and organic materials and by funding textile-recycling research.

During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Inditex used its supply chain and logistics network to buy and fly medical equipment to Spain, and some of its factories switched to making hospital gowns. Ortega, by then in his eighties, was reported to be still visiting the Arteixo headquarters regularly.

Zara’s model has been widely studied and copied, and business schools teach it as a case of a company that won by moving faster rather than by being cheapest.

The measure of him is the cancelled order in 1975. Where most small manufacturers would have taken the loss, he opened a shop, and from it learned that the fastest route between what customers want and what they get is to own the whole chain. He built one of the world’s great fortunes on that lesson, and said almost nothing about it.

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