Zara (Inditex)

Amancio Ortega was born in 1936 in León, Spain, the son of a railway worker. The family was poor. Ortega left school at 13 to work as a delivery boy for a shirtmaker in La Coruña. He then worked as a shop assistant at a clothing store. He observed customers closely, listened to what they wanted, and came to understand that fashion was not about what designers created but about what ordinary people would actually wear. He began making garments at home with his first wife Rosalía Mera — robes and loungewear — selling them door to door.

Ortega opened the first Zara store in La Coruña, Spain in 1975. The name was his third choice — his preferred names were already trademarked. The store offered fashionable clothing at affordable prices, with designs that closely tracked what was appearing on the high-end catwalks. Ortega had no fashion training and no design education. He had never attended university. His competitive advantage was operational: he could design, manufacture, and deliver a garment to stores in two weeks, when conventional retailers took six months.

Ortega founded Inditex — Industria de Diseño Textil — in 1985 as the parent company for Zara and future brands. The Inditex model was a fundamental departure from the fashion industry's established practices. Conventional retailers designed collections six months in advance and manufactured in bulk in Asia. Ortega manufactured in Spain and Portugal, in smaller quantities, closer to stores, with a two-week design-to-shelf cycle. If a design sold poorly, it was replaced within weeks. If it sold well, more was made immediately. Fashion responded to customers rather than requiring customers to accept what designers had decided months earlier.

Inditex went public in 2001 in Spain's largest IPO, raising €2.3 billion. Ortega retained 60% of the company. By 2015, he had overtaken Bill Gates to become the richest person in the world — briefly — with a fortune exceeding $80 billion. The man who had left school at 13 to deliver shirts was worth more than the founder of Microsoft. Ortega remained famously reclusive: he gave almost no interviews, was photographed rarely, and continued eating lunch in Inditex's staff canteen in Arteixo.

Zara and Inditex faced growing criticism in the 2010s and 2020s over fast fashion's environmental impact — the waste generated by clothing designed to be worn a few times and discarded, and the labour conditions in supplier factories. Inditex committed to using 100% sustainable fabrics by 2025 and announced ambitious recycling programmes. Critics argued these commitments were insufficient given the fundamental model of encouraging constant consumption. The tension between Inditex's extraordinary commercial success and its environmental footprint remained unresolved.