With his wealth, he has also built one of the world’s most valuable real estate portfolios. By the early 1960s, Ortega had already developed the core operating principles for the business model that would later be called fast fashion. The secret to Zara’s success largely was because of the way it kept up with street fashion with the changing times. Most other fashion brands would take a whole six months to get their new designs into the market. 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.
Personal life
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. 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 addition to state-of-the-art design and production, the computerized inventory systems that linked stores to factories prevented unnecessary capital expenditure by removing the need for large warehouse inventories. For example, once each Zara store was linked to the factory system, not only was all sales information automatically sent back to headquarters in Spain, but the on-site staff also constantly monitored the stock. If a style or color was selling well, new colors or patterns were added to existing designs.
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.
Uniqlo SuccessStory
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.
In that time, Ortega has also grown his business by acquiring and launching other fashion brands, which now fall under the Inditex umbrella. Inditex is considered the largest fashion retailer on the planet, turning out $29 billion in sales in 2018. 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.
Ortega also owned an $84 million superyacht named Drizzle, but he reportedly put it up for sale in 2022.
The building has 492 studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments along with a fitness center, yoga studio, dog park, and pet spa. There were no public photographs of him until 1999, and in 2012, Bloomberg noted that he had only ever granted interviews to three journalists. As of April 17, 2024, Ortega had a net worth of $91.5 billion, making him the 15th richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. 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. His father was an itinerant railway worker, his mother worked as a maid, and the family lived in a row house on the railroad tracks. Ortega is very private about his personal life, and as of 2012 he has only given three interviews to journalists.
In 2001, Ortega founded owner of zara brand 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.
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 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.
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.
- But if other High Street brands aren’t taking it on, online brands might – companies like Boohoo and Asos are only a fraction of the size of Inditex, but are focusing on shortening the time it takes to react to trends on the High Street and Instagram.
- In 2001, Ortega founded the Amancio Ortega Foundation, a charitable organization focused on education and social welfare.
- Through the Pontegadea company, he brings together all his assets based on real estate investment and financial investments.
- He also built an equestrian center near La Coruna, as his daughter Marta competes in show jumping, according to Bloomberg.
Pull&Bear, a teen-focused retailer, is also owned by Inditex.
He is the wealthiest person in Spain and among the wealthiest people in the world. Ortega built his retail empire as a pioneer of fast fashion—a retail concept based on the rapid production and distribution of inexpensive versions of designs copied from fashion runways or pop culture icons. Amancio Ortega developed the business model that would later be called fast fashion, revolutionizing the retail fashion industry and becoming one of the world’s richest men in the process.
That’s where Zara beat the rest of them and became the favourite brand among people who liked to keep up with the fashion. Ortega was famous for his view on clothes as a perishable commodity; that people would love to use them and throw them away, just like yogurt or bread. It is often cited that he produces ‘fresh baked clothes’ that survive the changing street fashion trends for not more than a month or two. It all began when Ortega established a dress-making factory, Inditex, in the year 1963.Ten years later, he started off a small store that was named as Zorba in La Coruna, Spain with a budget of a meagre 30 Euros. Zara slowly expanded its empire from the town in Spain to the rest of the country and then later to Portugal.
Few clothing brands keep up with the latest fashion, are of high quality and yet, affordable. It is probably the amalgamation of all these qualities that made Zara, the Spanish clothing brand become the go-to fashion brand for all. Stradivarius was acquired by Inditex in 1999 and was originally a family-owned women’s wear brand.
