Amancio Ortega Gaona BoF 500 The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry

Ortega married to his second wife, Flora Perez, and since 2001 they live in a discreet apartment building in La Coruña, Spain, near a major port of the Atlantic Ocean. They share a daughter, Marta, who is a senior creative consultant at Zara Women. Marta married top Spanish equestrian Sergio Álvarez Moya in February 2012, but the couple separated in 2015. Answer- Zara means that their items or the products are on the verge of being re-stocked. Zara puts a ‘coming soon’ message inside a envelop just next to the sold-out size. If the customer clicks on it and adds their email address, then those customers will be alerted by email as soon as the product gets re-stocked.

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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. 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. 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.

The commodity’s complex and opaque supply chains have also been linked to serious human rights abuses, including child and forced labour. 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.

All the products and items come off from the delivery trucks and they go directly to the sales floor of the outlet. This makes it possible for the store manager of the particular store to receive the product that the customers want and when they want them with ease. Just after a decade, Zara started their first online boutique in Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Portugal, Germany, and France. This was the decade where Zara as a brand started expanding their business fully in the online platform.

For the first time with Rosalía Mera, who co-founded Zara with him, and then he married Flora Pérez Marcote in 2001. He has three childern,Sandra Ortega Mera, Marcos Ortega Mera and Marta Ortega Pérez. The world got its first look of Ortega in 2000 when his company decided to go public. The mystery surrounding Ortega and his life has always fascinated the press and even led to books being published about him. Ortega’s childhood was spent in Leon, but when he was 14 years old, his family moved to A Coruna. Here, Ortega began working for a shirtmaker and learned the art of apparel making.

• Ortega owns 59% of Inditex, which is now the world’s largest clothing retailer, according to Bloomberg.
• Ortega is very private about his personal life, and as of 2012 he has only given three interviews to journalists.
• But in line with a long-term strategy announced in 2023, and following a major scandal last year, Inditex has indicated that cotton certified under the programme no longer qualifies as lower-impact in its book.
• According to Forbes, Ortega Gaona is the wealthiest retailer in the world and worth $69.1 billion as of 2019.
• Inditex’s establishment marked the beginning of the “instant fashion” strategy, which prioritized quick turnaround times for fashion production and distribution.
• 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.

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• Zara’s mysterious founder, Amancio Ortega, is now the world’s second-richest man — surpassing even Warren Buffet.
• Zara, under the ownership of Inditex, is a leading Spanish clothing and accessories retailer with a strong global presence.
• He was always ambitious for his business but he never focused on personal wealth, and has often expressed his astonishment at how things have turned out, he reports.
• It later expanded into international markets, with the first Zara store outside of Spain opening in Portugal in 1985.

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. 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. The move is part of a previously announced strategy to shift Inditex’s material mix, the company says. This “tainted” cotton was also finding its way into the supply chains of major brands like Zara and H&M, according to the investigation.

By the early 80s, Zara had expanded to several cities in Spain and in 1988, following the formation of Inditex, Ortega opened his first store in Portugal, followed swiftly by New York and Paris. The group began adding to its retail portfolio with Pull & Bear in 1991 and by 2000, it was distributing more than five different clothing chains in over 30 different markets. Zara was founded in 1975 by Amancio Ortega and Rosalía Mera in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain. The company initially opened its first retail store in 1975 and rapidly expanded its presence across Spain. Zara, the Spanish fashion empire, is primarily owned by Inditex, a holding company founded by Amancio Ortega as part of his “instant fashion” strategy. To ensure distribution to worldwide stores in just a few days, Zara also implemented a just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing system inspired by Toyota in 1990.

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The company responded well to consumers flocking back to stores after COVID-19 restrictions eased, posting a net profit of €3.1 billion in the first nine months of 2022. He vowed never to let his family suffer poverty again, left school, and went to work in a shirt shop. 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. In the street, I only want to be recognized by my family, my friends and people I work with. Ortega is very private about his personal life, and as of 2012 he has only given three interviews to journalists.

In 2019, Ortega went on a further real estate spending spree.

In time, he incorporated the brand into a holding company named the Inditex Group and bought 59.29% of the group’s shares, thereby becoming its largest shareholder. Inditex SA serves as Europe’s leading fashion retailer and carries brands that include Massimo Dutti, Uterque, Zara Home, Stradivarius, Bershka, Oysho, and Pull&Bear. Answer- Many faulty items take place while manufacturing a particular product or clothing item.

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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. Although Ortega enjoyed tremendous international success in an industry that fed on public images and publicity, he himself shunned the press and lived a strictly private life. On the day of Inditex’s public offering in 2001, Ortega reportedly worked a regular schedule and ate lunch in the company’s cafeteria—despite the fact that his net worth had risen by $6 billion. In 2008 Inditex emerged as the world’s largest fashion retailer, controlling some 4,000 stores in 70 countries.

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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. You go to the store a week too late and all the clothes would be changed. He later managed a clothing store that, like the men’s shirt store, catered to a wealthy clientele. Ortega saw an opportunity to expand his client base by using less-expensive materials and more-efficient manufacturing systems and by competitively pricing garments. He first applied the approach to a bathrobe business, Confecciones Goa, which he founded in 1963.

Ortega owns about 59 percent of the company, which has a $103 billion market cap. Today, the company includes brands like Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Pull&Bear and Stradivarius. To date, the Spain-based company has more than 88,000 employees and operates more than 7,400 stores in 96 markets around the world. In its 9-month interim report ending Oct. 2019, the company reported gross profits of €11.5 billion, a year-over-year increase of 8%.

In 2010, Zara Online extended its service to five more countries like Austria, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Ireland. Zara is an integral part of the Inditex owner of zara brand Group and Ortega is a 59.29 percent shareholder of the Group. Some of these include Massimo Dutti, Zara Home, Stradivarius, Bershka, Oyosho and Pull and Bear. The people shaping the global fashion industry, curated by the editors of The Business of Fashion, based on nominations and on-the-ground intelligence from around the world.