The founder of zara became the most. Zara owner is the second richest person in the world

Zara clothes are worn by queens and students, movie stars and clerks. Dark paper bags of these stores can be found on the streets of cities around the world. The Inditex group, which in addition to Zara also includes the brands Pull&Bear, Bershka, Stradivarius and others, is one of the major players on international market clothes. It allows millions of shoppers to wear inexpensive fashionable clothing. Most of them do not know that all this was created by the entrepreneur Amancio Ortega, who, together with his family, turned a small sewing workshop into an international corporation.

The Village read the book The Zara Phenomenon, recently published by Eksmo, and learned how one of the most famous clothing brands in the world came into existence.

Difficult childhood

“I remember one afternoon after school I went with my mother to get some food. I was very young, and she met me at school. Therefore, very often
I went shopping with her. The store we went to was one of those big grocery stores with such a tall counter, so tall that I didn't really see who was talking to my mother, but I heard a male voice saying what I had carried through
time and never forget: "Josefa, I'm sorry, but I can no longer sell you goods on credit." I was shocked. I was only 12."

On that day, the son of the Spanish railway worker Amancio Ortega decided that such an incident with his mother would never happen again. He left school and took a job as a sales assistant in a tailor shop in the town of A Coruña. Buyers immediately noticed the diligent boy, and his family's business went uphill.

At 17, Amancio left his first company and was hired as an assistant at
LaMaja. The company had several branches in which his older brother and sister Antonio and Pepita were already working. Amancio was quickly promoted
to manager, and his place was taken by a 16-year-old girl named Rosalia Mera Goyenchea, whom he married two years later.

The owners of La Maja paid attention to the suggestions made by the young Ortega. One of them was the idea - to make clothes using factory fabric and the work of his brother Antonio's wife - a dressmaker. After some time, Ortega quit his job to concentrate on the clothing business.

“I decided to follow the impulse and founded GOA with my brother Antonio,” said Amancio. - We opened an account for 2,500 pesetas (less than 20 euros today). My half-sister, who knew how to sew, and my first wife, Rosalia, made the famous quilted robes, very fashionable at that time.

Then, in 1963, family business was a small workshop. Then Amancio took up the purchase and subsequent export of clothing from other Spanish manufacturers. Ten years later, he had the idea to go to retail market- In 1975, he opened the first Zara store in his native A Coruña.

International network

In 1979, Amancio merged all of his companies under the banner of Inditex. In the 80s, he filled all corners of Spain with his stores, and before the end of the decade he was seized by a brave and reckless idea - to conquer the fashion capitals
world, open in Paris and cross the Atlantic to conquer New York.

“When I arrived in Paris in 1990, shortly after opening our first store, next to the Place de l’Opéra, I rushed there to
see everything with your own eyes, - said Ortega. - When I tried to enter that first store in the French capital, I could not get through the line of people crowding even on the street. I stood there in the doorway, sobbing like a baby. I couldn't contain my feelings."

From the very beginning, the company has relied on fast fashion and the repetition of models of famous designers in more accessible materials. The Inditex office had a special department whose employees studied fashion magazines and also dissected dresses from the latest collections in order to borrow their cut for their models.

Knowing that a single brand would not satisfy all customers, Amancio decided not to settle for Zara, whose consumer audience was middle-class women and which generated 78 percent of revenue. In 1991, he created Pull & Bear, which presented casual wear for young people. He also bought a stake in Massimo Dutti, which is aimed at upper-middle-income clients of both sexes, and within five years he took full ownership of the brand.

In 1998, realizing that he needed to cover the needs of teenagers hanging out in discotheques, he created Bershka - for girls who do not want to dress like their mothers or older sisters, and in next year bought Stradivarius to complement Bershka, thus gaining control of two major brands in the teen market. In the 2000s, the group also developed the Uterqüe accessories brand.

Business model

The first step in the creation process new collection- definition of trends. Employees of the company travel all over the world, look at what people are wearing and how customers are dressed on the street. Their observations can turn into sketches, which are then shown at internal meetings. Designers look at dominant colors and materials and then study specific elements in detail. In addition, they draw information from fashion magazines, runway viewings, TV shows or stars' red carpet outfits, and so on. Brand stores also report what is now in demand.

With all this information in hand, designers create line prototypes (more than 22,000 items a year). Prototypes are tested on real people and mannequins. Things that pass the test are given back to the hands of fashion designers, who create patterns. Fragments of the pattern are placed on the fabric like a puzzle, trying to find the most profitable use of the material.

When marketing gives final approval for the production of a thing, requests are sent to various factories that offer their prices and deadlines for a specific job. The one who offers the closest to the ideal option gets the job. Inditex usually produces 25% of its collection before the start of the season. This reduces warehouse costs and avoids the risk of not meeting customer requirements.

“We have the ability to completely abandon a line if it doesn’t sell, we can fill the collections with new colors and create a new style in just a few days,” Ortega said.

Ordinary sellers exhibit at the beginning of the season high prices, A
then they cut margins for several months to sell the product. The consumer knows that at the end of the season he or she will be able to buy items for more low prices. Ortega renews its line in stores around the world every week or twice a week in European stores. The clients know
that they will always find new products in the store, but they also know that they will definitely not find in the store what they tried on there seven days ago. Thanks to this, customers visit Inditex stores about 17 times a year, instead of the average 3.5 times in other clothing stores.

The store manager has full control of his territory, large or
small, with a staff of ten to 120 people. Many managers act as CEOs and their salaries reach up to 240,000 euros per year. These are the people who order from the catalog and inform the head office about what works and what doesn't.

The company has six fundamental rules governing communication with the client. These are known as the "master six":

Always work with a pleasant expression on your face;

Smile at the checkout;

Hold a pen in your hands;

The manager must be more interested in clients than others;

Fitting rooms are an important point in the sales process;

Throughout the store, patience is essential.

Now the number of Inditex stores that comply with these rules has exceeded 6,600. In 2001, the company placed its shares on the stock exchange, but Amancio retained a controlling stake. He is in fourth place on the Forbes list of billionaires with a net worth of $71.5 billion. The founder of the company does not like publicity and tries not to get into the camera lenses. At the same time, employees say that the huge wealth did not affect the character of Amancio.

“He didn't let anything change him,” says Elena Perez, manager of his first store in Madrid. - The company keeps growing and growing, but he wears the same shoes, shirts and trousers. I know he'd like to wear Zara more, but sometimes he gets really annoyed with our men's department because they don't have pants in his size."

Photos: Cover - Martin Good / Shutterstock.com, 1 - TORRECILLA / EPA / TASS, 2 - Vytautas Kielaitis / Shutterstock.com, 3 - Wikipedia

Spaniard Amancio Ortega topped the rating on September 9 the richest people world according to Forbes. Started 40 years ago by the son of a railroad worker and a maid, Zara is steadily growing profits

The fortune of the founder of the largest group of companies in the fashion industry Inditex, which unites the brands Zara, Massimo Dutti, Pull & Bear, Stradivarius, Bershka, Oysho, Uterque and Lefties, was estimated by Forbes on September 9 at $ 78 billion. Gates turned out to be $ 100 million less. “Easy hit, easy lost,” Forbes journalist Dan Alexander commented on the castling. "Gates and Ortega's fortunes will continue to fluctuate up and down as their stocks rise and fall."

Ortega stayed on the first line for only two days, again losing to the same Gates. And yet, for the third year in a row, he remains in the top three in the ranking, and his empire is the leader in its industry. Founded 40 years ago by the son of a railroad worker and a maid, Zara has spread all over the world, and its concept of "fast fashion" is forcing the oldest fashion houses to change their business strategies.

Proud child

Amancio Ortega was born in March 1936 in the village of Busdongo de Arbaz with a population of 60 in northwestern Spain. He was youngest child in a family of four children. The family lived very poorly. “My father's salary was 300 pesetas (less than €2 today). Do not say that in those days it was not so bad. There were three children in the family: the eldest Anthony, Pepita, the only girl, and me, the baby. And this salary was never enough to last until the end of the month, ”he shared his memories with his close friend, the author of his biography The Zara Phenomenon, Covadonga O’Shea.

Amancio got his first job at the age of 13. This was prompted by a case in grocery store, where he once came with his mother for groceries. “There was such a high counter that I did not see who was talking to my mother, but I heard a male voice that said what I carried in myself through time and I never forget. “Josefa, I'm sorry, but I can no longer sell goods to you on credit. I was in shock,” he recalled. According to O'Shea, Ortega had a very strong sense of pride since childhood, and the humiliation he experienced prompted him to leave school and start helping his family.

Ortega got a job in a small shop-studio Gala, was running errands for the whole store. “I washed, packed, unpacked and talked with customers when there were a lot of people. It seems that our clients were talking about me to the boss because they noticed that from the moment I first got there, I took my job very seriously and with full responsibility', Ortega recalled.

The atmosphere that reigned in this atelier shaped his attitude to work as an activity, the meaning of which is not only in generating profits. “I keep, like a treasure, the first contract from Gala,” he said.

The store is still open. “He seems to be frozen in time,” Xabier Blanco, author of the biographical book “From Zero to Zara,” shared his observations. “Checked shirts, fishing caps and wool sweaters, they still sell the same things, and Amancio is Mr. World.”

15 year old manager

After working at Gala for a year, Ortega got a job as an assistant in a higher-class store - La Maja, where his older brother and sister worked at that time. He was quickly promoted to manager, and was replaced by 16-year-old Rosalia Mera Goyenchena, whom he married two years later.

Having gained enough experience, Amancio quit, and by the age of 17, in 1953, he founded his first company - GOA Confessoines (Ortega's initials backwards). Start-up capital amounted to 2.5 thousand pesetas (less than €20 today).

Women's quilted dressing gowns were sewn in a small workshop. According to O "Shea, the bathrobes sold very well. Reinvesting most of the money he earned, Amancio put the workshop on its feet and found an intermediary who bought all the goods produced from him. Ortega's goal was large-scale production. As Blanco explained in his book, in Galicia in With little choice of work, thousands of men worked at sea while their wives stayed at home. "For little pay, they sewed very well," Ortega told him. He began organizing thousands of women into sewing cooperatives. It turned out to be easy. "We knew well Amancio, he was very close to the workers,” one of the members of the cooperative described her impressions of working for Ortega.

In ten years of work, Ortega established contacts with Catalan textile workers who sold fabrics to him, bypassing intermediaries, increased production capacity and amassed a large customer base. In the early 1970s, he moved into distribution and hired a design team, and in 1975 he opened his first retail store. He wanted to name him Zorba, after the Zorba the Greek character played by Anthony Quinn, but he couldn't get the rights to use the character's name. The store was named Zara.

Zara store in Barcelona, ​​Spain (Photo: Reuters/Pixstream)

"Fast" fashion

Zara - the main and most recognizable asset of the Inditex group - was created in 1985 on the basis of GOA and today is the largest group of companies in the fashion industry.

The success was brought by a strategy that contradicts most of the principles by which supply chains are created in the market. Zara works without intermediaries and agents. Unlike many outsourced clothing suppliers, he makes his own clothes for the most part. The company itself is engaged in the purchase of materials, design, storage, distribution and logistics. “Our business formula is built on very little markup. We prefer to earn less on each item, but sell them a lot more, ”Ortega explained.

The main thing is speed: the release of a new model, including design, production and delivery to stores, is scheduled for no more than two weeks. Zara employs over a hundred designers. It is difficult for other companies to withstand such a race: sometimes it takes months to develop only a design, the appearance of new collections on the shelves is possible two or three times a year. Retailers are subject to strict schedules for placing orders and receiving products, and delivery to stores must take no more than 48 hours. Zara does not seek to maximize production volumes: the company distributes new models in limited quantities and updates twice a month. Even the most popular models do not stay on the shelves for more than a month, and significant areas in Zara stores are deliberately left unfilled. This fuels customer interest: as Business Genius: A More Inspiring Approach to Entrepreneurial Growth says, while customers visit other clothing stores an average of four times a year, they visit Inditex stores almost 17 times a year. Zara has become virtually synonymous with the fast fashion concept used by retailers.

Due to the high traffic, Zara does not need to spend significant funds on advertising. As a result, Zara consistently outperforms competitors in terms of net profit. In 2015 net profit Inditex increased year on year by 14.8% to $3.2 billion. For comparison: H&M net profit in 2015 amounted to $2.5 billion (an increase from $2.4 billion a year earlier), GAP - $920 million ($1.3 billion a year earlier). In general, the Inditex group has only increased profits and revenues for the last ten years in a row. In 2015, revenue was $22.8 billion.

“The Spaniards have turned a hundred-year-old two-season cycle in the fashion industry,” says Masoud Golsorhi, editor of the London-based fashion magazine Tank, quoted by New York times. - Now about half of the companies in the high fashion segment, such as Prada and Louis Vuitton, produce four to six collections a year. It's because of Zara."

Interaction and control

In developing the supply chain, Ortega relied on vertical integration- an unpopular and generally difficult model for the fashion industry. He built a chain with a super-fast reaction and extended his control to almost all of its links.

The system is based on three fundamental principles, writes Harvard Business Review (HBR). The first is that the communication system built in Zara provides for real-time tracking of products at all stages of production and sales. Zara has a single design and manufacturing center [located at the headquarters in A Coruña]. Usually, after the start of the next season, clothing manufacturers allow retailers to adjust no more than 20% of the volume of orders, but the communication system at Zara allows you to adjust up to 40-50% of initial orders. This helps to avoid overproduction and sales.

In addition, Zara is the owner of almost all the stores where its products are sold. Competitors work, as a rule, according to the franchise system, which limits the influence of the manufacturer on the state of retail stocks. The Zara management itself sets the necessary rhythm for the movement of information and products.

Finally, the company, unlike many competitors, owns its own clothing factories (in 2015 there were 6.3 thousand of them worldwide), independently provides itself with textiles and dyes. This allows you to control the volume and timing of release and maintain independence from third-party vendors, notes HBR.

Unsociable enthusiast

All the time while Ortega was in the position of head of the company (he left it in 2011 at the age of 75), he preferred to control all the processes taking place in it. Even holidays, including New Year and the days of his birth, he spent at work. “If I want everything to continue to function, I must stand at my post, as usual,” he explained to O’Shea.

Most of all, he recalled, he liked to spend time in the design department - a huge room littered with blueprints and a variety of clothes, including famous brands. “We must draw inspiration from what people like and what people are looking for in the international market! Here we study garments, take them apart, sketch them, assemble them again, adapt them to our own style, release them and send them to the market,” explained O’Shea Ortega. He didn't have his own office. “My work is not paper work, but work in a factory,” the businessman explained.

Until 1999, the only photograph of him was an ID photo. "I'm trying to live quietly, to be common man to be able to go where I want to have a drink
coffee on the veranda in Piazza Maria Pita, the most traditional place in A Coruña, or stroll down the street with a cocktail where no one knows who I am,” he says.

Great forger

Zara has a special department of several dozen people who are dispersed in New York clubs, the business districts of Paris, the bars and fashionable streets of Spain. “We call the trend analysis procedure a check in market conditions on the target audience,” said Ortega.

Representatives of Zara attended fashion shows and copied clothing models, and then slightly modified models of luxury brands appeared on the shelves of the Spanish company's stores. The company was repeatedly accused of plagiarism, but each time Zara claimed that they did not copy, but caught fashion trends. In particular, in 2008 Zara was unsuccessfully sued by the French fashion house Christian Louboutin, who claimed that the Spanish company violated its trademark by releasing very high-heeled shoes with red soles (popularly called Louboutins). Zara shoes at that time cost no more than $100, while the cost of a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes often exceeded $1,000.

In July 2016, the Spanish company was accused of plagiarism by American illustrator Tuesday Bassen, who claimed the fashion brand copied her illustrations. Zara initiated an internal investigation into the case and suspended the sale of items with illustrations similar to Bassin's work.

According to Fortune magazine, 11 other designers made similar complaints. One of them, Adam Kurtz, posted the results online. comparative analysis their works and the works of Zara. The magazine did not name the rest of the designers.

Constant growth

In 2001, Inditex went public with an IPO on the Madrid stock exchange. The company was valued at $9.7 billion. Since then, its capitalization has actually steadily grown, and as of September 15, 2016, the group’s value was $111.5 billion. According to Forbes, the company managed not only to survive the global financial crisis, but to continue to improve financial indicators. From 2009 to 2014, according to the magazine, Ortega earned $45 billion from his shares. As of the end of 2015, Ortega owned 59.3% of its shares on total amount$66 billion

“Even when I was a nobody and had practically nothing, I dreamed of development and growth. Growth is a survival mechanism. And now that I'm 72, I feel the same way," says Ortega.

In 1988, Zara expanded abroad by opening its first store in Portugal, in 1989 in New York, in 1990 in Paris, and in 2003 in Russia.

Today, the Zara network has over 2.1 thousand stores in 88 countries around the world. There are 91 Zara stores in Russia. This is one of the key markets for Inditex. Even during the crisis of 2014-2015, several new Zara stores appeared in the country. At the end of 2015, Russia became the third market for Inditex in terms of the number of stores (after Spain and China).

The founder of the Zara chain of stores, the Spanish entrepreneur Amancio Ortega, became the richest man, displacing founder Bill Gates from the first line. Ortega's fortune in the World Billionaires Ranking, whose data is updated in real time, amounted to $79.7 billion. Over the past day, the fortune of the Spanish businessman has grown by 5.2%, or by $3.9 billion.

Amancio Ortega

Forbes Real-time Worldwide Billionaire Ranking is different from annual ranking log with daily updates on financial position the richest people on the planet based on the value of shares and other securities owned by businessmen. The agency has a similar real-time rating. However, according to the Bloomberg Billioners Index, the Microsoft founder is almost $10 billion richer than the Spanish businessman. So, as of October 22, Bill Gates' fortune is estimated at $83.8 billion, while Ortega ranks second with $75.7 billion.

Amancio Ortega owns Inditex, which has over 6,750 stores in 88 countries and owns famous brands Zara, Oysho, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Pull and Bear, Zara Home, Stradivarius and Uterque. Ortega's brands focus on the middle class and do not try to conquer the luxury clothing market. This strategy is bearing fruit: now luxury goods manufacturers are experiencing better times, since the performance of the largest market players is affected by the economic situation in China, namely, slowing demand in China and Hong Kong.

In the first half of the year, the income of the Italian retailer Prada in the Asian region, which accounts for 36% of all sales, decreased by 1.4% in local currency and by 17.5% in terms of constant courses currencies. In mainland China, this figure fell by 1.2 and 19.3%, respectively, reported.

According to financial director LVMH Jean-Jacques Guiony, the summer collapse of Chinese stock markets will affect LVMH (the group's financials are due next week), although, in his opinion, the market will feel a decrease in demand "only for a few months."

At the same time, the world's largest luxury goods maker said that Chinese travelers' spending growth has slowed in recent months. “We are seeing more and more tourists from China, but they are spending a little less. The growth rate of purchases in the third quarter is not as high as it was in the first half of the year, ”Ghioni quotes. This situation comes against the backdrop of a weaker euro, due to which Asian travelers staged mass shopping tours at the beginning of the year.

However, the fall in demand for luxury goods so far affects the British Burberry Group Plc the most, as up to 40% of its profits come from purchases from Chinese consumers.

During the first half of the year, sales in the Chinese and Hong Kong stores of the fashion house fell by 5 and 20%, respectively.

Another factor that also negatively affected the company's performance was their focus on the domestic, English market, which accounts for about 40% of European sales. Many "dollar" buyers take advantage of the weakening of the European currency and come to make purchases on the continent, draws the attention of MainFirst Bank AG.

The company has said it could return to a 5% increase in like-for-like sales in the second half of the fiscal year, which runs through March 2016. However, according to Reuters, whether the second quarter was unsuccessful for the company due to external reasons, or whether the decline in performance could become a trend is still unclear.

Zara, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Bershka, Pull&Bear, Uterqüe. Stradivarius - these fashionable clothing stores are known to every modern woman. Did you know that all these brands belong to the same production holding - Industria de Diseno Textil Sociedad Anonima (Inditex)? The owner of the holding, Spanish businessman Amancio Ortega, has been leading in the ranking of the richest people on the planet for several years in a row. In 2012, he was recognized as the richest person in Europe by Bloomberg, with a net worth of $39.5 billion. In 2013, his condition was assessed Forbes magazine already at 57 billion, which put him in third place among the world's billionaires, moving the legendary Warren Buffett in the ranking. And in 2015 and 2016, according to Forbes, he became the richest man on the planet with a fortune of about $ 80 billion, overtaking Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the Sultan of Brunei and other world rich people.

How did it happen that the richest man in the world is also the most unknown? We are sure that a little more than everyone has heard the name of the same Bill Gates, and you most likely see the name of Amancio Ortega for the first time. This man does not pose for cameras and never gives interviews. Almost nothing is known about his life, journalists even called him "the nightmare of the paparazzi." The only time and for only 15 minutes, he allowed journalists to photograph himself in 2001 at a public report of the company. Then he answered only one question - about why he leads such a reclusive lifestyle. The tycoon said he didn't want to be recognized on the street by anyone other than his family and friends. He also asked all his acquaintances not to talk about the details of his life, and no one violated his request.

The more valuable are the crumbs of information that are known about him. And here is what is known about him.

Amancio Ortega Gaona was born on March 28, 1936 in the Spanish provincial town of Busdongo, near Leon. The childhood of the richest man on the planet was the most ordinary. His parents were not millionaires who gave their offspring a good start in life. Unlike other European billionaires such as Georg Scheffler, Liliane Betancourt or Gerald Grosvenor (otherwise known as the Duke of Westminster), he did not inherit his wealth. His parents were not even middle class. Amancio Ortega's father worked as a railway worker, his mother was a servant. Even under conditions economic crisis In post-war Spain, Ortega's father's salary was considered very modest - he received only 300 pesetas a month. To understand the size of this amount, imagine that a dozen chicken eggs cost about 30 pesetas - a tenth of this salary. In addition to Amancio, the family had two more children - older brother Antonio and sister Josepha.

The family lived so poorly that Amancio had to leave school and go to work. He was only 13 years old. One day he went grocery shopping with his mother and witnessed a humiliating scene when, despite his mother's pleas, the seller refused to give her a further loan for groceries, because they already owed him a large amount. All the greengrocers, butchers and bakers from the surrounding shops refused to sell on credit, and at some point the family had nothing to eat. It was a turning point in Amancio's life - his biographer Covadonga O'Shea writes about it this way: “In these terrible days, he first realized all the drama and all the hopelessness of poverty, which should never again be repeated either in his life or in his future family ".

The first job of the future textile magnate was working as a courier in a haberdashery store. When Amancio was 14 years old, the family moved to the city of La Coruña, where Amancio's father was offered a job. There, Amancio got a job at the Gala Notariado clothing store on the corner of Federico Tapia and Plaza de Galizia. This store still exists. True, according to the owner, visitors to the store do not so much buy his products - shirts, cardigans and hats - as they try to find out details about the youth of the multibillionaire who once worked here as an errand boy.

Later, Amancio Ortega got a job in one of the Spanish ateliers. There he learned how to sew clothes, shirring and draping fabrics. Soon he got a job as an apprentice to a fashionable Spanish designer who once said this about him: “Amancio is a hard-working guy, of course, but he cannot become a good tailor. He doesn't know how to communicate with people. The tailor does half of the work with his tongue, but he is silent all the time, shy. Let him do something else, sewing is not his destiny. Ortega has always been modest, bordering on shyness. The only time journalists were allowed to photograph him, everyone could see how hard it was for him.

Working as an apprentice, Ortega not only learned to sew, studied fashion and developed a sense of beauty. He studied the needs of customers and thought about how to meet the demand. In his study of pricing, he saw that the cost of clothing rose as he moved from sewing workshop to a warehouse - from a warehouse to a wholesale dealer - from a dealer to a retail store. He realized that if you shorten this path, the price of things will become much more attractive.

But for Ortega, improving logistics wasn't the only way to win over a customer. He was always fascinated by the idea of ​​making luxury items available to the public. The idea was not new - many entrepreneurs of that time made their fortune by following this path. For example, founder of Ikea, which made designer furniture accessible to all segments of the population. In the 1960s, Ortega took a job as a sales manager in a clothing store. In addition to working in the store, he began to buy inexpensive fabrics in Barcelona and sew clothes from them. For some models, he himself came up with patterns, but mostly he copied clothes from famous fashion designers, adapting them to the mass buyer. His clothes were used in great demand, Spanish boutiques began to buy it. Within 3 years, Amancio saved up enough money to open his own clothing business called Confecciones GOA (the abbreviation GOA is Amancio Ortega Gaon's initials, read backwards). It was a family company, where Amancio himself was responsible for the development of models, his brother Antonio - for commercial matters, the sister was in charge of accounting, and his wife Rosalia Mera acted as a business partner. The future billionaire began by sewing underwear, bathrobes and nightgowns.

Amancio Ortega opened his first own clothing store shortly before his 40th birthday. It is interesting that this happened unplanned. GOA garments received a large order for bathrobes from a German client, and Ortega had already invested all the money he had in the tailoring when the client canceled the order at the last minute. To save the company from bankruptcy, Ortega and his wife decided to open their own store and sell their products there. Thus, the Zara store was born. At first, they wanted to name the store Zorba after Anthony Quinn's character from the movie Zorba the Greek. But the name Zorba was already registered to another company, and after some deliberation, the store got the name Zara, which sounded feminine and exotic (pronounced “Thara” in Spanish).

Ten years after the opening of the first Zara, a parent company, Inditex, was formed to handle the rapid expansion. In 1989, the first overseas Zara store was opened in Porta, Portugal. Now, after 40 years of dynamic development, the Zara network includes 2,000 stores in 88 countries around the world. In addition to Zara, Amancio Ortega owns Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Stradivarius, Oysho, Bershka, Zara Home, Uterqüe and Lefties brands.

The richest representative of the fashion world never attends shows, fashion weeks and other public or private events of the industry. But shortly after each fashion week, Zara stores are filled with designs that are very similar to the prêt-a-porte clothes introduced just a few days ago by high-end designers. This situation infuriates fashion designers and delights Zara customers who cannot afford an expensive original, and do not see much point in it.

The main feature of Zara, which allowed her to get ahead, is an instant response to customer demand. Firstly, the company was able to reduce the time for new models to go on sale to a ridiculous 10-15 days! Yes, yes, design, pattern development, tailoring, delivery to a retail store - all this within two weeks! The company's team employs more than 200 designers who respond to the slightest fluctuations in demand. Secondly, in order to better understand the needs of customers, the Zara team analyzes not only the actual sales, but also the goods that customers took for fitting, but for some reason did not buy. This analysis gives an understanding of what needs to be improved, helps to identify customer expectations. Thirdly, the company managed to get away from the trend to place garment production in the countries of Southeast Asia to reduce the cost of production. Spain produces 50% of Zara clothes, 26% in other parts of Europe and only 24% in Asia, Africa and other countries. Instead of saving on the quality of tailoring, Zara saves on advertising. According to High Point University economics professor Stephanie Crofton, Inditex spends only 0.3% of its revenue on advertising, compared to 3.5-5%, which is about the same as other major clothing brands. Fourth, Zara releases clothes in super-small batches and never re-sews even the most successful models. So they reduce the risks of increasing stocks, and provide customers with some kind of exclusivity.

In 2011, when the founder of Zara turned 75, he announced his resignation. The post of president of the holding was taken by former vice president and assistant Pablo Isla. Rumor has it that Amancio Ortega plans to make his successor the youngest daughter from his second marriage, Marta.

In total, Amancio Ortega has three children: daughter Sandra and son Marcos from his first wife Rosalia Mera, and daughter Marta from his second wife Flora Perez Marcote. They say that the eldest daughter of a billionaire flatly refused to do business. She inherited more than 4.7 billion euros from her mother, who died in 2012, owns a 7% stake in Inditex and, according to Forbes, is one of the richest and most powerful women in Europe. Son Marcos is not able to manage the company, since he has been disabled since birth - the boy was born with cerebral palsy. Shortly after his birth, his parents opened charitable foundation support for children with such disabilities.

The billionaire divorced his first wife in 1986, but there were rumors that the couple had not been a family for a long time by that time, keeping the relationship only for the sake of business. The billionaire married his second wife in 2001, they are together to this day.

Ortega spends millions of dollars every year protecting his anonymity. Perhaps there will be no more than 200 pictures in which you can see him and his family members. Bits of information about his life can be seen either in the official Zara news or in his biographies written by the official biographer Covadonga O'Shea (family friend, teacher at the fashion school at the University of Navarra) or Xabier Blanco (Spanish journalist, carefully tracks the career of the founder of Zara ).

He never arranges parties, does not go to public events, but what is there - he refused an invitation to dinner from the Queen of Spain herself! His modesty is also evidenced by the fact that for many years he lives in a five-story building in A Coruña, and when he worked for the company, he dined in the common dining room with his employees. His daughter Marta, who is to inherit her father's fashion empire, worked in the holding, starting from the lowest positions.

The Spanish billionaire knows how not only to make money, but also to spend. For example, in 2011, Ortega bought the 43-story Picasso skyscraper in downtown Madrid for $536 million. He also owns a Falcon 900 private jet, a hotel on the coast of Miami, various houses and apartments around the world, and his own racetrack. The billionaire bought real estate as an investment, he rents out his houses and does not leave A Coruña. But the hippodrome was bought for the soul. Ortega has a real passion for horses and racing, as does his daughter Marta, who even married equestrian star Sergio Alvarez Moya.

The great merit of this man is that he made fashionable designer clothes available to everyone, and not just to the elite segments of society. Many have tried to replicate his business model, but so far no one has succeeded. The speed with which he captures fashion trends and embodies them in the clothes of his brand is truly breathtaking. Many things played a role in his success - his own talent, and the right people who helped him, and his faith in success, and, of course, a happy coincidence. But the start was made when Ortega saw poverty in all its ugliness, on that memorable day when his mother refused to sell food on credit. On that day, the future billionaire promised himself never to humiliate himself or starve again. He kept his word.