Zara at 50: Spain’s greatest success story
From the store where its story began to the second revolution of Zara.
As our kids fought over a football in Plaza España, I asked a doctor friend from Bilbao to imagine A Coruña without Inditex - the parent company of the Spanish fashion giant Zara.
His prognosis was cold.
“Without Inditex, A Coruña would be another Oviedo or Gijón.”
In his view, it would be just another greying provincial city where people wear ropa de domingo - their Sunday best - once a week.
“Here, people dress well every day.”
The Inditex effect.
Facing the wild Atlantic, this corner of Spain favours fashion that’s functional over flamboyant.
While the identities of Oviedo and Gijón are rooted in an industrial past that’s not coming back, A Coruña is home to Spain’s greatest business success - an economic engine still posting record-breaking in-store sales.
It’s also home to about 250,000 people. “Without Inditex, the population wouldn’t reach 200,000,” added the doctor’s father-in-law, sitting nearby.
A Coruña - the birthplace of Inditex - is ground zero for Spain’s fashion industry. Referred to by The Financial Times as “a colossus among retailers,” the group includes brands like Zara, Bershka, Stradivarius, Pull&Bear, and Massimo Dutti.
5,500 people work at Inditex’s vast glass headquarters in the Sabón industrial park, 13 kilometers from A Coruña. The company employs 162,000 people worldwide, nearly 50,000 of them in Spain.
Across its seven brands, Inditex runs 5,563 stores - 1,759 of them Zara. The group’s crown jewel accounts for 72% of Inditex’s €39 billion in annual revenue.
For a globally recognised company, Inditex’s influence in A Coruña is surprisingly low key. It’s more of an ecosystem than empresa, business.
The network of spin-off employment it sustains - from builders and painters to material suppliers and transport services - is huge. Yet its presence in this city of fishing, football, and fashion is less conspicuous than local brands like Estrella Galicia or the team it sponsors, Deportivo La Coruña.
There are no flashy marketing campaigns - Inditex doesn't do traditional advertising. Besides, people carrying Zara bags on the street are better than any billboard.
Though the company’s complex sits just outside the city, it feels a world away. Last week, a pullout supplement in La Voz de Galicia hyped their behind-the-scenes tour of Arteixo - “This is what the inside of Zara looks like” - as if they’d somehow managed to break into Alcatraz.
Beyond the stores, there are subtle signals of its presence.
By A Coruña’s harbour, Inditex’s chairwoman’s foundation has hosted exhibitions by fashion photography legends including Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton, and Irving Penn.
Each morning at my local bus stop, it’s easy to pick out the people waiting for the blacked-out shuttle buses to Arteixo.
But sometimes the veil is lifted completely.
For an organisation that prides itself on operating like a small company, the arrival of TV cameras last Friday was a rare reminder that one of the world’s largest fashion empires was born in this damp, green corner of Spain.
It was a day that celebrated a defining moment in the company’s extraordinary story.
Back to where it all began
On May 9th, 1975, an estrella was born in Galicia.
It was the day when the first Zara store opened its doors on A Coruña’s Calle Juan Flórez Street in the now affluent Ensanche area - a tapas-sized Soho.
The newly renovated store not only honours its roots and the people who shaped its journey, but also points to the future, reflecting Zara’s evolving in-store experience.
Galicia, a region whose identity is deeply linked to waves of emigration and the sense of morriña - a nostalgic longing for the past - is a place steeped in melancholy. Yet, Zara has only ever looked to the future.
Measuring 350 m², the store is a microcosm of its city. It includes scaled-down versions of A Coruña’s iconic galerías — the white-framed, glassed-in balconies that allow sunlight in and keep all the other elements rolling in from the Atlantic out. The ceiling lamps are reminiscent of those used to light up ships.
A new café sits near an area where visitors can flick through fashion magazines that date back to 1975. And there are large portraits of just some of the women who have been a part of the Zara story.
One is Pilar Pan, who joined the company as a pattern maker 50 years ago.
“It’s a time capsule and at the same time a window into the future,” said La Voz de Galicia of the store, “the symbolic epicentre of the brand that revolutionised global fashion.”
Symbolic is the word. While the Juan Flórez store will always be Zara’s origin point, the real engine driving the brand’s future lies just a short stroll away.
In 2016, Zara opened a sleek and spacious flagship store on Rúa Compostela where the company pilots its latest retail innovations. This is where the serious business of fashion takes place.
Here, locals still get first dibs - sometimes a full month ahead of everyone else - on new collections that are put to the acid test. If a shirt or dress doesn’t make it here, it won’t get the chance to make it anywhere. It’s no wonder people describe the city as la cuna de la moda española - the cradle of Spanish fashion.
But amid the 50th anniversary celebrations, one figure was conspicuously absent - the man who started it all.
The quiet Galician
In his book After The Fall, Tobias Buck, the Financial Times’ former Spain correspondent, referred to former prime minister Mariano Rajoy as “the quiet Galician.” For someone who was supposedly quiet, he had a way of saying an awful lot - without saying very much. After all, he was a politician
Born in a small village in the province of León, the true “quiet Galician” is Amancio Ortega.
In Ghosts of Spain, Giles Tremlett describes Amancio Ortega, the founder of Zara, as a “reclusive Galician billionaire,” noting that for years, Ortega was defined by two things: he was Spain’s richest man, and yet, no one had ever seen a photograph of him.
It wasn’t until 1999, when Inditex prepared to float shares on the Madrid stock exchange, that an official photo finally appeared in the company’s annual report - after 36 years of anonymity.
“He looked like an average, small-town Galician businessman,” wrote Tremlett. “Only his unseasonal tan spoke of a man worth, at the time, 4 billion pounds - more, according to Forbes magazine, than anybody in Britain.”
When Inditex debuted on the stock market, it was valued at €9 billion. Today, its market worth has soared to around €143 billion, with its initial share price of €14.70 now trading at €47.
Tremlett described the scale of this feat:
“This is good going for a man who started out, at thirteen, as a shirt-maker’s delivery boy in A Coruña. He learnt to cut and design clothes in his sister’s dining room. His first sales hits, when he branched out on his own, were housecoats and dressing gowns. Ortega’s favourite spot is said to be the womenswear design section of Zara. His eye is obviously good. Even most French vogue readers admit to shopping regularly in Zara - paying a fraction of the price they might pay for clothes elsewhere.”
Until 1975, a man from Ferrol made Spain a hermit, an inward-looking state under his dictatorship. From then on, a man based just 50 km away would help open Spain to the world. “In the new world of globalisation, he is Spain’s first global conquistador,” wrote Tremlett. “His self-effacing, hard-working, innovative manner, however, does not fit the image we foreigners have built for Spaniards.”
He launched Zara at 39, late by startup standards, but it was worth the wait - Ortega triggered a seismic shift in the fashion industry, one that would reshape the global textile business. “He revolutionized the world's outdated textile business,” said El País, “where collections, dictated by creative visionaries, took up to nine months to hit stores, only to sit on shelves unsold.”
With a fortune of around €115 billion, Amancio Ortega remains the richest person in Spain. But perhaps his most remarkable accomplishment is that, as he once put it himself, “we’ve managed to make it to the second generation almost without anybody noticing.”
Quiet to the end of his tenure as chairman, even his succession was low-key - laying the foundation not just for continuity, but for what El País are calling “the second revolution of Zara.”
The second revolution
“Family is huge at Inditex. It’s like Succession but with friendly Spanish people, delicious food, and better clothes,” said the Financial Times.
It’s a great line - but in reality, with its boringly efficient handover, HBO would have no interest in Inditex.
In fact, Succession is a far more accurate portrait of most family businesses - they flounder after the founder.
Marta Ortega became the heir to her father’s retail dynasty in April 2022. She began to learn her trade at Inditex at the age of 23, progressing through various departments - finance, commercial, design, social responsibility.
A leader in the fashion industry, it’s no surprise that she also speaks English, French, and Italian.
Her appointment as chairwoman triggered an immediate 6.1% drop in the stock market. But under her leadership, Inditex recorded record-breaking sales of €35.9 billion in 2023 and €38.6 billion in 2024.
“Inditex lives off its image. And Marta Ortega is today its greatest asset,” said El Pais. “She has opened Zara’s doors to the world’s elite - top designers, creative directors, models, stylists, photographers, and celebrities, as well as key thought leaders - inviting them to collaborate with the brand and bring fresh ideas.”
For such an established brand, Zara and Inditex exude remarkable freshness and dynamism. This feeling is fuelled by a youthful and diverse workforce - women make up 73% of the total staff and 77% of the company's management positions.
Of all the companies on the IBEX 35, Spain's principal stock exchange, Inditex has the youngest workforce.
57% of its staff are under the age of 30 (the IBEX 35 average is 23%).
Only 16% of the company is over the age of 50.
The chairwoman, Marta Ortega, was born in 1984.
Zara is the third most-followed fashion brand on Instagram, behind Nike and Victoria's Secret and ahead of Chanel and Louis Vuitton. It has 275 million active users on its app and receives more than 8 billion online visits a year. Today it recruits Gen Z talent who’ve only ever known life online.
But at Zara, the offline world is still king - physical stores still account for three-quarters of its sales.
Zara didn’t have a marketing department until six years ago and has never relied on traditional advertising - they’ve always said that their best marketing tool has been its stores.
“Our stores are the heart of the business,” Marta Ortega told El País: At a time when everything is moving online, Zara recorded a 5.9% increase in physical store sales in 2024 compared to 2023.
Inditex’s strategy has focused on trading quantity for quality and prestige: fewer stores, larger spaces, and more strategic locations.
At Zara, however, the expansive layout and minimalist stock presentation make this pilot store feel far from fast fashion - everything about it, except the prices, radiates luxury.
Instead of creating an urge to get in and out ASAP, the A Coruña flagship store is a pleasant place to wander around. Zara knows that, the more time you spend here, the less time (and money) you spend elsewhere.
Walls are sparsely occupied by French photography books, Louis Vuitton guides to London, Rome, and New York, and copies of The World According to Karl (Lagerfeld). The top floor, meanwhile, has sea views on one end and a boutique café at the other. In the middle, the vinyl record covers on display discreetly blend with the pastel tones of chairs, coffee tables, and the kind of sofa that siesta dreams are made of.
As shown by its new El Apartamento store concept, Zara wants its stores to be inviting spaces where shoppers can slow down - moving towards a model where the in-store and online worlds fuse into a single, frictionless experience.
In four flagship Zara stores - Barcelona, A Coruña, Bilbao, and Madrid - there’s now no need to queue.
Customers can pay from anywhere on the shop floor using a sales assistant’s handheld device. The system allows staff to scan, de-tag, and process payments on the spot, with a digital receipt sent straight to the customer’s phone. The result is a smoother, faster in-store experience - less time waiting, more time browsing, and a shopping experience that feels increasingly high end.
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Fresh fish
Zara is really good at selling the perception of luxury at an affordable price.
“Without investing in conventional advertising, Zara’s brand image has for years been edging closer to the realm of luxury in terms of presentation,” said La Voz de Galicia. “The same models who walk for Chanel, Dior, or Versace also star in Zara’s campaigns: from Kate Moss to Gigi Hadid, Irina Shayk, Amber Valletta, and Cara Delevingne - the most iconic supermodels of recent decades have worn the Galician brand.”
And likes of Spain’s Queen Letizia and Kate Middleton wearing Zara stuff can’t hurt as it distances itself from fast fashion’s race to the bottom, looking instead to the French and Italian brands at the top.
Inditex’s greatest strength is its unmatched ability to adapt swiftly. As El País explains, rather than diving straight into full seasonal campaigns, it tests the waters with a drip-feed approach, confident in its ability to pivot quickly and align with the latest trends:
“The season unfolds gradually, driven by limited runs that, if successful, are expanded and refined in subsequent releases. If not, they vanish from stores in the blink of an eye. And if they do work, they disappear just as quickly: the limited production of high-demand items gives Zara a luxury-like appeal. The scarcer the product, the more desirable it becomes.”
Proximity production clusters in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, and Turkey (these make up 48% of its suppliers) enable Zara to produce trend-driven items as close to home as possible, allowing them to quickly respond to shifting fashion tastes worldwide by avoiding large initial runs and adapting in real time.
That the two Zara items in my wardrobe were produced in Cambodia and Bangladesh suggest I’m part of the less trendy cohort.
This slick system was inspired during Amancio Ortega’s trip to Japan in the late 1980s, where he partnered with Toyota to adopt just-in-time methods - enabling Zara to manufacture exactly what it needs, precisely when it needs it, with minimal excess stock.
“He had a new mentality: fast, agile, demanding instant responses to hit the market,” said José Alexandre de Oliveira, president of the renowned Portuguese fabric company Riopele, a Zara supplier for the past 40 years. “He told me customers want fresh fish, not yesterday’s catch.”
Of course, even a supply chain this nimble isn’t immune to the criticisms that often shadow fast fashion - from labour conditions in factories to the environmental toll of mass production.
Marta Ortega told The Financial Times that “the residual stock that we have, which is tiny - (is) less than two per cent.” Zara produces around 450 million garments annually - so even a 1.5% surplus equates to 6.75 million unsold items each year.
This stuff still has to go somewhere.
Just in time all the time
The concept of just-in-time was ahead of its time - tailor-made for today’s attention economy where it’s all about the next shiny distraction.
Zara excels at delivering a relentless conveyor belt of eye-catching looks to shelves and screens before anyone else.
Inditex adds about 1,000 new items every month, shipped out from five logistics hubs (Arteixo, two in Zaragoza, Madrid, and Lelystad in the Netherlands). They hit stores anywhere in the world within 48 hours, ready to launch twice a week - Fridays and Mondays.
As La Voz de Galicia explains, at the centre of Zara’s headquarters is a screen that monitors what people are doing on screens all over the world:
“In the facilities where Zara’s various teams work, a large screen filled with numbers becomes a central pillar of the workers’ daily routine. This monitor connects, in real time, the heart of Inditex in Arteixo with all the routes leading to the different countries where Zara operates. It allows designers to immediately see which garments are performing best in each market, which countries are buying the most clothing, and where customers prefer a basic T-shirt over a knit sweater. In this business, technology is the most valuable ally.
Every item - no matter how small, whether it’s a pair of earrings, a simple T-shirt, or a coat - has its own unique ID, which allows Inditex to track its exact location at any moment.
According to Andrea Ansareo, marketing strategy director at the Madrid-based agency Annie Bonnie:
“The power lies in a perfect choreography between product, data, and speed. Zara doesn't improvise: it observes, anticipates, and executes. Its optimised system aligns design, manufacturing, and point of sale with what’s happening on the streets and on social media."
This approach doesn’t just keep Zara ahead in fashion - it also positions Inditex as a rare safe bet in a volatile world. A recent New York Times podcast episode, The End of Fast Fashion?, explored how Donald Trump’s move to close a tax loophole could deal a heavy blow to Chinese giants like Shein and Temu.
“In an uncertain geopolitical climate, dress safe with Inditex,” said BNP Paribas. They point to the company's agile supply chain, robust balance sheet, strong pricing power, and powerful brands as key factors that will help Zara effectively weather ongoing geopolitical crises.
The invisible Galician
I’ve never seen Amancio Ortega around town - just the bodyguards near his duplex overlooking A Coruña’s harbour.
I’ve never heard him on TV or radio. He stays out of the spotlight - no public speeches, no ribbon-cutting ceremonies on behalf of the Amancio Ortega Foundation.
His foundation is currently financing the construction of seven state-of-the-art nursing homes in Galicia - the newest in A Coruña cost €32 million. The foundation is donating nearly €60 million to the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu Barcelona to fund pioneering rare disease research and a care centre. It also donated €100 million to help the towns affected by the devastating floods in Valencia.
Most businessmen would have jumped at these chances for public praise and PR; Ortega keeps his philanthropy low-key and out of the spotlight - very much consistent with the quiet Galician brand.
Nonetheless, at 89, Ortega is still remarkably active. As one El País source put it, “He works out every morning, has breakfast at his usual place, and is here in Arteixo by eight.”
Despite his invisibility, his presence looms large in A Coruña and Galicia. He has helped reshaped the region’s economy and identity
In Spain: The Trials and Triumphs of a Modern European Country, Michael Reid wrote:
“Since democracy arrived, Galicia has become the Spanish region with the fastest economic growth this century. Inditex, based near A Coruña, has grown from being a single draper’s shop to the world’s biggest provider of fast fashion through Zara and its other chains.”
And now with Marta Ortega at the helm, the fabric of the company - its vision, its values, and its future - seems to be in very safe hands.
Yet this massive empire remains a family business. And in such enterprises, the greatest existential threat often isn’t China, it’s succession.
So things could get interesting down the line.
One thing is for sure: Spain’s many tertulias - the hugely popular TV and radio debate programmes - would relish a homegrown a boardroom drama.
Until next time amigos,
Brendan
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Brilliantly written aa always. Señor Ortega sounds like an incredibly modest man, giving so much back to his community with no fanfare.