Ortega owns 59 per cent of Inditex, which is now the world’s largest clothing retailer. 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. 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.

Worth an estimated $6.67 billion, Ortega Mera controls 5% of Inditex, though she’s not involved in the company.

Ortega began his professional life at 14 as a delivery boy with a shirt-maker in Coruna, a blustery city in Northern Spain. Within a few years he had set up a workshop making nightgowns, lingerie and babywear. In 1963, with the equivalent of €30 (so legend has it) he founded a company called Confecciones GOA – his initials, backwards.

• Ortega picked up another New York property a year later, this time a hotel at 70 Park Avenue in Murray Hill for US$67.6 million.
• Ortega founded fast-fashion giant Zara with his then-wife Rosalia in 1975.
• Ortega sticks to a simple uniform of a shirt and trousers and doesn’t typically wear clothes from his own companies, according to Bloomberg.
• Today, the retailer has 1,500 stores in 70 countries around the world and is changing retail forever.

Despite running a major fashion retailer for four decades, Ortega is intensely private.

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. Ortega, meanwhile, had become one of the world’s top billionaires. In 2011 he stepped down as chairman of Inditex, though he remained involved with the company and retained his majority stake. 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.

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In the past 12 months, shares in Ortega’s fashion company, Inditex, rose 40 per cent in price. Ortega owns 59.3 per cent of the business, which is valued at €110 billion, and is not only bigger than H&M and Gap, but worth more than Santander and Telefonica – Spain’s two largest other commercial empires. Consider the below the CV Ortega would (perhaps) write, were he publicity minded. 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. The mysterious Zara founderwas briefly the world’s richest man back in 2015, Forbes reported. He bypassed the then-richest person, Bill Gates, when his net worth peaked to $80 billion as Zara’s parent company Inditex’s stock peaked.

He first applied the approach to a bathrobe business, Confecciones Goa, which he founded in 1963. Amancio Ortega (born March 28, 1936, Busdongo de Arbas, Spain) is a Spanish fashion executive and founding chairman (1985) of the Spanish owner of zara net worth clothing merchandiser Inditex (Industria de Diseño Textil, SA), which included the Zara chain store. Its state-of-the-art manufacturing chain means it can midwife a product from drawing board to shop floor in three weeks.

The Year’s Biggest Winner: Zara Billionaire Amancio Ortega

They launched first a textile manufacturing company, then later, the Zara brand. 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. In 2022, 49% of the factories supplying Inditex were still located fairly close to corporate headquarters, either in Spain or Portugal, Turkey, or Morocco. Highlights included the 1999 acquisition of Stradivarius (a youth fashion chain), the 2001 launch of Oysho (lingerie), and the 2003 launch of Zara Home (home furnishings)—the company’s first business line outside of the apparel industry. In 2015, he paid US$370 million for an entire block of prime property in Miami Beach. He reportedly bought an office block in London’s affluent Mayfair neighbourhood that borders Hyde Park and a property on London’s prime shopping street, Oxford Street.

Best buys across Inditex brands tend to be the less shouty staples. As pointed out on the fashion page in Saturday’s paper, wearing obvious copies aren’t necessarily the best message to send out about yourself. Sometimes he sits down with the Zara Woman design team and they kick around ideas for the coming weeks and months – the new layout for a store, a new design for the upcoming winter collection. After all, he has 60 years’ experience in fashion retail, built up from humble beginnings.

px » alt= »owner of zara net worth »/>https://www.1investing.in/ more than $3 billion from founder Amancio Ortega’s fortune. The billionaire founder behind Zara has tapped his youngest daughter to chair the fast fashion giant, in a surprise move that brings the world’s biggest clothing retailer back under the family’s control. Amancio Ortega Gaona is a Spanish fashion entrepreneur and founder of Zara’s parent company Inditex. He has been living his life peacefully as one of the richest people on the planet.

Internationally, he also owns properties in five other major European capitals (Paris, Berlin, Rome, Lisbon and London). Zara gained popularity even though the company claims it does not spend on advertising. The store offers fashionable items in different price points easily afforded by common shoppers. One of its most influential but not official endorsers is Kate Middleton who was seen wearing Zara on some occasions. Middleton is not officially signed by the company to wear its clothes.

The entrepreneurs whose businesses can be classified as essential during lockdowns increased their net worth despite the uncertainties. Business owners need to adapt quickly to the changing times and put more focus on online retail as consumers prefer not leaving the house during the pandemic. Despite the setback, Ortega remains one of the wealthiest in the world. Aside from Ortega, only LVMH’s Bernard Arnault & family is included on the richest list from the fashion and retail industry. Bloomberg reported in 2012 that he eschewed a private office to sit among the designers and fabric experts at Zara’s headquarters, while another report said he typically ate lunch with his employees in the company cafeteria every day.

The son of a railway worker, he founded Inditex with former wife Rosalia Mera, also a billionaire, making lingerie and dressing gowns in their living room. As per Insider, most of his cash is reinvested in real estate through the company’s investment department. In 2011, he bought the tallest skyscraper in Spain, the 515-foot Torre Picasso in Madrid for an astounding $536 million. He also owns the skyscraper, Cepsa Tower, in Madrid that he bought for $551 million. He owns the Epic Residences, a high-end Bayfront iconic condo, and a 45-story luxury apartment building in Miami.

There were no public photographs of him until 1999, and in 2012, Bloomberg noted that he had only ever granted interviews to three journalists. Ortega founded the Amancio Ortega Foundation in 2001, a charitable organization focused on education and social welfare. Amancio Ortega stepped down as Inditex’s chairman in 2011 and handed the reins to executive president Pablo Isla, but in 2022, Marta Ortega took over as Inditex’s chairwoman. He started making clothes with his siblings and future wife, Rosalia Mera, in their home in the early 1960s. In 1975, Ortega and Mera opened the first Zara store in downtown La Coruna, Spain, according to Bloomberg.

At that moment, Ortega was so humiliated that he decided he would drop out of school and start working—a decision that turned out to be the first step in one of the greatest retail careers in history. Ortega has also invested in the Epic Residences and Hotel, a luxurious, 54-story skyscraper in Miami. He’s also reportedly bought property in London, Chicago, Barcelona and more, according to Forbes.

That makes her the second-richest person in Spain, with a net worth of $6.9 billion. Mera, a trained psychologist, lives in the same coastal Spanish town of La Coruña where she grew up and where the company is headquartered with her husband and three kids. Today, the retailer has 1,500 stores in 70 countries around the world and is changing retail forever. Alongside new chief executive Óscar García Maceiras, Marta Ortega Pérez will face a number of challenges. At a time when consumers are becoming more aware of the environmental costs of fast fashion, Zara particularly is in an awkward spot – its reputation is built on bringing style trends to High Street stores quickly and cheaply.