Amancio Ortega

Ortega was born in 1936 in a railway town in León, the son of a railway worker, and grew up in A Coruña, where he left school at about fourteen to run errands for a shirtmaker called Gala. He learned the trade from the bottom — delivery boy, then shop assistant, then cutter — and in 1963, with his brother Antonio and his first wife Rosalía Mera, founded Confecciones GOA making quilted dressing gowns for wholesalers. The story told in Arteixo is that a wholesale customer cancelled a large order and Ortega, stuck with the stock, opened a shop to sell it himself. The first Zara opened on Calle Juan Flórez in A Coruña in 1975. He had wanted to call it Zorba, but the name was taken.

What made Ortega different from every other clothing manufacturer who opened a shop was that he never treated the shop as the end of the line. From the beginning the store manager reported what sold and what customers asked for, and the factory a few miles away changed what it made in response. Everything Inditex is known for — the twice-weekly deliveries, the small batches, the seven hundred designers, the decision around 1990 to keep the fashion product made near Arteixo when the rest of the industry went to Asia — is the same idea applied at larger scale. He has described the customer as the person who runs the company, and he appears to mean it literally. He did not give an interview until the company floated in 2001, and his photograph was first published in the prospectus; he still eats in the staff canteen and has never had an office with a door.

The contested parts of his record are the ones common to the industry he built, and they are documented. In 2011 Brazilian labour inspectors found Bolivian migrants working in conditions they described as slave-like at a São Paulo workshop subcontracted by a Zara supplier; Inditex accepted responsibility for oversight and signed a compliance agreement. In 2017 shoppers in Istanbul found notes sewn into Zara garments by unpaid workers at a bankrupt supplier, Bravo Tekstil. Inditex signed the Bangladesh Accord after Rana Plaza in 2013 and has been broadly rated among the better performers on supply-chain disclosure since, which is a judgement about the industry as much as the company. In Spain the criticism is different: that the several hundred million euros his foundation has given to public hospitals for cancer equipment is charity in place of tax, an argument Podemos made loudly in 2017, and that Pontegadea's property holdings — now over €20 billion, from the dividend — make him a landlord first and a clothier second. He is ninety. His daughter Marta chairs the board.