Who is Amancio Ortega?
Amancio Ortega Gaona was born in Busdongo de Arbás, León, Spain. He his worldwide known for his clothing retailer multimillionaire company, Zara. But Zara is just the top of the iceberg.
Zara is part of a bigger holding, Inditex. Inditex was founded in 1985 in A Coruña, Spain. As part of the holding we can find companies such as Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Oysho, Pull and Bear, Stradivarius, Uterqüe, Zara Home and, the previously mentioned, Zara. The headquarters are located in Arteixo, Spain. It is known to be the biggest fashion group around the world with more than 7200 stores in 93 different countries. But, who is behind this immeasurable business making, in 2019, more than 19.820 millions of euros in sales?
Amancio Ortega’s life
As mentioned before, Amancio was born in a small spanish village of around 100 citizens in the province of León. His family budget was always short and decided very early to move to A Coruña looking for better opportunities. His father worked during this years in the local railway station and his mother was a housemaid.
As the situation at home was dramatic, Amancio started to work at a local company at the age of 14. At that small business, Amancio gain practical knowledge of how to manufacture clothes by hand. As years passed by in rainy A Coruña, Amancio kept working hard to bring some money home and help his own family. However, at the same time, a business plan was in the making.
Amancio wanted to personalize what customers want, in order to provide some kind of elite service for people looking for specially designed clothes and accessories. In 1950, he started to organized poor single women into sewing cooperatives. After 10 years working in the cooperative industrial business, he decided that the next step was to found his very own company. The dream was realised and in 1963 he created Confecciones GOA, S.A. based in Arteixo, Galicia, Spain.
He organized the company in a family way. His brother Antonio was responsible for commercial issues, his sister Josefa was in charge of bookkeeping and Rosalía (who later became his wife) performed as his business partner.
Later and after getting married to Rosalía, the couple opened their very first Zara store in 1975. The idea was to produce popular fashionable clothes at low prices. This initial idea reminds nowadays and has allowed Amancio to be known as the kind of low cost fashion.
The key strategy was, firstly to incorporate and understand the importance of computers and technology in the business and, on the other hand, implementing in the 80s a revolutionary design and distribution system that reduced dramatically the time between production and final arrival at stores of the products. This method was created by Castellano, the brain behind Amancio’s stores. Subsequently, Castellano became the CEO of the company in 1984.
Finally, is important to state that Amancio and his family have always mantain a low profile. In Spain, he is known not only as a successful business man, but also as a very down to earth person. Amancio, as an individual, has always been concern about social matters.
Together with his daughter he created the Amancio Ortega Foundation to help others in need. He usually donates top medical instruments and devices to public hospitals in his country or donates money to keep cancer investigations alive in Spain.
On the other hand, as a very famous and succesful man he has his detractors. Many people argued that he should not be donating big sums of money to any kind of public institution, but rather paying his taxes in Spain.
This is left to the reader to judge Amancio’s decisions. But we can all agree that he is the most famous person in the world when talking about clothes manufacturing and that his comapny changed the way we dressed.
