Zara became the flagship of the world’s largest fashion retailer by getting the latest styles to customers faster than anyone else, at prices most could afford. The same company now wants to be known for quality rather than speed, while its founding family hands control to the next generation. Whether a business can change what it stands for and who leads it at the same time, without losing the model that made it, is the central question facing Zara and its parent company, Inditex.
Zara is one of the world’s most successful fashion retail brands – if not the most successful one. With its dramatic introduction of the concept of “fast fashion” retail since it was founded in 1975 in Spain, Zara aspires to create responsible passion for fashion amongst a broad spectrum of consumers, spread across different cultures and age groups. There are many factors that have contributed to the success of Zara but one of its key strengths, which has played a strong role in it becoming a global fashion powerhouse as it is today, is its ability to put customers first. Zara is obsessed with its customers, and they have defined the company and the brand’s culture right from the very beginning.
Zara is also one of the world’s most closely watched family business successions. Its parent company Inditex is 59 percent owned by founder Amancio Ortega, chaired by his daughter Marta Ortega Pérez, run by a professional chief executive, and anchored by one of the largest family offices in the world. More than four years into the generational transition, the results are visible, and they hold lessons for business families everywhere.
The Zara brand offers men’s and women’s clothing, children’s clothing (Zara Kids), shoes and accessories. The sub-brand Zara TRF offers trendier and sometimes edgier items to younger women and teenagers.
The roots of the business go back to 1963. Amancio Ortega, the son of a railway worker, had left school at 13 to work for a shirtmaker in A Coruña. At 27 he began making quilted dressing gowns with his then wife, Rosalía Mera, and in 1972 he founded Confecciones Goa, the group’s first garment factory.
Zara was founded by Amancio Ortega and Rosalía Mera in 1975 as a family business in A Coruña in Galicia in the northern part of Spain. Its first store featured low-priced lookalike products of popular, higher-end clothing and fashion. Amancio Ortega named Zara as such because his preferred name Zorba was already taken. A nearby bar used the same name, and as the moulds for the letters of the shop sign had already been made, the founders rearranged them into Zara. In the next 8 years, Zara’s approach towards fashion and its business model gradually generated traction with the Spanish consumer. This led to the opening of 9 new stores in the biggest cities of Spain.
In 1985, Inditex was incorporated as a holding company, which laid the foundations for a distribution system capable of reacting to shifting market trends extremely quickly. Ortega created a new design, manufacturing, and distribution process that could reduce lead times and react to new trends in a quicker way, an approach that became known as instant fashion. This was driven by heavy investments in information technology and utilising groups instead of individual designers for the critical “design” element. Ortega also kept much of his manufacturing close to home, at a time when Western fashion companies were sending their designs to distant, low-cost factories and ordering months in advance. That proximity made speed possible.
In the next decade, Zara began aggressively expanding into global markets, which included Portugal, New York (USA), Paris (France), Mexico, Greece, Belgium, Sweden, Malta, Cyprus, Norway and Israel. The stores in New York and Paris opened in 1989 and 1990, only 14 years after the first shop in A Coruña. In 2001, Inditex listed on the stock market. Today, there is hardly a developed country without a Zara store. Zara now has 1,487 stores (July 2026) in leading cities around the world. The number has fallen in recent years as the brand has replaced smaller stores with larger flagships that are integrated with its online platform. It is no surprise that Zara, which started off as a small store in Spain, is now the flagship brand of Inditex, the world’s largest fashion retailer by sales. Its founder, Amancio Ortega, now 90, ranked 15th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in March 2026.
Today, Inditex is the world’s largest fashion group with more than 163,000 employees of 174 nationalities. It sells in 215 markets through its online platforms and 5,444 stores (July 2026), most of them managed by the company itself. For fiscal 2025 (year ended January 2026), Inditex had revenues of USD 46.3 billion and a net profit of USD 7.2 billion. Zara, reported together with Zara Home and Lefties, accounted for 70 percent of sales. The other fashion brands in the Inditex portfolio are, with store numbers as of July 2026:
Zara Home: Home goods and decoration objects founded in 2003. 374 stores.
Pull&Bear: Casual laid-back clothing and accessories for the young founded in 1991. 789 stores.
Massimo Dutti: High-end clothing and accessories for cosmopolitan men and women acquired in 1995. 509 stores.
Bershka: Blends urban styles and modern fashion for young women and men founded in 1998. 849 stores. Its first store in the United States opened in Miami in August 2026.
Stradivarius: Casual and feminine clothes for young women acquired in 1999. 835 stores.
Oysho: Lingerie, casual outerwear, lounge wear and original accessories founded in 2001. 378 stores.
Lefties: Value fashion brand that began as an outlet for surplus Zara stock and now sells its own collections. 223 stores, reported as part of the Zara segment.
Uterqüe: High-quality fashion accessories at attractive prices founded in 2008. The brand was integrated into Massimo Dutti from 2021 and no longer operates its own stores.
Apart from fashion brands, Amancio Ortega has also set up Pontegadea, which is both the holding company for the family’s controlling stake in Inditex and one of the largest single family offices in the world. It owns office, retail and hotel properties in countries including the United States (Seattle), Britain (London), France (Paris), Canada, Italy and South Korea. These corporate properties house large companies including Amazon, and prestigious luxury and retail brands. Pontegadea’s role in the family’s succession is set out in a dedicated section below.
In 2025, Zara was ranked 41st on global brand consultancy Interbrand’s list of best global brands, with a brand value of USD 19.4 billion, ahead of its fashion retail peers Uniqlo (47th) and H&M (68th). Its core values are found in four simple terms: beauty, clarity, functionality and sustainability.
The secret to Zara’s success has largely been driven by its ability to keep up with rapidly changing fashion trends and showcase them in its collections with very little delay. From the very beginning, Zara found a significant gap in the market that few clothing brands had effectively addressed. This was to keep pace with the latest fashion trends, but offer clothing collections that are a combination of high quality and yet, are affordable. The brand keeps a close watch on how fashion is changing and evolving every day across the world. Based on the latest styles and trends, it creates new designs and puts them into stores in a matter of weeks. In stark comparison, most other fashion brands would take close to six months to get new designs and collections into the market.
It is this strategic ability of introducing new collections based on the latest trends in a rapid manner that enabled Zara to beat other competitors. It quickly became the people’s favourite brand, especially with those who want to keep up with fashion trends. Founder Amancio Ortega is famously known for his views on clothes as a perishable commodity. A Portuguese fabric supplier who has worked with him since the late 1980s recalls Ortega telling him that customers wanted fresh fish, not the previous day’s catch. That philosophy belongs to the brand’s first decades. Marta Ortega has distanced the company from speed for its own sake. “We don’t want to be fast; we want to be agile and flexible,” she wrote in Inditex’s 2022 annual report. Today, Zara is deliberately rebalancing towards better quality, longer-lasting products, repair and resale, as discussed in the sections below.
The media often quotes that the brand produces “freshly baked clothes”, which survive fashion trends for less than a month or two. Zara concentrates on three areas to effectively “bake” its fresh fashions:
Shorter lead times (and more fashionable clothes): Shorter lead times allow Zara to ensure that its stores stock clothes that customers want at that time (e.g. specific spring/ summer or autumn/ winter collections, recent trend that is catching up, sudden popularity of an item worn by a celebrity/ socialite/ actor/ actress, latest collection of a top designer etc.). While many retailers try to forecast what customers might buy months in the future, Zara moves in step with its customers and offers them what they want to buy at a given point in time.
Lower quantities (through scarce supply): By reducing the quantity manufactured for a particular style, Zara not only reduces its exposure to any single product but also creates artificial scarcity. Similar to the principle that applies to all fashion items (and more specifically luxury), the lower the availability, the more desirable an object becomes. Another benefit of producing lower quantities is that if a style does not generate traction and suffers from poor sales, there is not a high volume to be disposed of. Stores have traditionally received only three or four pieces of each new style, with more available if customers respond. Zara only has two time-bound sales a year rather than constant markdowns, and it discounts a very small proportion of its products, approximately half compared to its competitors, which is a very impressive feat.
More styles: Rather than producing more quantities per style, Zara produces more styles, roughly 12,000 a year. Even if a style sells out very quickly, there are new styles waiting to take up the space. This means more choices and a higher chance of getting it right with the consumer.
Zara only allows its designs to remain on the shop floor for three to four weeks. This practice pushes consumers to keep visiting the brand’s stores because if they were just a week late, all the clothes of a particular style or trend would be gone and replaced with a new trend. At the same time, this constant refreshing of the lines and styles carried by its stores also entices customers to visit its shops more frequently.
Since 2022, a fourth element has been added: elevation. Under its chair Marta Ortega, Zara has moved deliberately upmarket in product, stores and image, leaving the ultra-low price segment to players such as Shein and Temu, and to its own value brand Lefties. Scale helps. Long relationships with suppliers allow Zara to buy better fabrics at lower cost than smaller competitors can. The chair is equally clear about the limits of the move. “We’re a long way from wanting to be a luxury brand,” she said in August 2026, adding that the aim remains a well-made product that reaches as many people as possible.
The elevation is visible in the structure of the range. Zara’s womenswear is organised in three lines: Woman, Basic and TRF. Above them sit Studio, a collection presented twice a year that carries the brand’s most ambitious design, and SRPLS, a limited-edition line introduced in 2018. A beauty line followed in 2021. Each gives the brand a place to show what it can do at a higher level of design and price without moving the core of the offer.
In the following sections, the key components of Zara’s winning formula in the fashion retailing industry are illustrated.
Zara’s unrelenting focus on the customer is at the core of the brand’s success and the heights it has achieved today. There was a fascinating story around how Zara co-creates its products leveraging its customers’ input. In 2015, a lady named Miko walked into a Zara store in Tokyo and asked the store assistant for a pink scarf, but the store did not have any pink scarves. The same happened almost simultaneously for Michelle in Toronto, Elaine in San Francisco, and Giselle in Frankfurt, who all walked into Zara stores and asked for pink scarves. They all left the stores without any scarves – an experience many other Zara fans encountered globally in different Zara stores over the next few days.
7 days later, more than 2,000 Zara stores globally started selling pink scarves. 500,000 pink scarves were dispatched – to be exact. They sold out in 3 days. The speed of that response was no accident.
Customer insights are the holy grail of modern business, and the more companies know about their customers, the better they can innovate and compete. But it can prove challenging to have the right insights, at the right time, and have access to them consistently over time. One of the secrets to Zara’s success includes using Radio Frequency Identification Technology (RFID) in its stores. The brand uses cutting-edge systems to track the location of garments instantly and makes those most in demand rapidly available to customers. Additionally, it helps to reduce inventory costs, provides greater flexibility to launch new designs, and allows fulfilment of online orders with stock from stores nearest to the delivery location thereby reducing delivery costs.
The technology keeps evolving. In 2023, Inditex began to replace hard security tags with a soft-tag system that speeds up payment and makes garments easier to handle and to try on. By mid-2026 it was in place in every store. In December 2025, Zara launched an AI-based virtual try-on tool that lets customers dress a personalised avatar in real products. The avatar is built from the customer’s own photographs, and the tool runs on Zara.com in 43 markets. At headquarters, large screens show sales by product for every Zara store in the world, and a second system displays what customers are placing in their online shopping baskets at that moment.
Another secret of Zara’s success is that the brand trains and empowers its store employees and managers to be particularly sensitive to customer needs and wants, and how customers enact them on the shop floors. Zara empowers its sales associates and store managers to be at the forefront of customer research – they intently listen and note down customer comments, ideas for cuts, fabrics or a new line, and keenly observe new styles that its customers are wearing that have the potential to be converted into unique Zara styles. In comparison, traditional daily sales reports can hardly provide such a dynamic updated picture of the market. Store managers report to headquarters every day. There, regional sales managers sit at a line of desks in the middle of the design floor, with designers on either side of them. A request heard in Istanbul, New York and Tokyo in the same week is treated as a global trend. The Zara empire is built on two basic rules: give customers what they want, and get it to them faster than anyone else.
Due to Zara’s competitive customer research capabilities, its product offerings across its stores globally reflect unique customer needs and wants in terms of physical, climate or cultural differences. It offers smaller sizes in Japan, adapted womenswear in the Middle East, and clothes of different seasonality in South America. These differences in product offerings across countries are greatly facilitated by the frequent interactions between Zara’s local store managers and its creative team. Inditex has also observed that tastes differ more between neighbourhoods than between countries. A Zara store on Fifth Avenue in New York has more in common with one in Ginza in Tokyo than with one in SoHo, which is closer to Shibuya.
In the fashion world, a trend starts small, but develops fast. Zara employees are trained to listen, watch and be attentive to even the smallest seismographic signals from their customers, which can be an initial sign that a new trend is taking shape. Zara knows that the quicker it can respond, the more likely it is to succeed in supplying the right fashion merchandise at the right time across its global retail chain. Zara has set up sophisticated technology-driven systems, which enable information to travel quickly from the stores back to its headquarters in Arteixo in Spain, enabling decision makers to act fast and respond effectively to a developing trend. Its design teams regularly visit university campuses, nightclubs and other venues to observe what young fashion leaders are wearing. In its headquarters, the design team uses flat-screen monitors linked by webcam to offices in Shanghai, Tokyo and New York (the leading cities for fashion trends), which act as trend spotters. The ‘Trends’ team never goes to fashion shows but tracks bloggers and social media and listens closely to the brand’s customers.
The fact that Zara’s designers and customers are inextricably linked is a crucial part of the brand strategy. Specialist teams receive constant feedback on the decisions its customers are making at every Zara store, which continuously inspires the Zara creative team. Every morning, senior managers gather around a table on the open design floor to review the global ranking of best-selling pieces, and orders on their way to stores are adjusted accordingly.
Zara’s highly responsive, vertically integrated supply chain enables the export of garments 24 hours, 365 days of the year, resulting in the shipping of new products to stores twice a week. In the early 2000s, Zara could take a garment from design to store in as little as 15 days. The company’s current figure for an entirely new product is around five weeks. All clothing items are processed through the company’s logistics centres, four in Spain (Arteixo, Madrid and two in Zaragoza) and one at Lelystad in the Netherlands, where new items are inspected, sorted, tagged, and loaded into trucks. In most cases, clothing items are delivered to stores within 48 hours. This vertical integration allows Zara to retain control over areas like dyeing and processing and have fabric-processing capacity available on-demand to provide the correct fabrics for new styles according to customer preferences. It also eliminates the need for warehouses and helps reduce the impact of demand fluctuations. Zara produces over 450 million items and launches around 12,000 new designs annually, so the efficiency of the supply chain is critical to ensure that this constant refreshment of store level collections goes off smoothly and efficiently.
Much of the product work is still done by hand at headquarters. About 140 pattern-makers and 100 seamstresses turn the designers’ ideas into prototypes, and each piece is fitted on a model, an unusual practice in mass-market fashion. Because production follows so closely, Zara can settle its autumn and winter collections in June, about three months later than companies that work to the industry’s traditional six-month lead time.
Here are some of the characteristics of Zara’s supply chain that highlight the reasons behind its success:
Frequency of customer insights collection: Trend information flows daily into a database at head office, which is used by designers to create new lines and modify existing ones.
Standardisation of product information: Zara warehouses have standardised product information with common definitions, allowing quick and accurate preparation of designs with clear manufacturing instructions.
Product information and inventory management: By effectively managing thousands of fabric, trim and design specifications and their physical inventory, Zara is capable of designing a garment with available stock of required raw materials.
Procurement strategy: Zara has traditionally bought more than half of its fabric undyed, before designs are finalised, so that it can respond to colour trends in the middle of a season.
Manufacturing approach: Zara uses a “make and buy” approach – it produces the more fashionable and riskier items (which need testing and piloting) in Spain, and outsources production of more standard designs with more predictable demand to Morocco, Turkey and Asia to reduce production cost. About half of production comes from countries close to its headquarters, mainly Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Turkey. Inditex still operates eight factories of its own in Arteixo, which make prototypes, support nearby production and set the quality standard for suppliers. In 2025, its supply chain comprised 6,684 factories in 49 markets, and some supplier relationships go back to the late 1980s. Clothes with longer shelf life (i.e. those with more predictable demand patterns), such as basic T-shirts, are outsourced to low-cost suppliers, mainly in Asia. When it manufactures in-house, Zara has long subcontracted sewing to small workshops in the region.
Distribution management: Zara’s state-of-the-art distribution facility functions with minimal human intervention. Optical reading devices sort out and distribute more than 60,000 items of clothing an hour. To capture future growth, Inditex invested more than USD 1 billion a year in 2024 and 2025 in expanding its logistics capacity. The new Zaragoza II distribution centre began operating in 2025. At the Zaragoza centres, each the size of some 20 football pitches, about 500 trucks arrive and leave every day. In October 2025, a new Zara building of more than 200,000 square metres opened in Arteixo for Zara’s women’s and children’s product teams.
In addition to these supply chain efficiencies, Zara can also modify existing items in as little as three weeks. Shortening the product life cycle means greater success in meeting consumer preferences. If a design does not sell well within a week, it is withdrawn from shops, further orders are cancelled and a new design is pursued. Zara closely monitors changes in customer preferences towards fashion. It has a range of basic designs that are carried over from year to year, but some in-vogue, high fashion, inspired by latest trends items can stay on the shelves for less than four weeks, which encourages Zara fans to make repeat visits.
A Harvard Business Review study in 2004 found that shoppers in central London visited the average clothing store four times a year, but Zara 17 times. It also found that Zara collected 85 percent of the full ticket price on its clothing, against an industry average of 60 to 70 percent. The discipline shows in the outcome: according to Marta Ortega, less than 1 percent of the product remains unsold.
This expectation for such a high frequency of repeat visits is evidence of Zara’s confidence that it is keeping on top of changing consumer needs and preferences and is helping them shape their ideas, opinions and taste for fashion. In reality, Zara is also helping in giving birth to new trends through its stores or even helping in extending the longevity of some seasonal styles by offering affordable lines.
Sustainability has moved from being a hot topic to being a hygiene factor for companies that want to resonate with and win the loyalty of their global customers. For Inditex, this means having a commitment to people and the environment. It is also where the company faces its closest scrutiny, because a model built on frequent new collections depends on volume.
Commitment to people: Inditex ensures that its employees have a shared vision of value built on sustainability through professional development, equality and diversity and volunteering. Women make up 73 percent of the workforce and hold 76 percent of management positions. It also ensures that its suppliers have fundamental rights at work and initiates continuous improvement programmes for them. Like most large fashion companies that outsource production, Inditex has faced questions over conditions in parts of its supply chain. It audits its suppliers against a code of conduct and ends contracts with those that fail to meet it. Inditex also spends about USD 200 million a year (2025) on social and community programmes and initiatives. For example, its “for&from” programme which started in 2002 has enabled the social integration of people with physical and mental disabilities through 17 stores, which have created employment for almost 1,000 people in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Mexico.
Commitment to environment: Being in a business where it taps natural resources to create its products, Inditex makes efforts to ensure that the environmental impact of its business complies with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Inditex has committed that by 2030, 100 percent of its textile products will use only lower-impact fibres. Under targets announced in July 2023, about 40 percent is to come from conventional recycling, 25 percent from next-generation materials, 25 percent from organic or regenerative farming and the rest from other lower-impact sources. In 2025, 88 percent of the fibres used qualified as lower impact, and recycled materials accounted for 47 percent. The group has also committed to reduce its total emissions by 53 percent by 2030 and to reach net zero by 2040, with a reduction of at least 90 percent against 2018. Progress here is slower: by 2025, the emissions covered by its science-based targets were 11 percent below the 2018 level. Emissions from its own operations were down 88 percent, but those from the value chain, which account for most of the total, were down 7 percent.
Additionally, Inditex takes wide-ranging measures to protect biodiversity, reduce its consumption of water, energy and other resources, avoid waste, and combat climate change. For example, it has outlined a Global Water Management Strategy, specifically committing to zero discharge of hazardous chemicals, and has reduced water consumption in its supply chain by 26 percent against 2020. It has also been expanding its waste reduction programme through which customers can drop off their used clothing, footwear and accessories at collection points in its stores. This is complemented by Zara Pre-Owned, a platform through which customers can resell, repair or donate their Zara garments, launched in 2022.
Regulation is raising the bar further. European Union governments agreed in 2023 to ban the destruction of unsold clothing, and policymakers are making fashion companies responsible for the cost of collecting and treating the garments they sell once these are discarded. In September 2026, Inditex joined H&M Group, Adidas and Bestseller in a two-year initiative with the Ghana-based Or Foundation, to test how brands can fund reuse and recycling in countries that receive large volumes of exported second-hand clothing.
Critics argue that no materials strategy can offset the effect of volume, and that the industry will not meet its targets unless it produces less. Inditex’s answer is that a model which makes what customers ask for, and leaves almost nothing unsold, is itself its strongest environmental argument. For a brand built on speed and volume, this is the most significant long-term challenge and an opportunity to lead. Zara will be judged on absolute results.
Zara has a very entrepreneurial culture, and employs lots of young talent who quickly climb through the ranks of the company. Zara promotes approximately two-thirds of its store managers from within and generally experiences low turnover. Across Inditex, 80 percent of vacancies in 2025 were filled through internal promotion. The brand has no fear in giving responsibility to young people and the culture encourages risk-taking (as long as learning happens) and fast implementation (the mantra of fashion).
Top management gives its store managers full liberty and control over their store’s operations and performance with clearly set cost, profit and growth targets with a fixed and variable compensation scheme. The variable component amounts to up to half of the total compensation – making store level employees heavily incentive-driven.
In addition, once an employee is selected for promotion, his or her store develops a comprehensive training programme for that individual with the human resources department, which is followed up by periodic supplemental training – reflecting Zara’s commitment to talent development. The organisational structure is also flat with only a few managerial layers. Titles are deliberately few, and the most senior people in the company work at ordinary desks on the open design floor.
Customers are the most important source of information for Zara, but like any other fashion brand, Zara also employs trend analysts, customer insights experts, and retains some of the best talents in the fashion world. The creative team of Zara comprises about 300 designers (2025), up from 200 two decades earlier. They all embody and enact the corporate philosophy that the word “impossible” does not exist in Zara.
For example, while many companies struggle with long lead times in discussions and decision making, Zara gets around this challenge by getting various business functions to sit together at the headquarters and also by encouraging a culture (through structures and processes) where people continuously talk to each other. The sales and marketing teams who receive trend feedback talk regularly with designers and merchandisers. It is important that there is constant two-way communication so that sales and marketing teams can talk about new lines to customers and designers / merchandisers have a strong visibility of customers’ needs and preferences enacted at a store level. The production scheduling is also closely coordinated so that there is no time wasted on approvals. The design team structure is very flat and focuses on careful interpretation of catwalk trends that are suitable for the mass market – the Zara customer. The design and product development teams, who are based in Spain, work closely to produce 1,000 new styles every month.
Besides being customer-centric, another important reason why Zara’s employee strategy is so successful is the fact that it empowers its staff to make decisions based on data. Zara has no chief designer. All its designers are given unparalleled independence in approving products and campaigns, based on daily data feeds indicating which styles are popular.
Due to the unwavering focus on the customer, the entire business model is designed in such a way that the pattern of needs for the finished goods dictates the terms of the production process to follow, instead of having the raw materials determine the nature of the production process – something that is very rare in multinational companies of similar scale.
The culture is the founder’s imprint, and it has been carried into the second generation with care. Marta Ortega has described her father’s particular strength as finding the best person for each task, not being the best at any one of them. People at Inditex speak in the first person plural and avoid attributing success to individuals. The chair summed up the aim in the 2025 annual report as “working to make Inditex a little more Inditex every day”. Place matters too. The company has stayed in Arteixo, outside A Coruña and far from the fashion capitals. More than 5,000 people work at its headquarters there, and in 2017 Inditex overtook fishing as the main driver of the regional economy. Its leaders regard the distance as part of the model, because it gives them a different perspective from that of the industry’s centres.
In sum, the entire brand culture is extremely customer-centric, which has been and continues to be a significant contributor to Zara’s success.
Zara has used an almost zero advertising and endorsement policy throughout its entire existence, preferring to invest a percentage of its revenues in opening new stores instead. In 2004, it spent 0.3 percent of sales on advertising, against 3 to 4 percent at its competitors, and it had no marketing department until about 2019. The brand’s founder Amancio Ortega has almost never spoken to the media nor has in any way advertised Zara. This is indeed the mark of a truly successful brand where customers appreciate and desire the brand, which is over and above product level benefits but strongly driven by the brand experience.
Instead of advertising, Zara uses its store location and store displays as key elements of its marketing strategy. By choosing to be in the most prominent locations in a city, Zara ensures very high customer traffic for its stores. It has long sought out historic buildings and addresses next to luxury houses, and it has often bought rather than leased its most prominent sites, among them space at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York, acquired in 2011. Its window displays, which showcase the most outstanding pieces in the collection, are also a powerful communication tool designed by a specialised team. A lot of time and effort is spent designing the window displays to be artistic and attention grabbing. According to Zara’s philosophy of fast fashion, the window displays are constantly changed. This strategy goes down to how the employees dress as well – all Zara employees are required to wear Zara clothes while working in the stores, but these “uniforms” vary across different Zara stores to reflect socio-economic differences in the regions in which they are located. This effectively communicates Zara’s focus on the mass market, yet another detail that reflects its close attention on the customer.
The stores themselves are being elevated. Openings and refurbishments in 2025 and 2026 include Shinsaibashi in Osaka, Noon Square in Seoul, Avenida Diagonal in Barcelona, Serrano in Madrid and Bond Street in London, as well as new stores in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Charlotte. The chief executive, Óscar García Maceiras, has described the result as “a network of bigger, better and more beautiful stores”. The flagship that opened in Nanjing in 2025, the brand’s largest in Asia, covers 2,500 square metres on three floors and includes one of Zara’s own coffee shops. Zara treats China as a testing ground. Its managers there describe Chinese consumers as the most demanding in the world, paying digitally for nine purchases in ten and using self-checkout for most of them, and what the company learns in China is reported to Arteixo every day and applied elsewhere.
This is also where Zara has changed most visibly since 2022. The brand still spends very little on traditional advertising, but it now invests in fashion image at the level of a luxury house. Campaigns are shot by photographers such as Steven Meisel, who also directed the film marking Zara’s 50th anniversary in May 2025, featuring 50 of the world’s best-known models. By 2023, Meisel had shot 13 campaigns for the brand. Designer collaborations have become a core communication tool: Narciso Rodriguez, Stefano Pilati, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kate Moss and the stylist Harry Lambert have all worked with Zara, and the architect and designer Vincent Van Duysen has created furniture for Zara Home. In March 2026, Zara announced its most ambitious partnership to date: a two-year agreement with the couturier John Galliano covering four collections, in which he reworks existing Zara garments into new pieces. The appointment drew public debate. The first collection, Re{form}, arrived in the autumn of 2026, with prices starting at USD 29.90.
Marta Ortega’s own MOP Foundation, which opened in A Coruña in 2022, stages exhibitions of fashion photographers such as Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel and Annie Leibovitz. It is separate from the company, but it has brought much of the fashion industry to Zara’s home city.
To tap into the emerging e-commerce trend, Zara launched its online boutique in September 2010. The website was initially available in Spain, the UK, Portugal, Italy, Germany and France, and was extended to Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Over the next 3 years, the online store became available in the United States, Russia, Canada, Mexico, Romania, and South Korea. In 2017, Zara’s online store launched in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and India. In March 2018, the brand launched online in Australia and New Zealand. Today, Inditex sells online in 215 markets. Online sales reached USD 12.4 billion in fiscal 2025, more than a quarter of group sales, compared with 14 percent in 2019.
As a fast fashion retailer, Zara is definitely aware of the power of e-commerce and has built up a successful online presence and high-quality customer experience. The store and the website now work as one system. Customers have usually seen a collection online before they enter a store, and stores serve as collection and return points for online orders, which is why the company describes the two channels as a single integrated model. Speed of delivery is part of the advantage. The sooner a garment reaches the customer, the less likely it is to be returned, and a returned item that re-enters the system quickly can still be sold at full price. The company counts more than 8 billion online visits a year.
Most of the attention on Zara goes to its supply chain. For business families, the more instructive story is how the Ortega family has handled succession. Inditex is one of the few global companies of its size where a generational transition has been designed over more than a decade, executed, and tested in the market while the founder is still present. He regarded the matter as resolved long before it became visible. “The problem of succession is settled, because everything has been delegated,” Amancio Ortega told his biographer in a book first published in 2008.
It is best understood as a succession in four steps, each answering a different question.
2011 – Management passes to a professional: For Zara’s first 36 years in business, the brand was controlled by its founder Amancio Ortega, who is now 90 years old. In 2011, Ortega passed the chairman title on to Pablo Isla, Inditex’s chief executive since 2005. For the next eleven years, the company was led by a non-family executive. It was a break with Spanish tradition that removed uncertainty about the succession and gave the next generation time to develop inside the company. Isla had been recruited from outside the fashion industry, and during his 17 years at Inditex the share price rose fivefold.
2015 – Ownership is secured: Amancio Ortega placed a 50.01 percent shareholding in Inditex, together with more than USD 6.5 billion of prime commercial real estate, into the holding company Pontegadea Inversiones. His heirs will therefore inherit shares in Pontegadea rather than shares in Inditex that could be sold individually. Together with a further stake held through the company Partler, the founder controls 59.29 percent of Inditex. The effect is plain: whatever happens within the family, control of the company cannot be diluted through the sale of individual holdings. Founders have used different instruments for the same purpose. Giorgio Armani set up a foundation in 2016 to control the company he founded, and the founder of Rolex placed his shares in a foundation as early as 1944. Ortega chose a private holding company.
2022 – The next generation takes the chair: In April 2022, Pablo Isla stepped down and Marta Ortega, then 38, took over as chair of the company that her father Amancio Ortega started with his ex-wife Rosalía Mera in 1975 in Galicia, Spain. Marta Ortega is the youngest of Amancio Ortega’s three children.
Marta Ortega is a non-executive chair. She concentrates on Zara’s brand and product strategy and does not run the daily business. Within the board’s division of responsibilities, communications, the board secretariat and internal audit report to her. She had been with Inditex for over 15 years before her appointment, starting out working in a Zara store at King’s Road in London, and as an assistant at the portfolio brand Bershka. She joined in 2007 after graduating in international business in London, spent six months on the shop floor and nine more visiting stores across the United Kingdom with the head of retail, and later joined the Zara Woman design and product team. “I will always be wherever the company needs me most,” she said in 2021, when she still held no formal title. She describes her contribution in the same terms as chair. “My energy is on the product and how that’s presented,” she said in 2023, leaving the financial side to an experienced team around her.
Óscar García Maceiras was appointed CEO of Inditex in November 2021 and runs the daily business. He joined Inditex in March 2021 as general secretary of Inditex and secretary of the board. A state attorney by training who had led the legal team at Banco Santander, he succeeded Carlos Crespo, chief executive since 2019. He is responsible for strategy, finance, organisation and execution.
The sharing of executive powers between the chair and the CEO to enhance corporate governance has historically been less common in the corporate world in Spain but is often seen in Europe and elsewhere. Inditex therefore returned to dual leadership in April 2022 with Marta Ortega as chair and García Maceiras as CEO, the very same structure that ran for six years with Amancio Ortega as chairman and Pablo Isla as CEO until 2011. The division is visible in public. At each annual general meeting, the chair opens the proceedings and hands the conduct of the meeting to the chief executive, under her supervision.
Like her father, Marta Ortega does not have an office. Amancio Ortega never had an office either and always preferred to work in an open space in the fashion design department to be close to teams around him. Her desk stands in the middle of the Zara Woman design floor, close to his. Where the two generations differ is in visibility. Amancio Ortega has always been known for appearing less in public and avoiding any media exposure. His photo did not appear in the Inditex annual report until 2000. Marta Ortega is more open to media interviews and public appearance. She granted her first interview to the Wall Street Journal in August 2021, and has since spoken to the Financial Times and Vogue. She still gives few interviews, and some investors have said they would like more direct access to the chair.
2025 – The family office renews its own leadership: Succession is not only about the operating company. In 2025, José Arnau, who had been closely involved in managing the founder’s wealth since 1997 and had been deputy chair of Inditex since 2012, retired. He had spent 24 years at Pontegadea and continues to advise the family. Roberto Cibeira, the chief executive of Pontegadea, was elected to the Inditex board in his place at the annual general meeting on 15 July 2025. Marta Ortega sits on the boards of both Pontegadea and Partler. The generational handover has thus taken place at the level of the family office as well as at the level of the company.
The board that results reflects the balance the family has chosen. Of its ten members, four represent the founder: Amancio Ortega himself, who has sat on the board since 1985, his wife Flora Pérez Marcote, Marta Ortega and Roberto Cibeira. Five are independent, one of them the lead independent director, and one, the chief executive, is executive. The family holds the chair and close to 60 percent of the shares, but not a majority of the seats.
The family’s presence is not limited to the board. Flora Pérez Marcote spent her career in design and production at Inditex and chairs the Amancio Ortega Foundation. Members of her family have held senior operating roles, among them her brother Óscar Pérez Marcote as managing director of Zara, and Marta Ortega’s husband, Carlos Torretta, is Zara’s head of communications. Family employment of this kind is common in founder-led companies. What matters for governance is that each role is defined and that performance is assessed by the same standard as for anyone else.
The transition results so far: When the transition was announced in late 2021, the share price fell by 6.1 percent on the day and by about a quarter over the following months, as investors questioned whether a new chair and a chief executive with less than a year in the company could match the record of their predecessors. The numbers since tell a different story. Net profit in fiscal 2025 was almost double that of fiscal 2021, the last year under the previous leadership, and sales were 44 percent higher. The shares reached a record high in February 2026. Investors and analysts have credited the chair with moving Zara upmarket, which allowed the company to raise prices and protect its margins when costs rose. The transition has also reached the product teams. In 2026, the long-serving head of Zara’s womenswear left after 25 years and a new head was appointed for the Zara Woman line.
Seen through the three roles that family members can hold in an enterprise, owner, steward and operator, the Ortega model separates what founders usually combine in one person. The operator role is held by a professional chief executive. The steward role, guarding the culture, the brand and the long-term direction, is held by the next generation in the chair. The owner role is institutionalised in the family office. Marta Ortega is not asked to be her father. She has said as much herself: she does not try to be like him, because no one could be. She is asked to be the steward of what he built, which reflects a clear view of stewardship as the foundation of multi-generational success.
It is instructive to compare this with Uniqlo, where the founding family has indicated that the founder’s sons, both board members, will act as owners rather than managers. Both families separate ownership from management. The difference is the chair: at Inditex, the family has chosen to hold it.
Pontegadea is the least visible part of the Inditex and Zara story and, for business families, one of the most instructive. It was set up as a private limited company with funds from the stock market listing in 2001, and it has grown into one of the largest and most active family offices in the world. At the end of 2024 it had net assets of about USD 40 billion, according to its filings with the Spanish commercial registry.
Its structure is simple. Pontegadea Inversiones holds 50.01 percent of Inditex, and Partler, a second company controlled by the founder, holds a further 9.28 percent. Amancio Ortega chairs Pontegadea, Flora Pérez Marcote is first deputy chair, Marta Ortega is a director, and Roberto Cibeira is second deputy chair and chief executive. Cibeira, a former Arthur Andersen manager, joined in 2003 and has led the office since 2016. In 2022, his team numbered more than three dozen people, based in Galicia and in cities such as Paris, London and Seoul.
The investment approach is conservative and consistent. Dividends from Inditex, about USD 3.7 billion in 2026, are reinvested, mostly in prime commercial and residential property bought largely without debt. Bloomberg describes the result as the largest real estate portfolio in Europe owned by an individual investor. It includes the Haughwout Building in New York, the Southeast Financial Center in Miami, Royal Bank Plaza in Toronto and The Post Building in London. Since 2018, the office has diversified into infrastructure and energy, with investments in telecommunications towers, the Spanish gas grid operator Enagás, renewable energy and, since 2025, ports. The Inditex shares themselves have not been sold.
It is far more than a vehicle for reinvesting dividends. It holds the controlling stake, represents the family on the board, professionalises the ownership function, and diversifies the family’s wealth away from a single listed company. This is what a family office should be: not a sidecar next to the business, but an integrated governance layer between the family and its assets. For any family of substantial wealth, the purpose and value of a family office is a strategic question, not an administrative one.
Three design choices stand out. First, the family office and the holding company are one and the same, so the people who manage the family’s wealth are also accountable for its most important asset. Second, the office is led by a professional with more than two decades inside it, and its own succession was prepared years in advance: when José Arnau retired, his successor had already been chief executive for nine years. Third, the next generation joined its board while the founder was still in the chair.
Alongside the company and the family office stands the Amancio Ortega Foundation, created in 2001 and chaired by Flora Pérez Marcote, which has committed about USD 2.5 billion to health and social projects through Spain’s regional governments. Business, family office and foundation each have their own governance, and the same small group of family members and trusted professionals connects them.
For business families, the lesson from Inditex is that succession is a process, not an event. It has taken the Ortega family more than a decade, and it has addressed management, ownership, the chair and the family office as four separate questions. Few families control a company of this size, or have a founder who is still present at 90. The principles behind the approach apply much more widely.
Families who chart strategy and succession with the same discipline give themselves the best chance of remaining owners for generations.
From the COVID-19 crisis to an integrated store and online model: With its primarily offline shopping experience, Zara was hard hit by global store closures amid the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, with sales falling 44% year-on-year in Q1 2020 and the company reporting a net loss of USD 482 million. Inditex announced that it would close between 1,000 and 1,200 stores worldwide, focusing on smaller ones in Asia and Europe. Online sales almost doubled in April 2020, but could not offset the closures.
Inditex committed USD 1.1 billion to scaling up its digital strategy and online capabilities by 2022 and a further USD 2 billion in stores to improve integration between online and offline for faster deliveries and real-time tracking of products. Its goal was for online sales to constitute at least 25% of total sales. That goal has been reached, and the transformation has paid off: over the three years to fiscal 2025, sales grew by 22 percent while the number of stores fell by 6 percent. The challenge now is to sustain growth from a much higher base. In the first half of fiscal 2026, sales grew by 7.6 percent, but operating expenses grew slightly faster, and the shares fell on the day the results were published. There is room to grow: even as the largest company in its industry, Inditex has only 1 to 2 percent of a fragmented global apparel market.
Mobile commerce and artificial intelligence: Zara woke up late to the potential of mobile commerce but has caught up. Its app had 275 million active users in 2025, according to the company, and links the store with the online experience. In China, the opening of the Nanjing flagship in 2025 was streamed live on Douyin. The next frontier is artificial intelligence. The virtual try-on tool is a first step, and AI will increasingly shape design, demand forecasting and personalisation. Inditex names personalisation and the building of online communities as priorities for its platforms. Zara needs to keep making mobile shopping not only an effortless experience but also a delightful one.
Price is not an advantage anymore: Offering the latest fashion lines at affordable prices continues to be a strategic advantage for Zara, but cannot continue to be the only one. The competition has changed fundamentally. Shein, which sells almost entirely online, had sales of about USD 23 billion in 2022 and close to a fifth of the global fast-fashion market, according to the research firm Coresight. It works with suppliers that accept very small initial orders and scale up on demand. In the year to November 2023 it introduced 1.5 million products in the United States, against 40,000 at Zara, according to a University of Delaware analysis. Temu competes on the same ground. Swedish fast fashion retailer H&M, which is now placed 68th on Interbrand’s list, well behind Zara, launched an online store in Spain in 2014 to take on Zara on its home turf. Again in its home market, it faces continued competition from brands like Mango, which cut prices and started focusing on fashion segments in which Zara enjoyed popularity. Uniqlo, whose parent company ranks third among the world’s apparel retailers by sales behind Inditex and H&M, competes from a different position, built on basics and longevity rather than fashion.
For Zara to effectively compete and maintain its strategic advantage, the focus needs to shift away from price and towards quality. Even today the Zara brand enjoys high levels of appeal, which is evident from the serpentine queues outside its stores when it launches in new markets. This is precisely the direction the brand has taken since 2022: higher prices at Zara, better fabrics and design, fewer and larger stores and limited discounting, with Lefties defending the lower price points. Lefties had stores in 17 countries in early 2024, and in Spain it had almost as many customers as Shein in 2023, according to Kantar. The risk in this strategy is that Zara moves too far from the broad customer base that built it. The chair frames the ambition as growth in quality, not volume. “It’s not about selling more, it’s about selling well,” she said in 2025.
Marketing strategy has evolved: The 2021 edition of this article argued that Zara’s near-zero advertising and passive social media presence were a gap that needed to be closed. As described above, that gap has largely been closed, through campaigns with the world’s leading fashion photographers, collaborations with designers of the calibre of John Galliano, and a far more curated presence on digital platforms. In 2025, Zara was the third most-followed fashion label on Instagram, behind Nike and Victoria’s Secret. The challenge now is balance: to build desirability without losing the accessibility that defines the brand. As Zara’s target customer segments use more social and digital platforms for communication and for sharing their lives, it remains important for Zara to have a strong presence on such platforms.
Design credibility: Zara has long faced the charge that it follows other designers too closely. The best-known case, brought by Christian Louboutin over red-soled shoes, failed in the French courts, and the company maintains that it develops its own products. The charge matters more as the brand moves upmarket. The investment in some 300 in-house designers, in pattern-making and fittings, and in collaborations with established names is partly an answer to it. A brand that asks customers to pay for design has to be seen to create it.
Geopolitics, tariffs and costs: A model built on proximity sourcing and central distribution from Spain is exposed to a more fragmented world. Inditex closed its 502 stores in Russia in March 2022, then its second-largest market by number of stores, and later sold the business. In mainland China, it closed about a fifth of its stores in 2022 and has since concentrated on flagship locations such as Nanjing. US tariffs add cost in a market that is central to Zara’s growth plans. The conflict in the Middle East raised transport and raw-material costs in 2026 and affected sales in a region where Inditex has about 480 franchised stores. And currency movements matter for a euro-based company selling in 215 markets: in fiscal 2025, sales grew 7.0 percent in constant currency but only 3.2 percent as reported.
The American opportunity: The United States has been a difficult market for European fashion retailers, and Inditex entered it cautiously. In 2012, Inditex had 45 stores there. In 2023, the company described its growth opportunities in the country as very strong. Zara opened in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Charlotte in 2025, Massimo Dutti is adding stores in Miami and New York, and Bershka opened its first American store in 2026. The Americas account for about 18 percent of group sales. The test is whether a model built on twice-weekly deliveries from Spain can keep its speed at that distance, and at what cost.
Next generation ownership: With various technological and business disruptions in the past decade, leadership in the 21st century will be influenced by constant change, geopolitical volatility, and economic and political uncertainty. As discussed above, Inditex has completed the first part of its generational transition with considerable success. The second part, the transfer of ownership, and the life of the company after its founder, is still ahead. The design is strong. But a succession is only complete when it has been tested without the founder. Three questions remain open, and they apply to every business family:
To effectively manage the above changes, Zara’s next generation leadership needs to step up to the succession planning challenge by being resilient in staying true to the brand promise to consistently produce “freshly baked clothes” for its fashion-forward consumers, and by balancing both short-term (profitability) and long-term goals (growing the business and reaching more consumers).
More importantly, despite Zara’s global reach and consequent product standardisation, it needs to constantly find new ways to serve local fashion needs and preferences of its consumers across the globe. This will be a challenge for the brand’s leadership in the next decade.
The Zara brand was born with a keen eye on its customer – its ability to understand, predict and deliver on its customers’ preferences for trendy fashion at affordable prices. In addition to its effective supply chain, the brand’s ability to have its customers co-create designs is unique and provides it with a competitive advantage. Most fashion trends often start unexpectedly, originate from uncommon places and grow out of nowhere. With reference to the pink scarf trend mentioned above, it could have been that Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson had worn a pink scarf to a charity gala the evening before in Los Angeles, or golf star Michelle Wie had showcased a pink scarf at a celebrity tournament in Asia. The fact that Zara was able to quickly jump on to this trend and provide hundreds of customers with the pink scarves they desperately wanted to buy shows how closely the organisation listens.
In a world swamped with Big Data, and yet more collected at an even more rapid pace than before, brands still need to be careful and observant. Big Data does not provide answers to all business challenges, and it may be too hyped to be considered as the Holy Grail.
One of the secrets behind Zara’s global success is the culture and the respect for the fact that no one is a better, more authentic trendsetter than the customer himself or herself – and this philosophy needs to be continually reflected in all its business strategies going forward.
Fifty years after the first store opened in A Coruña, that principle has not changed, but the company around it has. The verdict on the first four years of the second generation is positive. The business is larger and more profitable, the brand carries more weight in fashion, and the division of roles between family and management has held. Zara’s next test is not in the supply chain. It is whether a family that has handled its first generational transition with unusual discipline can do the same with the next one: ownership. If the Ortega family succeeds, Zara will be remembered for two achievements: reinventing fashion retail, and showing how a founder-led enterprise becomes a multi-generational family institution.
For leaders of any family enterprise, the implication is to treat customers and continuity with the same discipline: listen to the first every day, and plan for the second years ahead. The place to start is with your customers. Zara always does.
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About the author: Martin Roll – Global Family Business & Family Office Expert
Read about family business: The Stewardship Imperative: How to Build Multi-Generational Success in Family Business
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