Zara's parent can move a design to the shop rail in about two weeks
Traditional fashion houses plan collections many months ahead. Inditex, the Spanish group behind Zara, can reportedly take a garment from sketch to shop shelf in as little as 15 days. That speed, built on a logistics system designed in the 1980s by a local professor, made it the biggest fast fashion group on the planet.
It began in a home in A Coruña in the early 1960s, where Amancio Ortega, then working for a local shirtmaker, and his wife Rosalía Mera started sewing their own designs. Savings paid for a small factory that sold garments back to his old employer. In 1975 the couple opened the first Zara shop, offering fashionable clothes at low prices.
The masterstroke came from outside the rag trade. Spotting the growing power of computers, Ortega hired José María Castellano, a professor, to build the company's computing. Castellano then designed a system that slashed the time between design, production and delivery to stores, and became chief executive in 1984. The holding company, Industria de Diseño Textil, was created the following year.
Growth ran in two directions: new countries and new brands. The first shop abroad opened in Porto in 1988, followed by the United States a year later. Pull&Bear, Bershka, Stradivarius and Massimo Dutti joined the family, and a brand called Lefties, named for leftovers, was created to sell unsold Zara stock. When shares were floated in Madrid in 2001, the company was valued at 9 billion euros. Store counts doubled at dizzying speed: shop number 2,000 opened in Hong Kong in 2004, number 4,000 in Tokyo in 2008, and number 5,000 in Rome in 2010.
Its marketing is equally unusual. Inditex largely shuns magazine adverts, relying instead on prime locations, window displays and budgets for celebrity endorsements. Today it runs more than 7,200 stores in 93 markets, mostly company owned, and in 2026 announced plans for 200 new Lefties stores across Europe.
Source: Inditex
