Have you ever been to a Zara store?

Have you ever been to a Zara store?

You probably have, as today it is one of the fastest-growing chains in the world.

The person behind Zara is Amancio Ortega. He is the richest man in Spain, but very few people know his face. There are only two official photographs of him, and he rarely gives interviews. Although he is a multimillionaire businessman, he doesn’t look like one – he doesn’t like wearing suits or ties, and prefers to wear jeans and a shirt.

When he was young he worked as a shop assistant in a clothes store, but he always dreamed of having his own business. In 1963 he started a small company which made women’s pyjamas. In 1975, at the age of 40, he opened his first clothes shop in La Coruña, a small city in north-west Spain, and named it Zara. Now you can find Zara shops all over the world, from New York to Moscow to Singapore. So why is Zara so successful?

The main reason is that Zara reacts incredibly quickly to the latest designer fashions, and produces clothes which are fashionable but inexpensive. Zara can make a new line of clothes in three weeks. Other companies normally take about nine months. The clothes also change from week to week – so customers keep coming back to see what’s new. It produces 20,000 new designs a year – and none of them stay in the shops for more than a month.

So if you’ve seen a new jacket or skirt you like in a Zara store, hurry up and buy it, because it won’t be there for long.