Zara

Zara opened its first shop in central A Coruña, in Galicia in north-western Spain, in 1975. Its founders, Amancio Ortega and Rosalía Mera, planned to call the shop Zorba, after the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, but a bar of the same name stood two blocks away, so they rearranged the letters they had ordered into Zara. The shop sold low-priced versions of fashionable, higher-end styles, and more stores soon followed across Spain.

What set Zara apart was not its prices but its speed. During the 1980s the company reorganised design, manufacturing and distribution around information technology and teams of designers rather than individual names, so that it could react to trends within weeks rather than seasons. Stores fed back what was selling, and the company produced in smaller batches so it could replenish winners and drop the rest. In 2012 the New York Times Magazine described how this system had turned Zara into the world's largest fashion retailer. Inditex, the holding company created to house Zara and the brands that followed it, went on to add Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho and Zara Home.

International expansion began with a store in Porto, Portugal, in 1988, followed by New York in 1989 and Paris in 1990. Through the 1990s and 2000s Zara opened across Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, and in 2011 it arrived in Australia, opening in Sydney. Online sales began in 2010 and were gradually extended worldwide.

Zara remains headquartered in Arteixo, outside A Coruña, where its design teams work alongside the logistics centres that ship to roughly a hundred countries. In 2019 it introduced a new logo by the French agency Baron & Baron. In the 2020s the brand closed smaller stores in favour of large flagships and integrated online shopping, withdrew from Russia in 2023, and has faced the same questions as the rest of the industry about consumption, waste and supply-chain labour.

Ortega's daughter Marta Ortega Pérez became chair of Inditex in 2022. The design studio remains largely anonymous, though the group occasionally names category leaders, as when Marta Andreia Rodrigues was appointed director of Zara Woman in 2026. In September 2026 Inditex's chief executive, Óscar García Maceiras, identified the United States as a key market for the next phase of growth. Half a century after the shop in A Coruña, Zara is still the benchmark against which fast fashion is measured.