Ortega came from humble beginnings to turn himself into Spain's richest man in 2001 when Inditex first offered shares to the public. Ortega acquired a reputation as a private and down-to-earth person; he rarely made public appearances and shunned the trappings of the wealthy.
The son of a railroad worker and a maid, Ortega received no formal higher education. He began his remarkable career as a teenager in La Coruña, Spain, the traditional center of the Iberian textile industry.With help from then-wife Rosalía Mera, got start making gowns and lingerie in his living room 44 years ago.
When he was 13 years old he worked as a delivery boy for a shirt maker who produced clothing for the rich. He later worked as a draper's and tailor's assistant. In seeing firsthand how costs mounted as garments moved from designers to factories to stores, Ortega learned early on the importance of delivering products directly to customers without using outside distributors. He would later employ such a strategy with great success at Zara, attempting to control all of the steps in textile production in order to cut costs and gain speed and flexibility.
Zara may change, but the man who built this retail giant will always be, deep down, a small-town hero. Once, when traveling to a store opening in Manhattan, Ortega watched as shoppers poured through the doors. He was so overcome he shut himself in a bathroom and wept. "No one could see the tears streaming down my face," he told O'Shea. "Can you imagine how I thought of my parents then? How proud they would have been of their son who had, so to speak, discovered America, starting from a little town lost in the sticks of northern Spain!"
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