In an industrial zone in Arteixo, at the furthest northwestern tip of Spain, amid granite quarries and aluminum merchants, Inditex, the company that owns Zara, has built a city of glass. Within it there are offices, factories, warehouses, photography studios, design departments, ateliers, a logistics center, showrooms complete with artful storefronts—all designed to fulfill desires at lightning speed.
On a top floor, the online team runs at least two fashion shoots at a time, ready to drop new products twice a week. Across a walkway in the sky, banks of sewing machines are operated by 100 seamstresses in a room the size of a small airport. On the third floor of a new building dedicated to Zara’s commercial operations, a vast screen connects to shopping tills in 1,495 stores worldwide and shows what is—or isn’t—selling, so the in-house designers can quickly adapt. As this detailed information filters through to the people who decide how to give the customers what they want, robots mow the expansive lawns and young forests grow. There are restaurants, of course, as well as bicycles and motorized scooters—although, if you’re the boss overseeing the company’s 163,000 employees and you need to get to another building in a hurry, sometimes it’s quicker to take a car.
Marta Ortega Pérez, the 42-year-old nonexecutive chair of the Inditex board and the youngest daughter of its founder, presides over this futuristic complex with a democratic hand. Unassuming in her affect and understated in her dress, with a shaggy blond bob, Marta greets me warmly and leads me from the basement parking area through an indoor landscape of light. She knows everyone: Many Inditex staffers are her relatives, and she’s known others for decades. A large number of them are based in La Coruña, the nearby port town where Zara has its roots. “I can’t help seeing you as a five-year-old president,” Loreto García Falque, a long-standing friend of Marta’s mother, says with affectionate pride as she comes to greet us on the tour.
To the wider world, the Ortegas are intensely private. Marta’s father, Amancio, now 90, almost never gives interviews, and Marta only rarely does. But to Inditex staff, these two are present and visible every day. “It’s a very flat organization,” Marta explains, leading me past her desk in the middle of an open-plan workshop, close to that of her father—who famously left school at 13 to become a delivery boy for a shirtmaker before opening the first Zara store in 1975. “We don’t have many titles. It’s a very big company, but for us, from the inside, it doesn’t feel that way. In the end we’re like a family, and I think that’s what creates the magic.”
Under Marta’s aegis, Zara has elevated itself by association while remaining true to what she describes as its founding premise: that “beautiful things, well-designed things, shouldn’t be only for certain people. Social class,” she adds, “has nothing to do with style.” She has forged unions with designers and cultural figures, from Steven Meisel to Vincent Van Duysen, Marisa Berenson to Luca Guadagnino, and John Galliano to Bad Bunny, turning Zara from “a high street thing,” as her friend Pieter Mulier, the Versace chief creative officer, puts it, to “a brand that’s not only bigger in turnover, but bigger in impact on culture, on aesthetics, and on fashion.” The results speak for themselves: Inditex is the world’s largest fashion retailer and also owns brands such as Massimo Dutti and Bershka, but the various incarnations of Zara and Zara Home account for almost three quarters of its revenue. Marta has worked for the company for just under 20 years and has been chair of the board for four. Last year, Inditex’s net profit was 6.2 billion euros, up 91.8 percent on the last financial year under the company’s previous leadership. They’re also ahead of their competitors in terms of sustainability: According to François Souchet, founder of Swanstant, a firm that forecasts how climate affects economic outcomes, “Inditex has been both posting the strongest operating margin in the industry and the lowest emission intensity.”
