In an industrial area of Arteixo, at the far northwestern tip of Spain, surrounded by granite quarries and aluminum dealers, Inditex—the company behind Zara—has built a glass city. Inside, there are offices, factories, warehouses, photography studios, design departments, ateliers, a logistics center, and showrooms with stylish storefronts, all designed to meet customer desires at lightning speed.
On the top floor, the online team runs at least two fashion shoots at once, ready to release new products twice a week. Across a sky bridge, 100 seamstresses work at rows of sewing machines in a room as big as a small airport. On the third floor of a new building dedicated to Zara’s commercial operations, a huge screen connects to cash registers in 1,495 stores worldwide, showing what’s selling—or not—so in-house designers can adjust quickly. As this detailed information flows to those who decide how to give customers what they want, robots mow the wide lawns and young forests grow. There are restaurants, of course, plus bicycles and motor scooters—though if you’re the boss overseeing the company’s 163,000 employees and need to get to another building in a hurry, sometimes a car is faster.
Marta Ortega Pérez, the 42-year-old nonexecutive chair of Inditex’s board and the youngest daughter of its founder, runs this futuristic complex with a down-to-earth approach. She’s modest in manner and simple in dress, with a shaggy blond bob. Marta greets me warmly and leads me from the basement parking area through a bright indoor space. She knows everyone: many Inditex staff are her relatives, and she’s known others for decades. A large number are based in La Coruña, the nearby port town where Zara began. “I can’t help seeing you as a five-year-old president,” says Loreto García Falque, a longtime friend of Marta’s mother, with affectionate pride as she comes to greet us on the tour.
To the outside world, the Ortegas are intensely private. Marta’s father, Amancio, now 90, almost never gives interviews, and Marta rarely does either. But to Inditex staff, the 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 her father’s—who famously left school at 13 to be 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 leadership, Zara has raised its profile while staying true to what she calls its founding idea: 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 built partnerships 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, into “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 like Massimo Dutti and Bershka, but the various versions 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 from the last financial year under the company’s previous leadership. They’re also ahead of their competitors in terms of sSustainability: According to François Souchet, founder of Swanstant, a firm that predicts how climate affects economic outcomes, “Inditex has been both posting the strongest operating margin in the industry and the lowest emission intensity.”
Aside from Marta herself, a few persuasive factors keep coming up in conversations with Zara’s collaborators. First, the family feeling seems to be contagious. “There’s something about the conviviality of that particular company,” says photographer David Sims, who has worked with Zara for 15 years. “It’s really relaxed and a lot of fun.” Second, creative people are encouraged to do what they want. As Marta’s friend Linda Evangelista puts it, “This is what I love about Marta: She lets the artist shine. She hires people for who they are, and her admiration is genuine.” And—not least—almost every fashion insider who has visited the Inditex headquarters in Arteixo has been amazed by its systems.
When the Zara team met with Bad Bunny to discuss a multi-part collaboration, Marta explains, they shared a common language and a sense of the importance of family. But it was the company’s innovative infrastructure that allowed them to add the Super Bowl Halftime Show. As Marta’s husband, Carlos Torretta Echevarría, who, as Zara’s head of communications, was involved in the discussions, points out: Who else could make clothing for 700 dancers in two weeks?
Galliano, whose first collection for Zara will hit stores in late September, first came to Arteixo when Marta invited him to give a talk to Inditex staff. “I was quite blown away,” he tells me. “It was like a James Bond setup, really, how stuff could be moved around the world. I was like, ‘Wow—I’ve worked in ready-to-wear, darling, but this: This is incredible!'”
TALL ORDERS
The gardens at Ortega Pérez’s home were designed by the acclaimed English landscape architect and garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith.
In a private room at Inditex HQ—I’ve lost track by now of which building we’re in—Marta and I are served lunch. Everything is discreetly delivered: the opening salad, the filet steak, the chocolate dessert molded into a cacao pod. The room is filled with the comforting smell of Zara Home’s Basilicum candles. The atmosphere is luxurious. And yet, Marta makes clear as we eat together, “we’re a long way from wanting to be a luxury brand. Luxury does an incredible job and inspires us all a lot, but we don’t want to change what Zara is. We want to produce a well-made product that reaches the maximum number of people.”
After the brand celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, they moved on quickly. “We’re not great celebrators here,” Marta says with an ironic smile. “Yes, those 50 years deserved to be honored, but the past is more important as a reminder of our mistakes—it’s better not to repeat them than to celebrate our successes.”
If this sounds tough, it’s in keeping with the Ortega family’s exacting nature. (“We’re very demanding,” Marta says of her entire clan.) Karl Templer, a Zara creative director, tells me that, because of the company’s work ethic—Marta’s in particular—”you want to do a really good job for her. She inspires people to bring something to the table.”
Over the months that I’ve observed Marta, I’ve wondered how best to convey her particular mix of warmth and cool. There’s no question that she is, as people who know her well have said to me in Spanish, cercana. The word literally means “close” and loosely translates, in this case, as a gift for friendship. Marta is a noticer—of how you feel, of what you like, of whether you might need anything. If anyone at work is ill, they’ll get a message from Marta. If she invites you to dinner, your whole family is welcome. If you’re her friend, she’ll never miss a birthday.After she bonded with Galliano over their shared love of Ernest Hemingway, he was amazed to soon receive a signed first edition of A Farewell to Arms, with the pages still uncut. When Inditex’s CEO, Óscar García Maceiras, told me that attention to detail was one of Marta’s strengths, I assumed he meant things like the design of a sleeve or the buckle on a bag. Instead, the example he gave was this: he had mentioned to Marta an employee at a Zara store in a distant country who wanted to be closer to their family in Spain. Marta immediately reached out and found the employee a job nearby. “I’ll tell you something,” Evangelista says, “she’s a real woman’s woman. Very supportive, very family-oriented.”
Yet Marta also has a quiet, understated allure that suggests she’s not easily impressed. She is “rigorous and mathematical and direct,” as Pieter Mulier puts it—something he finds rare in the fashion world. “She has a very clear opinion, and you get it in a second.” She can be brief in her speech. Her dark, expressive eyebrows and deep voice create an entertaining contrast with her husband’s boundless energy and outgoing nature.
Pierpaolo Piccioli understood these different sides of her. Marta had been his client for two years when he designed four Valentino couture outfits for her wedding in 2018. He imagined three sleek, understated looks, and then had another idea: a romantic pink moiré strapless gown with an exaggerated bow. He suggested she wear it with combat boots. “It’s not me,” Marta said immediately. Five minutes later, she texted back: “You’re right.” She danced in it until three in the morning.
Zara’s story began when Amancio Ortega and his first wife, the late Rosalía Mera, decided to start making quilted bathrobes and lingerie in their living room. The lingerie, which was considered somewhat daring at the time, met a growing need in Spanish consumers as the Franco regime came to an end. The first Zara store opened in the couple’s hometown of La Coruña, and the company expanded across Spain and Portugal over the next decade. In 1989, they opened a shop in New York, giving rise to the phrase “fast fashion” when The New York Times reported that Zara catered to customers who “change their clothes as often as they change the color of their lipstick.”
Into this world was born a girl who noticed everything. Those who knew Marta as a child recall her large, watchful eyes and say she was just as observant then as she is now. The only child of Ortega and his second wife, Flora Pérez, Marta spent a lot of time with her maternal grandmother while her parents worked at Zara. “My grandmother is probably the person who’s had the greatest impact on me,” Marta reflects. “She brought up eight children. She never cared where anyone was from or what they did for a living—the only things that mattered to her were whether people were hardworking and honest.”
While her grandmother helped her make clothes for her dolls, it was a British nanny who first took Marta horseback riding in La Coruña. By the age of 10, she was hooked. “I competed as a show jumper for many years,” she says—and while she didn’t jump professionally, it became a big part of her life. When she went to business school in London, she competed on weekends, and when she started working on the Zara shop floor on the King’s Road, she did the same. After she had her eldest son, Amancio, with her first husband, the Olympic show jumper Sergio Álvarez Moya, she returned to competition but increasingly found that she wanted to spend her weekends with her son. “Now I have less time and more children,” she says succinctly. “When my daughter was born, I stopped—to compete at that level, you need to train every day, and I wasn’t doing that.”
Marta retains the drive of an athlete—with some unusual specificShe describes show jumping as “a thankless sport,” simply because “most of the time, you lose.” What it taught her was not just humility, but also a sensitivity to others that has clearly been useful in her business life. “The most special thing about it is that you’re there with a living being,” she explains. “Any athlete has to be fit, but in this case both you and the horse have to be in good shape. It’s not a racket or a football—it’s alive, and it depends on you.”
Now Marta shares competition horses in Holland with the son of her original trainer, and she runs a riding school in La Coruña that, among other things, offers therapy for children with disabilities. “I like not having lost touch with that world,” she says. “It gave me so much for so long.”
MAKING THE TEAM
Ortega Pérez and her husband, Carlos Torretta Echevarría (now Zara’s head of communications), at their 2018 wedding in La Coruña.
Photographed by Saskia Lawaks
Marta met Carlos Torretta Echevarría in January 2016 through a mutual friend. They had dinner together at Sant Ambroeus in the West Village—Carlos was working at a branch of the Elite modeling agency and had lived in New York for almost a decade. By April they were dating, and at the end of that year he moved back to his native Spain. They married in La Coruña two years later, and after a while Carlos—whom Marta says is “like a walking encyclopedia”—joined what he describes as “the biggest family business in the world.”
“They’re a fantastic couple to spend time with,” says Mulier, who enjoys summer holidays with them in Greece, eating, talking, and waterskiing. “We’re yin and yang,” Carlos says affectionately. “I speak a lot, she speaks less. She’s very organized and I’m more unorganized. You know, I’m sure it drives her crazy a million times a day, but in the end I think it works well. It’s also very good for me,” he adds, “to have someone like her who puts me on the right path.” They still argue about the weather, Marta being fond of Galicia’s British-style climes and Carlos being of a more Mediterranean bent.
Amancio, now 13, was joined by Matilda (6), Manuel (2)—and, most recently, a long-haired Jack Russell puppy. Their home in La Coruña—next door to Marta’s parents’—has a calm atmosphere not unlike the one Zara has sought to create in The Apartment spaces within its stores; their nearby country house has a garden designed by the British landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith. Each weekday Marta gets up at 6:45, goes to the gym (“normal training and some Pilates, nothing very exciting”), has breakfast with the kids, takes them to school, and drives to the office. In the evenings, she prefers reading to watching TV. Current favorite authors include Ottessa Moshfegh and the Moldovan Romanian writer Tatiana Tibuleac. “I love a bookshop,” she says. (She loves a stadium concert just as much, whether it’s Bad Bunny or her friend Rosalía.)
It’s not always easy to follow in your father’s footsteps, especially when he’s forged such a globe-spanning path, but Marta says she doesn’t feel that pressure. “For me, it’s a source of pride. I don’t want to be like my father, because no one ever will be. I feel like I’m in a good moment of life,” she explains: “I do a job I enjoy every day, I work with incredible people every day. To be able to do that in a city where I can be close to my family is an enormous privilege—not just my children but my extended family, who support me a huge amount.”
David Sims’s quadruple-height studio is a converted tram shed in North London, its cream-colored tiles reminiscent of those in old London Underground stations. On the day of the Zara shoot, one of the models, Karolina Spakowski, stands in a black slip dress against a gray infinity wall.The Bee Gees are playing through the speakers, and fans are blowing three different types of air toward her. Sims is photographing 12 pieces of clothing for The Item, a collection that launches every week, with Templer overseeing everything. Marta stands at the back of the studio in brown cargo pants and a knitted yellow top, holding a leather-bound notebook. Two of her colleagues are next to her.
In November, Sims’s work will be featured in the latest photography exhibition at the Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation in La Coruña. Photography, especially fashion photography, is something she has always loved. “In my head, I always thought I’d take photos,” she tells me.
As a teenager, Marta would go with her mother to Zara photo shoots. “There was one at the Guggenheim in Bilbao,” she remembers, “before it opened to the public. It was a Spanish photographer, and the models were Amber Valletta and Carolyn Murphy. I would have been 14 or 15—I went to watch them work whenever they’d let me.”
Even though Marta’s love for fashion was already obvious back then (she recalls traveling to New York with her mother and buying a pair of gray patent leather boots from Marc Jacobs), she now buys the kind of clothes that Zara is sometimes accused of copying. (In 2012, Zara won a lawsuit against Christian Louboutin, allowing them to make red-soled shoes.) When I ask her about intellectual property, Marta responds gracefully: “Fashion is a shared language,” she says. “How you speak it is what sets some people apart from others. I have great respect for what designers do—I’m a client and admirer of many of them.” She names people who have become friends—Mulier, Piccioli, and others. “Phoebe Philo, of course; Sarah Burton is doing incredible work. I’ve always been a huge fan of Mrs. Prada. Willy Chavarria, Matthieu Blazy, Jonathan Anderson. The designer I’ve always admired the most is John Galliano, and I’m lucky enough to be working with him.”
The respect goes both ways. Piccioli describes Marta as “close to the fashion system” and gives her a high compliment: She always, he says, spots the pieces of his that are “more for a connoisseur.” “When you wear couture, you have to know why a black dress is couture while an embroidered dress is ready-to-wear,” he explains. “You have to know that couture is about the hidden parts. It’s not about what you show off. She really gets that point.”
Whether fashion is one language or many, Marta is perfectly placed to translate. “Fast fashion, if I can call it that, wasn’t welcomed with open arms initially,” Sims points out. “And that might still be the case. But because Marta is such a charismatic leader, she creates something that could be seen as harmonious with the institutional houses.”
“For sure,” says Piccioli, “she is the future.”
ALL SYSTEMS GO
Ortega Pérez at the Inditex headquarters. When John Galliano visited the complex, he compared it to “a James Bond setup…. I was like, ‘Wow—I’ve worked in ready-to-wear, darling, but this: This is incredible.'”
Fast fashion is not a term Marta uses. She prefers flexible. Almost everything Zara makes goes through its distribution centers in La Coruña, which allows them to be agile. “I don’t think the company would be what it is if we hadn’t stayed in La Coruña,” Marta says. Having built an industry based on speed, the company’s leaders say they now aim to be at the forefront of addressing some of its consequences. Marta tells me that Inditex is committed to improving the social and environmental conditions of its workers, and she is eager to lead the push for sustainability and aim for net-zero emissions by 2040. Hakan Karaosman, an expert on social sustainability in fashion supply chains, points out that, while Inditex is currently stronger on its water footprint than it is on other issues, the company is making progress.On social issues, they are “really innovative with supply chain design, because they established nearshoring.”
“Our business is very demand-oriented,” Marta says. “The key is to keep stock levels very low and minimize leftovers. We have less than 1 percent unsold products—we don’t do big shipments that don’t work and end up stored in a warehouse. Even if others want to call it fast fashion, our business model itself may be the most sustainable thing we have.” In 2022, the company launched Zara Pre-owned, a thoughtful platform that makes it easy to repair, resell, or donate your Zara clothes.
Galliano, who calls his two-year project for Zara a “reauthoring” of garments from its archive, admits that his initial reaction, when Marta asked if he might work with Zara, was “No way.” His reservations were probably “the same as everyone’s,” he guesses, based on “ill-formed or secondhand news.” By the time he’d toured Inditex and seen the gallery of sustainable fabrics, he’d changed his view. “There are a couple of fabrics that every couturier uses—silk chiffon, organza. They said, ‘Oh no, you can’t use that—they’re highly flammable. Now, you can use this one.’ They’re so on it.”
Marta opened her foundation by accident. “Peter Lindbergh was our wedding photographer and a personal friend,” she says. “He had curated an exhibition to be shown in Düsseldorf, and he never got to see it. [Lindbergh died in 2019.] When I saw that they were due to open the show there, I spoke to his son Ben and said that I’d love to do an exhibition of Peter’s work in La Coruña. It was all for Peter.”
She found a cement silo in La Coruña’s port that had been empty for 20 years and commissioned a local architect, Elsa Urquijo, to transform it. Now it houses an elegant fountain looking out to the sea, a sequence of monumental exhibition spaces, and an extraordinary spiral-shaped bookshop. The foundation produces a catalog under the MOP imprint for every exhibition—the day I went it was Annie Leibovitz; that was followed by Paolo Roversi—they host talks and book signings, and they give scholarships to four Galician photography students every year to enable them to study abroad.
In this way, Marta, ever proud of the city and the region where she grew up, has made La Coruña and Galicia something of a destination. But what strikes me most is how personal all of this is to her: fashion, photography, family, friends. She tells me about a day she spent in Paris with Lindbergh and the Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz, both now departed. “I have a photo of that day that I think of with a lot of affection,” she says.
“We always talk about fashion as if it were something frivolous, but I think it’s very human,” Marta suggests. “Fashion is present in the lives of millions of people every day. It’s how we present ourselves to the world. It sustains a lot of creativity and requires a lot of sensitivity. And it can be wonderful if we do it well.”
In this story: hair, Damien Boissinot; makeup, Lucia Pica.
Produced by AL Studio. Set Design: Mary Howard.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about Marta Ortega Pérez and her leadership of InditexZara ranging from basic questions to deeper insights
Beginner Questions
1 Who is Marta Ortega Pérez
Marta Ortega Pérez is the daughter of Amancio Ortega the founder of Inditex She is currently the nonexecutive chairman of Inditex effectively the face and strategic leader of the company
2 Is Marta Ortega the CEO of Zara
No She is the Chairman of Inditex while Óscar García Maceiras serves as the CEO In simple terms she focuses on the longterm vision brand image and global strategy while the CEO handles daytoday operations and finances
3 What does nonexecutive chairman mean
It means she doesnt manage the daily operations or sit in on every management meeting Instead she presides over the board of directors sets the overall corporate direction and acts as the ambassador for the companys creative soul
4 Did she inherit her position
She didnt inherit the CEO job She started working in the company in 2007 learning the business from the ground up in various stores and departments She was appointed chairman in 2022 after years of proving her understanding of the business particularly in product design and branding
5 What is Inditex
Inditex is the parent company that owns Zara along with other brands like Massimo Dutti PullBear Bershka and Stradivarius Zara is the largest and most profitable of these brands
Advanced Strategy Questions
6 How is Marta Ortegas leadership style different from her fathers
Amancio Ortega was famously reclusive and focused purely on the operational fast fashion model Marta is more publicfacing and brandfocused She prioritizes elevating Zaras image to feel more like a luxury house focusing on highquality campaigns premium store experiences and aligning the brand with highend fashion photographers and artists
7 What specific changes has she implemented since taking over
She has shifted the focus from fast fashion to fresh fashion Under her leadership Zara has
Reduced the number of collections per year but made them more curated
Invested heavily in premium store designs and flagship locations like