Rosalia Mera, who went from 11-year-old tailor’s apprentice to Spain’s richest woman as the founder of the Zara retail chain, died yesterday. She was 69.
Spanish media report that Mera suffered a stroke while on vacation and died in a hospital in La Coruna, the Galician city where she was born.
She and husband Amancio Ortega opened a clothing store in 1975. They were going to call it Zorba, after the character in the movie, but there was a bar with that name a few blocks away. So they rearranged and substituted the letters of a sign they’d already had made, and the banner Zara emerged.
The Inditex Group was created as a parent company after the founders added the Bershka, Masssimo Dutti, Oysho, Pull & Bear, Stradivarius, Uterque and Zara Home chains. There are now 1763 Zara stores around the world, and Inditex has a total of 6058 stores and 120,000 employees.
She and Ortega divorced in 1986. He is listed as the world’s third-richest person. Mera left the Inditex board in 2004 but still owned nearly 7 percent of the company.