MADRID (AFP) – Marta Ortega on Friday took the reins of Zara-owner Inditex, the group founded by her father, and faces an immediate challenge after the fashion giant closed shops in Russia, its second biggest market.
With neither fanfare nor ceremony, the 38-year-old daughter of multibillionaire Amancio Ortega took over the world’s biggest fashion retailer and its 6,500 shops.
“I begin this stage… with a deep sense of responsibility,” Ortega wrote in a letter to the 174,000 employees of the group, which has eight brands including Massimo Dutti, Bershka and Stradivarius.
“I ask for your support and patience while I continue to learn from everyone every day,” she added.
The youngest of Ortega’s three children, she was in charge of design and product launches across all of Inditex’s brands before becoming chairwoman on Friday, taking over from Pablo Isla who had run the group since her father retired in 2011.
As her father’s right hand, Isla oversaw Inditex’s massive international expansion over the past decade.
Marta Ortega’s promotion has been on the cards for several years but was only announced at the end of November as part of a reorganisation engineered by her father, now 86.
“We’ve been preparing for this transition for a while,” said Isla at the time. “Marta has been working in the company for 15 years… she knows it very well”.
Described as discreet and reserved, Marta Ortega was born on January 10, 1984 to the billionaire and his second wife Flora Perez, growing up in La Coruna in northwestern Spain with her half-sister Sandra and half-brother Marcos.
After attending a Swiss boarding school and graduating in 2007 from the European Business School in London, she briefly worked on the shop floor at a Zara store in the British capital to understand how things operate.
Although she never said she was the Inditex owner’s daughter, her colleagues told El Pais newspaper they quickly figured it out after noticing her Rolex watch.
“The first week, I thought I was not going to survive. But then you get kind of addicted to the store,” she told The Wall Street Journal in a rare interview in August 2021.
When her appointment was initially announced in November, it caused concern in the business community, triggering a fall in the company’s share price but such fears appear to have evaporated.
Although she has never held an executive role at Inditex, she is “well prepared” and will be “surrounded by good people,” said professor at Spain’s ESADE business school and a former Inditex executive Alfred Vernis.
Working with her is Oscar Garcia Maceiras, who recently took over as chief executive of Inditex barely a year after joining the group from Spanish banking giant Santander.
“He will be the one who takes executive decisions,” said Vernis.
