Amancio Ortega Gaona is the co-founder and chairman of Inditex Group; recently in the news for being listed as one of the richest men in the world by the Forbes magazine. He is also as a well-known Galician fashion designer and entrepreneur.

Amancio Ortega was born on March 28, 1936 in Leon, Spain. He was born in a family with limited means as his father worked on the railroad while his mother worked as a maid. During his adolescence, at the young age of thirteen, Ortega started work as a delivery boy for a tailor in La Coruna, Galicia.

He was a fast learner and quickly gained insight into the way products and costs changed as they exchanged hands from the manufacturer to the consumer. Consequently, he came up with the idea of getting the product directly to the consumer from the manufacturer with no middlemen dealings.

He was a smart businessman and had a very observant eye. Despite no formal education in the area, Amancio Ortega became the manager of a clothing firm. He realized that the economy was going to take a worse turn and there would be a demand for cheaper clothes. He therefore started making his own clothes by buying fabric from Barcelona that cost less and sold better quality finished product with a lower price tag at local stores.

He founded his own company known as Confecciones Goa selling fine quality bathrobes in 1963, when he was merely 27 years of age. He opened more stores as the most strategic locations and by 1989 was the owner of almost 100 stored in Spain.

Following the increasing popularity of Zara, Amancio Ortega opened Industria de Diseño Textil (Inditex) in 1985 as one of the holding companies of some of the smaller chains as well as for the Zara brand; the company was on its way to becoming one of the largest textile companies in the world.

The unique selling property of Ortega's designs was the simplicity and ease of access. He aimed at picking designs from the fashion shows and making them available to the common consumer within a very shorts span of time.

Ortega preferred the clothes to be manufactured in lesser numbers and strategized so that stores were replenished with fresh stock based on demand. This worked very well as he could reduce the inventory and shipping costs.

As the factories were located in Spain and produced lesser batches of garments, he was also contributing to the job market in his own country, along with saving unnecessary shipping costs. This enabled him to pass all these savings to his customer. Due to this business model Amancio Ortega, there was hardly any need for advertising at all.

In 2001, the Inditex Group made its initial public offering and Ortega retained 59 % of shares which propelled him into the league of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the world. However, he is a very private person and there are very rare photographs available of him. He refrains from making public appearances and never agrees for any interviews.