Amancio Ortega

Spanish retail entrepreneur who co-founded Inditex — the parent company of Zara — starting as a delivery boy for a shirt maker and building the world's largest fashion retailer through a completely different supply chain model: fast fashion based on trend observation and rapid production rather than seasonal collection.

Invented fast fashion as a business model — the insight that instead of designing collections 6–12 months in advance and producing in Asia, Zara could observe what customers were actually buying, design new items in 2 weeks, manufacture in Spain and Portugal, and ship to stores — turning fashion from a prediction business into a response business.