Seamstress who became Spain's richest woman after setting up the fashion chain Zara
As if in a fairy tale, Rosalía Mera, who dropped out of primary school to work as a seamstress, became Spain's richest woman. According to Forbes magazine, Mera, who has died after a stroke aged 69, was the wealthiest self-made woman in the world, worth over $6bn (£3.8bn), the value of her 6.99% share in Inditex, the textiles group she co-founded in 1985 with her then husband Amancio Ortega.
Inditex's flagship is Zara, the clothing brand that today has around 1,750 shops in 86 countries. Inditex also owns seven other international clothing chains, including Massimo Dutti, Pull & Bear and Bershka. Zara's success was based on adapting the latest high-fashion clothes and making them rapidly available in high-street outlets at accessible prices. Zara's greatest innovation was to change its lines very quickly, which drew in customers not just at the changes of season, but every few weeks. It was "fast fashion", with a reputed two weeks from design to manufacture (where many clothes companies take several months).
Ortega and Mera were able to make their good-looking clothes relatively cheaply because they started out with hundreds of home seamstresses working for low wages in Galicia, one of Spain's poorest regions, and in neighbouring Portugal. Their first factories were located there, too. Keeping production local also added to design-to-retail speed, while their slower competitors were outsourcing to cheap labour in Asia (and earning reputations for extreme exploitation of women and children, which Inditex avoided in its early days).
Mera and Ortega also began at just the right time. The first Zara shop opened (and is still open) in the Galician city of La Coruña on 15 May 1975, the year that the dictator Francisco Franco died. Most of Spain was longing for colourful, modern, well-cut clothes to accompany their new democracy.
Daughter of a father who was an electricity company employee and a mother who ran a butcher's shop, Mera was brought up in the working-class neighbourhood of Monte Alto in La Coruña. In the climate of post-civil war poverty, Mera left school aged 11 to work at La Maja, a well-known clothes shop in the city, first as a night seamstress sewing up the day's orders and then as a shop assistant. There she met Ortega, a messenger boy, whom she married in 1966.
In 1963, they and other family members set up on their own in a basement workshop. Their company GOA, Zara's forerunner, made brightly coloured padded housecoats, a garment that millions of Spanish women of the time wore for domestic chores.
Despite Zara's success and the founding of Inditex as a holding company, the business partners' marriage foundered. After her divorce from Ortega in 1986, Mera took a back seat in Inditex's affairs, though she remained on the board until 2004. These were the years of the company's spectacular international growth: Mera had little to do with it, though she benefited from the company's 2001 launch on the Madrid stock exchange.
In 1973, Mera had returned to school. She qualified as a primary school teacher and received a diploma in health. Later she studied psychology. In 1986, she launched the Paideia Galiza Foundation, a broad-reaching charity to assist mentally and physically disabled people and develop women's initiatives. She worked actively in the foundation and was its main spokesperson.
Mera was not just a philanthropist, but a feminist and progressive voice. In recent years she had spoken out strongly for a woman's right to choose, against the current government's proposals to restrict access to abortion. She also supported the mass movement of indignados who filled Spain's squares in 2011 to protect against corruption and austerity. "If we play around with questions of health, children's welfare, education, we are doing ourselves no favours at all," she said three months ago with reference to government cuts. Asked in one of the rare interviews she gave whether she was leftwing, Mera replied: "Coming from where I come from, I couldn't be anything else."
She invested her fortune in a wide range of enterprises apart from her foundation, including Zeltia pharmaceuticals, which researches cancer, the luxury Bulgari hotel in Knightsbridge, a company that makes fingerprinting identification kits for infants and renewable energy and information technology firms.
A dynamic, intelligent woman, with a somewhat hippy (though well-cut) style, Mera lived unostentatiously in the wealthy garden suburb of Oleiros, just outside La Coruña.
She is survived by her son, Marcos, and daughter, Sandra.
• Rosalía Mera Goyenechea, businesswoman, born 28 January 1944; died 15 August 2013