In Memoriam: Zara's Rosalia Mera

Image: Xurxo Lobato / Getty Images

When Mera was 11 she left school to work as a seamstress. She would go on to co-found fast-fashion giant Zara in 1975 with her then husband, Amancio Ortega, with a line of lingerie and bathrobes she created in their living room. She eventually became the world’s wealthiest self-made woman, appearing on last year’s World’s Billionaires list at a net worth of $6.1 billion. The couple split in the 1980s, and Mera redirected her energy toward philanthropy, but she remained on the company’s board until 2004 and netted $600 million in the 2001 IPO of Zara’s holding company, Inditex. Today the business she helped build has revenues of $22 billion, and Zara has locations in over 400 cities around the world. Mera died in August at the age of 69 after suffering a brain hemorrhage while vacationing with her daughter, Sandra (see p 78), on the island of Minorca.


Also deceased: Dirce Navarro de Camargo, Roberto Civita (Brazil); Paul Desmarais (Canada); Hans Riegel (Germany); K Anji Reddy (India); Hiroshi Yamauchi (Japan); Alberto Benavides, Mario Brescia Caferata (Peru); Harold Simmons, Barbara Piasecka Johnson, Robert Holding, Ray Dolby, George Mitchell, Kenneth Adams Jr, Peter Lewis (US)