1) The year was 1963. Amancio Ortega, a bright Spanish businessman, started a modest workshop in the city of A Coruna (located in North-Western Spain).
2) His workshop manufactured dresses and quilt dressing gowns.
3) His business did well and in ten years time his workshop employed 500 people.
4) In 1975, after 12 years of making textiles, Amancio Ortega opened his first fashion retail store in the city of A Coruña with his wife.
5) Ortega called the store Zorba, after the film "Zorba The Greek".
6) Apparently, Zorba The Greek was a popular film and there was a bar with the same name just 2 blocks away.
7) The owner of the bar came to Ortega's shop and said that it would be too confusing to have two Zorba's in the same neighborhood.
8) Unfortunately, Ortega had already made the molds for the letters in the shop's sign.
9) So, he decided to simply rearrange them to see which other names he could find.
10) Upon rearranging the letters, he came up with the word "ZARA". He liked it and so ZARA it was!
(It is believed that the extra "A" came from an additional set of letters that had been made for the company.)
11) That is how Mr. Amancio Ortega came up with the name Zara, which later went on to become one of the most popular fashion brands of all time!
[THE END]
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How a foreign brand became one of the largest players in the Indian footwear industry?
1/ Bata was founded in the country of Czechoslovakia by Tomas Bata in 1894.
After the initial struggles, Bata's philosophy of making affordable footwear was a success and it had grown to become one of the largest footwear brands in Europe by 1920s.
2/ In 1925, Tomas Bata decided to visit India to source rubber and leather for his footwear factories.
He saw a number of barefoot Indians and realized that there was a huge opportunity in the footwear market in India, too.