ZARA: Its Founding Story and a Fragrance World Expanded through Collaboration with Perfumers

Creativity is at the heart of Zara and is the characteristic that defines us.
— Marta Ortega Pérez (chair of Inditex)

ZARA is a fashion brand founded in A Coruña, Spain, in 1975. Its world began with clothing and later expanded into perfume. Delving into clothing archives, imagining the wearer and the moments that person experiences: part of the appeal of Zara’s fragrances lies in expressing stories of dress through scent.

This creativity is supported by collaboration between the brand’s teams and perfumers. Ideas from Jo Malone, Jérôme Epinette, Olivia Giacobetti, and others meet memories of clothes and the textures of fabric. Looking at Zara as a fragrance maker reveals relationships with creators that cannot be seen through its clothing departments alone.

Essential Information
The Founders and the Brand’s Origins
The Brand’s Commitments
Incidentally…
References

Essential Information

Brand founded: 1975
Founders: Amancio Ortega and Rosalía Mera
Place of origin: A Coruña, Spain
Group: Inditex
Official website: https://www.zara.com/

The Founders and the Brand’s Origins

Amancio Ortega and Rosalía Mera’s Work in Garment Making

Amancio Ortega was born in 1936 in Busdongo de Arbas in northern Spain. His father was a railway worker, and the family was not well off. He left school in his teens and began working in clothing. His experience learning to sew and make garments laid the foundation for his later business.

The other founder, Rosalía Mera, also worked in clothing from an early age. She grew up in the Monte Alto district of A Coruña, left school at eleven, and worked in a shop called La Maja. She gained experience first as a seamstress and later as a sales assistant. At the time, Ortega worked at Gala, a clothing shop in the same city. Their paths crossed through the work of making and selling clothes.

In 1963, Ortega started a small garment workshop, Confecciones GOA. Together with Mera and family members, he made bathrobes and clothes to wear at home. As work increased, people outside the family joined, and the business developed into a garment-making collaboration organizing women from the area. At Zara’s beginning, the work of making clothes came before the stores.

Opening the First Zara in A Coruña in 1975

On May 9, 1975, the first Zara store opened on Juan Flórez Street in A Coruña. At least ten years had already passed since garment making began at GOA. Here, Ortega’s business moved from manufacturing into retail. It now had a place to bring the clothes it made directly to the people who would wear them.

Zara listened to customers’ preferences and incorporated the looks they wanted into its collections. It observed what people bought and looked at in stores and connected this with design and supply. A system able to change its offerings with shifting clothing preferences became a defining feature supporting the brand’s growth.

In 1985, Inditex was established to bring the businesses together. Zara expanded to Porto in 1988, New York in 1989, and Paris in 1990. Work that began in a local garment workshop came to shape how people dressed in cities around the world.

Entering Perfumery and Collaborating with Jérôme Epinette

Zara expanded into perfume in the late 1990s. Early on, it collaborated with the Spanish perfume company Puig. While 1975 marked the fashion brand’s birth, fragrance was a form of expression added later.

Over time, the individual characters of the perfumers involved became more visible. One was Jérôme Epinette (in Japanese). Vibrant Leather appeared as an eau de toilette in 2016 and developed into an eau de parfum in 2018. Epinette has created several Zara fragrances, including this series.

Vibrant Leather layers the calm of woody notes with the strength of leather. Epinette’s ideas, informed by his fondness for woody scents, joined Zara’s world of dress. The relationship with a perfumer became something that grew across successive creations.

Introducing Zara Emotions with Jo Malone in 2019

A new milestone in fragrance creation was Zara Emotions by Jo Loves in 2019. The first collection comprised eight gender-inclusive perfumes and candles.

Collaborator Jo Malone CBE sold her namesake brand, Jo Malone London, to Estée Lauder in 1999 and left it in 2006. She subsequently launched Jo Loves (in Japanese) in 2011. Her work with Zara began while she was developing this second brand.

When Zara approached her, Jo Loves had gained a following in the United Kingdom but was not yet a global brand. Collaborating with Zara was also an opportunity for Malone to bring her creations to the world again. She sees the relationship as work in which two different histories meet.

Essentially, it is Zara’s history in fashion and my history in fragrance coming together.
— Jo Malone (perfumer and founder of Jo Loves)

Malone looked to Zara’s clothing archives. She also took pieces such as lace dresses and leather jackets from her own wardrobe and imagined what kind of person would wear them and what that person would do. Building fragrances from those imagined characters became the starting point for the first collection.

The collaboration with Zara is the work of Malone herself after leaving Jo Malone London. The collection name “by Jo Loves” carries the name of the new brand she was developing. Jo Loves is her second brand and a separate business from Jo Malone London, which belongs to Estée Lauder.

Creating Fragrances with Creators through the 50th Anniversary

In 2022, Ortega’s daughter, Marta Ortega Pérez, became chair of Inditex. Zara celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2025. Projects such as a commemorative film by photographer Steven Meisel featuring fifty models reaffirmed the relationship between fashion and creativity.

Fragrance collaborations also marked the anniversary. For Final Black, creative director Fabien Baron teamed up with perfumer Alberto Morillas to create three scents themed around the forces of nature. Alongside imagining clothing stories, expression incorporating photography and three-dimensional design has joined Zara’s perfumery.

The Brand’s Commitments

Making Fragrance through the Individuality of Perfumers

Zara’s perfume-making begins with a mood, an emotion, or an image of a moment it wants to capture. Its in-house teams explore materials, textures, and contrasts with perfumers, refining scents through successive trials. As in fashion, the creative process turns an idea into something one can wear.

Within this process, perfumers become ongoing partners in exchanging ideas. Epinette sees his experience of creating multiple fragrances for Zara as something that feeds into the next project.

Having created several perfumes for Zara makes it easier for me to understand new projects.
— Jérôme Epinette (perfumer)

He says he likes woody scents and uses them in almost all his creations. While Malone imagines the people wearing the clothes, Epinette brings his own preferences for materials. In Zara’s work with different perfumers, these individual creative perspectives coexist.

Creating Scent from the Stories of People Who Wear Clothes

In Zara Emotions, clothing is an entry into a fragrance’s story. Malone gave each creation a character and a moment in that person’s life.

Each one is a story, communicating its own personality through the fragrance notes combined in it.
— Jo Malone (perfumer and founder of Jo Loves)

For example, the inspiration for Ebony Wood in 2019 was the cashmere sweater of a young woman who had just graduated from university. She receives car keys from her father and sets off along a coastal road. A perfume carries that moment of freedom at the start of a new life.

Waterlily Tea Dress features someone relaxing on a lawn in a vintage dress. Not only the shape of the clothing but where the wearer spends time and how they feel inform the fragrance. Clothing and perfume express the same person’s story through different senses.

Olivia Giacobetti’s Textures of White Fabric

In 2023, A Perfume By Olivia Giacobetti, created by Olivia Giacobetti (in Japanese), was introduced. Across four fragrances, the collection approached clean imagery suggestive of musk and white fabrics from different angles.

Popeline Blanche takes delicate cotton against the skin and a white shirt as its subjects. It combines bergamot and neroli with notes evoking freshly washed fabric and musk. Blanc Ensoleillé, meanwhile, imagines white jeans, depicting a milky white through coconut milk, woods, and musk.

Even within white, the lightness of a shirt and a milky, enveloping texture change what the scent seeks to express. The collection’s appeal lies in transferring the feel of fabric and impressions of white into smell, rather than distinguishing fragrances only by types of flowers or woods.

Attention to Bottle and Packaging Design

Creators working on bottles and outer packaging also contribute to fragrance projects. Art director Ezra Petronio designed the Zara Emotions packaging. For its Japanese launch in 2020, the collection used clear glass bottles and boxes made from FSC-certified paper meeting standards concerning forest management and related matters. Choices made with recycling in mind included avoiding cellophane and plastic in outer wrapping and avoiding coloring the glass.

In Final Black, Baron’s visual expression also appears in the bottle’s form. Sharp contours of clear glass, a black-painted interior, and dimensional black lettering create a contrast between black and transparency. Extensive 3D printing and physical prototyping were also part of exploring the shape.

The three nature-themed fragrances are accompanied by Baron’s own photographs. Bringing scent, sculpted glass, and photography into one project extends the collection’s theme across several senses. Zara’s fragrances are also a place where creators of clothes and visual expression respond to perfumers’ ideas.

Incidentally…

In her collaboration with Zara, Malone also created a fragrance paintbrush for painting scent onto the skin. She brought to Zara an idea she had developed at Jo Loves. Applying one fragrance along the contours of the body, then layering a little of another over it: for her, wearing scent was also an act to be enjoyed like painting.