Zara founder Rosalia Mera's fast-fashion legacy to the British high street

That clothing company was Zara, which had been chosen by some of the biggest names in the industry, including Andy Clarke, the chief executive of Asda, and Terry Duddy, the chief executive of Home Retail Group.

Only 15 years after opening its first store in the UK, Zara’s parent company, Inditex, has grown into a global giant with a market cap of almost €65bn (£55bn), with shares rising from €60 in 2007 to €103.

Even more remarkable, however, is that Zara has achieved this growth by staying true to its Spanish roots, rather than by outsourcing manufacturing to China, the path taken by so many other mainstays of the British high street in recent decades.

Unlike, for example, M&S, which manufactures much of its clothing through third parties overseas, Zara produces more than half its products at its own manufacturing base outside the port city of La Coruna in northern Spain.

From this base, which allows the company to compete with the sprawling factories of China, Inditex has set the benchmark for “fast fashion”, taking trends from the catwalk to the shop floor within two weeks.

By contrast, M&S, whose store on London’s Oxford Street goes head to head with the flagship Zara opposite, has months of delay before new designs reach shoppers. It’s no coincidence that Topshop owner Sir Philip Green has said that Zara is the retailer he would most like to buy, and last year announced that his Arcadia Group had increased the number of British factories it uses by 27pc to 47 sites.

It is the ultimate tribute to Zara co-founder Rosalia Mera, who died on Wednesday aged 69, after helping build the company from scratch into a byword for affordable, contemporary fashion, with 6,000 stores across 80 countries, from Azerbaijan to Venezuela.

The Zara story started in 1963, when Mera and her former husband, Amancio Ortega, a railway worker’s son, started out making quilted bathrobes and lingerie based on designer brands but at a fraction of the price.

As manufacturing grew, the pair opened a Zara shop in the city centre in 1975, and then, ten years later, created a new holding company called Industria de Diseno Textil, or Inditex.

Despite the fact that Inditex now produces 840m garments a year through its eight retail brands that include Massimo Dutti and Bershka, the close relationship between factory and shop has been maintained.

Inditex directly controls the supply of fabric, cutting, and the finishing of garments, and controls more than 100 companies involved in the design, manufacturing and distribution of clothing.

There are no intermediate warehouses that hold stock – stores receive deliveries from Spain twice a week – and store managers can tell designers directly when products are selling well.

Despite criticisms over the slight compromise on quality created by the speed of production, the fast fashion model is popular with fashion-conscious customers and with the Inditex designers, who can see their work on the shop-floor within a fortnight. If a product flops, they can simply get to work on something new.

It also produces consistently strong returns to Inditex’s bottom line. Last year, sales rose 22pc to €15.9bn, making Mera, who retained an almost 7pc stake in Inditex after stepping down from the board in 2004, Spain’s richest woman and the world’s richest self-made woman, with an estimated fortune of $6.1bn.

But despite her meteoric rise, the retail tycoon who left school aged 11 to work as a seamstress kept her feet on the ground. After stepping back from running Inditex following her separation from Ortega in 1986, Mera became an outspoken critic of the Spanish government’s austerity drive, warning that erosion of public health and education services would have a devastating effect on Spanish society.

In a statement published on its website, Inditex paid tribute to Mera’s essential role in the company’s success. “The group wishes to send its sincere condolences … after the loss of a person who contributed so much to the origins and development of the company.”

Not just to Inditex, Sir Philip and his fellow UK retail moguls will agree, but to the entire British high street business model.