Her death was announced by Inditex, the holding company that owns Zara and seven other apparel concerns. Spanish newspapers said she had a stroke on the Mediterranean island of Minorca on Aug. 14 and was flown to a hospital in La Coruña, in northwestern Spain, where she lived.

Forbes magazine ranked Ms. Mera as the richest woman in Spain this year and the 66th richest woman in the world. She ranked first among women who had acquired their wealth through their own efforts, rather than inheritance or marriage.

Her former husband, Amancio Ortega, with whom she started the company as an equal partner in 1974, is listed by Forbes as the world’s third richest man, with assets of $57 billion. Ms. Mera’s wealth came from owning approximately 7 percent of Inditex stock, worth $6.1 billion.

Zara changed the apparel industry, chiefly by speeding up its mass-market response to new designs coming from the leading fashion houses in Paris, Milan, New York and other cities. Zara could come up with its own variations on those designs and have them in stores within two weeks; previously, six months was the industry average.

It accomplished this through what is known as vertical integration. Zara designs, produces, distributes and sells its own lines in its own retail stores — 1,763 in 86 countries, including the United States. It uses no subcontractors or intermediaries and relies little on advertising. Devotees of the Zara label include the Duchess of Cambridge, the former Kate Middleton.

Zara takes an extra step in getting daily feedback from its many stores. The company can incorporate customer desires by modifying a design and shipping the new product out within days. The company says it takes care not to violate copyright laws in following designer trends.

In 1985, Zara and its “fast fashion” model came under the corporate umbrella of Industria de Diseno Textil, or Inditex S.A., a conglomerate whose eight brand names, each with its own chain of stores, aim at specific markets. Massimo Dutti, for example, targets urban cosmopolites, while Bershka is youth-oriented.

In 2001, when Inditex shares were first sold to the public, Daniel Piette, fashion director for Louis Vuitton S.A., called it “possibly the most innovative and devastating retailer in the world.”

Rosalía Mera Goyenechea was born on Jan. 28, 1944, in a working-class neighborhood of La Coruña, a port city in Galicia, a center of Spain’s textile industry. Her father worked for a utility company and her mother for a butcher shop.

Ms. Mera skipped secondary school and in 1963 met Mr. Ortega, the son of a railroad worker and a maid who had left school at 13 to work as a delivery boy for a shirt maker. When they met, he was working at one clothing shop in La Coruña and she at another. They married in 1966.

In their living room, they began making quilted bathrobes and lingerie that Ms. Mera had designed. The London newspaper The Independent said in its obituary of Ms. Mera that her lingerie designs were “a bit shocking at the time” but immediately popular. The newspaper suggested that this new liberalism in undergarments reflected a slight breeze of change in the final years of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

The couple soon expanded the business, setting up manufacturing operations, employing hundreds and later opening their own store.

At first they wanted to call the store Zorba after watching the 1964 film “Zorba the Greek.” But after discovering that there was a bar named Zorba two blocks away, and since they had already made the molds for the letters spelling Zorba for a storefront sign, they simply rearranged them to see what they could find. They settled on Zara.

The business eventually expanded to other Spanish cities, then to Portugal, then around the world.

The couple separated in 1986 and divorced in the 1990s. Ms. Mera stopped working at Zara after the separation but remained on the board until 2004. She devoted more time to charity work, much of it through a foundation that she and her husband had set up to help disabled people.

Ms. Mera made $600 million from Inditex’s public stock offering in 2001 and diversified her investments, buying stakes in a fish-farming group, a company that looks for cancer treatments in ocean products, and the maker of a fingerprinting system for newborns. She was a major investor in the Bulgari Hotel in London.

For years Ms. Mera could be seen in La Coruña at the movies or pubs. She was also politically active, speaking out against tightening Spain’s abortion laws and cutbacks to health care and education programs. She visited the camps of protesters against capitalism’s excesses, a precursor to the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States.

Survivors include a son, Marcos Ortega, and a daughter, Sandra Ortega.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/business/rosalia-mera-co-founder-of-zara-dies-at-69.html?partner=rss&emc=rss