Speech: Famous Female Entrepreneur
Respected teacher, fellow classmates,
Today I’m going to be talking about a famous entrepreneur known for being the founder of Zara, a famous fashion retail outlet, I’m sure you all, as girls, have heard of.
Her name was Rosalia Mera, a Spanish woman born in La Coruna. Daughter of a father who worked at an electricity company and a mother who ran a butcher's shop, Mera was brought up in the working-class district of Monte. Amid the post-civil war poverty, Mera left school aged 11 to work at La Maja, a well-known clothes shop in the city, first as a night seamstress sewing up the day's orders and then as a shop assistant.
She married Amancio Ortega, a messenger boy she had met while working as a shop assistant, with whom she first discussed and developed her idea of opening a boutique that would sell fashionable clothes at affordable prices. They were able to attract people’s attention by making their good-looking clothes relatively cheap. They managed to do by employing hundreds of home seamstresses working for low wages in Galicia, one of Spain's poorest regions. Their first factories were located there, too. Keeping production local also added design-to-retail speed, while their slower competitors were outsourcing to cheap labor in Asia (and earning bad reputations for extreme exploitation of women and children, which Rosalia Mera avoided and even condemned).
The first Zara shop opened (and is still open) in the Galician city of La Coruña on 15 May 1975, the year that the dictator Francisco Franco died. Most of Spain was longing for colourful, modern, well-cut clothes to accompany their new democracy.
In 1973, Mera had returned to school. She qualified as a primary school teacher and received a diploma in health and later on studied psychology. In 1986, she launched the Paideia Galiza Foundation, a broad-reaching charity to assist mentally and physically disabled people and develop women's initiatives. She worked actively in the foundation and was its
Today I’m going to be talking about a famous entrepreneur known for being the founder of Zara, a famous fashion retail outlet, I’m sure you all, as girls, have heard of.
Her name was Rosalia Mera, a Spanish woman born in La Coruna. Daughter of a father who worked at an electricity company and a mother who ran a butcher's shop, Mera was brought up in the working-class district of Monte. Amid the post-civil war poverty, Mera left school aged 11 to work at La Maja, a well-known clothes shop in the city, first as a night seamstress sewing up the day's orders and then as a shop assistant.
She married Amancio Ortega, a messenger boy she had met while working as a shop assistant, with whom she first discussed and developed her idea of opening a boutique that would sell fashionable clothes at affordable prices. They were able to attract people’s attention by making their good-looking clothes relatively cheap. They managed to do by employing hundreds of home seamstresses working for low wages in Galicia, one of Spain's poorest regions. Their first factories were located there, too. Keeping production local also added design-to-retail speed, while their slower competitors were outsourcing to cheap labor in Asia (and earning bad reputations for extreme exploitation of women and children, which Rosalia Mera avoided and even condemned).
The first Zara shop opened (and is still open) in the Galician city of La Coruña on 15 May 1975, the year that the dictator Francisco Franco died. Most of Spain was longing for colourful, modern, well-cut clothes to accompany their new democracy.
In 1973, Mera had returned to school. She qualified as a primary school teacher and received a diploma in health and later on studied psychology. In 1986, she launched the Paideia Galiza Foundation, a broad-reaching charity to assist mentally and physically disabled people and develop women's initiatives. She worked actively in the foundation and was its