Inditex's founder Amancio Ortega handed the chairman's seat to Pablo Isla

On July 19, 2011 a board meeting of Inditex, the world's biggest fashion retailer and owner of the Zara brand, approved the appointment of managing director Pablo Isla as chairman to succeed founder Amancio Ortega, Spain's richest man and, per Forbes, the seventh in the world with a fortune estimated at 31 billion dollars. Ortega, then 75, had announced the move in January in a letter saying it would not stop him remaining with the group and its board.

Isla, 46, a former co-chairman of the tobacco group Altadis, had been with Inditex since 2005, starting as managing director. A tearful Isla told the board it was a very emotional day and that he wanted to express his admiration for Ortega as head of the company and on a personal and ethical level. The handover was a break in a company founded and run by one family member who had built the business from a small shirt shop in La Coruna.

Ortega's personal wealth and his remaining role kept the family connected to the business. The son of a railwayman who left school at 13, he had opened his first Zara boutique in 1975 in La Coruna and expanded into Portugal in 1988, the United States in 1989 and France in 1990. He stayed on the board and remained the biggest shareholder through the holding company that controls Inditex.

The company kept growing under a non-family executive, and Isla later handed the seat to Ortega's daughter Marta in 2022.

Ortega stayed on the board and as the largest owner, so the family's financial and strategic interest in the group did not end with the handover.

Naming a non-family professional already inside the company, Isla, avoided both a sudden outsider and a forced family succession.

Isla had been managing director since 2005, so he already knew the business before taking the chairman's seat in 2011.

Walking away from the day-to-day chair let Ortega keep control via ownership while a professional ran the operating company.

A founder can hand the chairmanship to a non-family professional and still keep the family's ownership destiny, so no family business needs a family member in every seat.

Pablo Isla ran Inditex for over a decade, growing it into the world's largest fashion group by market value and buying brands beyond Zara. In 2022 he handed the executive chairmanship to Marta Ortega, Amancio's daughter, who inherited the top seat from the founder's line. The family's ownership destiny had been preserved through a decade of non-family management, and it returned to a family member when the next generation was ready.