Zara Communictations Director Jesus Echevarria told the NY Times that the name for Zara fashion stores was inspired by the 1964 film, ‘Zorba the Greek’.

When Zara founder Amancio Ortega was looking for a name for the first store of the famous international chain in La Coruna in 1975, he wanted to call the stores ‘Zorba’.

“I don’t think they were thinking of making history, just that it was a nice name, but apparently there was a bar that was called the same, Zorba, like two blocks away, and the owner of the bar came and said, ‘This is going to confuse things to have two Zorbas.’ They had already made the molds for the letters in the sign, so they just rearranged them to see what they could come up with and thus found Zara,” Echevarria said.

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From those early Grecian beginnings to now, Zara stands as one of the largest international fashion retailers in the world with a total of 1,671 stores – five of those are in Australia. Zara is the only fashion store that changes it’s range every fortnight.