Funky brands from around the world: Spain02 Oct
Entrance to the Imaginarium store
My first post about funky brands from around the world featured Germany, and today I am happy to talk about Spain. The list was compiled by the SCHMOOZY FOX Facebook fans and Twitter followers, and I have to admit I threw a couple of my own favorites in there.
After all, I spent a year in Madrid back in 2007, and had a chance to experience some of the funkiest Spanish brands first hand.
- The first and foremost funky brand for me personally — and I am definitely biased here — is IE Business School, the very reason behind my relocation to Madrid for a year. Somehow, IE ticks many boxes of what a funky brand should be : it is memorable, triggers many emotions (at least to those who are part of the IE community), run by a passionate team of people, and last but not least, it’s based on rigorous business management. IE Business school has been climbing the FT ranks steadily for the past two years, and has been recently ranked at number 1 in the world by the Wall Street Journal. IE Business school was probably one of the first business schools to get “land” on Second Life, it is good at engaging in a dialog with future students through social media and it was definitely a very nice environment for the launch of the Funky Business Club I founded during my MBA.
- Cacao Sampaka: this is a chocolate shop (in fact, a chain of shops, although I personally visited only one of them in Madrid), and a chocolate café in one. The shop sells not only chocolate (very good taste, and brilliant packaging!), but also a wide selection of things that go well with chocolate, or are about chocolate: utensils to make chocolate fondue, books about chocolate, cups for drinking hot chocolate, and so on. The café is suitable for all those chocolate fans who thrive on a 100% chocolate diet.
- Ibiza: Ibiza is a funky island brand, a host of some of the trendiest and funkiest night clubs, and great DJs.
- Camper shoes: this brand has already been covered on my blog, check it out here.
- Desigual: a Spanish fashion label with a tag line, “Atypical Spanish Wear since 1984″. They have a very funky web site!
- Garciamadrid.com: this brand was mentioned by one of my Twitter followers (here is my link love to him! ), and I suppose it’s a fashion label — the site doesn’t explain the concept well enough, and I am not familiar with it to make any comments.
- Tuenti is Madrid-based, invitation-only private social networking website, also sometimes referred to as “Spanish Facebook”.
- Imaginarium is a kids’ toy and game company. It was created in 1992 and since then, it has opened shops in 30 countries around the world.
That’s my crowdsourced quick list of funky Spanish brands. There are, of course, many many more interesting, innovative, original and simply funky brands. A good source of Spanish brands in general (funky or otherwise) is the site http://www.brandsofspain.com/
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2 Responses to “Funky brands from around the world: Spain”
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Thanks, Ramon, for this great explanation! I’ll keep an eye on Garcia Madrid, for sure, as well as Tuenti! Spain is full of funky brands, keep them coming…
Hi Olga. Thanks for the superlink and love. Heres some back to you!
I really like what Manuel is doing with García Madrid, going far beyond just designing, but also stepping out into the social media world with a great do-it-yourself attitude to stablish a closer relationship with his fans and clients. Yes it is a fashion brand, but the concept goes far beyond a regular brand. He has taken an approach where the least important thing is the designer himself, using one of the most common Spanish lastnames as his flagship. The importance is in the people and in the clothes, not on any diva. Check Garcia’s blog out to understand him a little better.
About Tuenti, today they hired Facebook’s Spain Sales Director for themselves! They are now serving 7 billion pages a month. Not bad for such a small social network compared to Facebook.
Keep it funky!