MultiÓpticas Brand Guidelines: A 1977 Opticians’ Cooperative That Became Mó Global Eyewear

Opticians who studied the French and formed a cooperative.

MultiÓpticas began as a buying group of independent opticians. Moda en Gafas, the Spanish optical trade publication, traced its origins in July 2024 to the 1970s, when a group of Spanish opticians studied how their French colleagues bought jointly to be more competitive. The group travelled to Cannes at the invitation of a French group that had proposed they join it; back in Spain, they met in Barcelona and agreed to form a cooperative. It was founded in 1977 as Ópticos Asociados and took its current name in 1980, the publication says. El País, in a November 2023 profile, dated the members’ shared history to 1970.

For more than four decades the business ran as a cooperative. Its members contributed money to the social fund and voted on major decisions at each assembly, El País explained, counting 130 member opticians in 2023. Alongside them sat “collaborators”: about 150 shops that worked more like franchisees, with the right to use the brand in towns of under 40,000 people in return for a monthly fee, and with access to central buying, training and marketing. Some members ran 15 or 20 shops each, and a new shop had to sit at least 500 metres from an existing one, the paper reported.

That structure ended in 2024. On 26 June 2024 an extraordinary general assembly approved turning Multiópticas, Sociedad Cooperativa, into a limited company that kept its legal personality, under the name Mo Global Eyewear, S.L., according to the notice in Spain’s official state gazette on 15 July, quoted by Moda en Gafas. Europa Press reported on 27 June 2024 that the members had backed the change by a wide majority, and that the business then counted more than 300 members and collaborators, more than 550 shops and more than 2,000 professionals in Spain. Its registered seat is at Colmenar Viejo, in the Community of Madrid.

Mó: a house brand takes the lead.

The identity most shoppers now see is Mó. Moda en Gafas says the brand was created in 2012, and that when MultiÓpticas launched online sales in 2018 it adopted a new image in which Mó played the leading role. On its own website the company calls Mó Eyewear its house brand of frames and says it sells more than a million pairs of glasses a year.

The shift was commercial as well as visual. El País reported in November 2023 that over the previous five years MultiÓpticas had moved away from third-party licensed brands, which carry lower margins, and concentrated on designing its own frames with a team in Madrid. It commissioned collections from Spanish fashion names including Palomo Spain, Teresa Helbig, Juanjo Oliva and Juan Avellaneda, and hired Elsa Urquijo Architects, a studio that had designed many Zara stores, to give its shops the feel of boutiques. The paper added that the frames are made by outside suppliers, while lenses are ordered from large groups such as Essilor and Hoya and sold under the Multilens name; hearing aids carry the Multisound name.

The house brand also became a media channel. In 2024, its first year as a limited company, MultiÓpticas launched what it called a new architectural concept for its shops, a contact-lens subscription, lenses it says were designed with artificial intelligence, and a video platform, Mó TV, Moda en Gafas reported in March 2025. Its marketing leans on the short name: the newsletter, the website says, is part of the “#Mó” community.

The company also runs the Fundación Multiópticas, which it says aims to help people with few resources gain access to sight and hearing care.

Design and documentation.

Optical retail chains are first of all shops, and their own material usually starts there. When studying one, look at how the fascia carries the name from across a shopping centre, how the frame wall is lit, grouped and photographed, and how the company’s news pages show openings and refits. Store counts appear again and again in these pages, so read them as dated figures from the company rather than as fixed facts.

Campaign imagery is the second layer. Many chains work with a well-known face, from footballers to television presenters, and describe that person plainly as an ambassador; others build films around customers, families or a single repeated line. For a design study, note who is in the frame, whether the glasses or the person lead the picture, and how one slogan or visual device carries across television, radio, social media and the shop window.

The website is now a third shopfront. Optical chains commonly offer an online try-on, either a camera-based virtual fitting or a service that lets visitors choose frames online and reserve them in a nearby shop, along with appointment booking and frame advice pages. These tools carry the identity into small interface details: buttons, product grids, colour accents and the photography of frames on plain backgrounds.

Behind the shop sign sits a corporate structure that a design guide should state carefully. Some chains are cooperatives of independent opticians, some run franchise networks, and many belong to investment firms or to a larger eyewear group. Corporate pages on owners, takeovers and franchise terms explain why one name can look different from country to country, and why a familiar sign can change hands while the shops stay open. In the guides that follow, owners and dates come from dated sources, and palettes are our own interpretation rather than official brand colours.

From cooperative to Mó Global Eyewear.

The name on the shopfront is still MultiÓpticas, but the company behind it is now Mó Global Eyewear. Moda en Gafas reported in March 2025 that the group had 550 points of sale in Spain; the company’s own website, read in November 2026, claims more than 600 opticians and more than 2,000 professionals, and says it has the largest market share in the Spanish optical sector. The same page gives both “40 years” and “45 years” for the company’s history.

International growth followed the change of structure. More than a decade earlier, Moda en Gafas says, its operations had already reached optical groups in the United States, Canada, South Africa and the Philippines; in 2024 it opened two Mó shops of its own in Mexico, which the publication called a first step toward taking the business abroad.

Its place in Spanish optical retail is distinctive. El País, in 2023, set MultiÓpticas in a market where franchises and large groups had been taking ground from independent opticians, naming the German chain Fielmann, which had bought Spanish chains, and the French chain Alain Afflelou. MultiÓpticas grew out of those independents. General Óptica followed a different path, as a Barcelona chain owned since 2000 by the Italian eyewear group De Rigo.

For a design guide, MultiÓpticas shows how a group of independent shops can build one consumer brand and then hand the lead to a shorter house name, Mó. Compare General Óptica, the Barcelona chain with a sculptor’s monogram, and Fielmann. For this guide we use a deep teal, a warm sand and a soft coral with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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