Arturo Calle Brand Guidelines: A San Victorino Shirt Shop, AC Leather & Maravela

A shirt shop in central Bogotá.

Arturo Calle is a Bogotá clothing company named after its founder, Arturo Calle, who came to the capital from Medellín. Its story starts in San Victorino, the trading district in the centre of Bogotá, where he bought a small shirt shop. Forbes Colombia dated that purchase to 1966 in a February 2026 profile, adding that he stocked it with formal wear bought in Pereira, opened a second and then a third shop, and two years later, at a customer’s suggestion, put his own name on the business.

Sources give different starting years. Portafolio wrote in December 2019 that the group began in 1965 with its first shop in San Victorino, called La Camisita; in 2016 the same paper said the first premises had been called Dante before that renaming, and that Arturo Calle was marking half a century in business that year. In September 2025 the company itself gave its founding year as 1969, as quoted by Portafolio. The dates therefore run from 1965 to 1969, depending on whether the first shop or the brand name is counted.

According to Portafolio in 2016, the early shops sold clothes brought in from Pereira, and these were later replaced by the company’s own designs under the brand that carries the founder’s name. Spanish Wikipedia says a store opened in Bogotá’s Unicentro shopping centre in 1988, that shops in Cali and Medellín followed in the late 1990s, and that the company opened its own office tower in Bogotá, with a flagship store, in 2011.

From shirts to six brands.

For most of its history Arturo Calle was a menswear brand, built on suits, shirts and ties. That changed in stages. In a December 2019 interview with Portafolio, the then general manager, Carlos Arturo Calle, listed the group’s brands: the original Arturo Calle; AC Kids, from 2014; AC Leather, from 2015; and Colore, a lower-priced line, and Signatura, for made-to-measure clothing, both from 2017. That month the group added a sixth, Maravela, a summer line built around linen and other light fabrics for children, teenagers and adults, with its first shop in the La Serrezuela shopping centre in Cartagena.

At that point it was still a men’s and children’s business. Portafolio reported in November 2020 that the brand was moving into womenswear, and that a name, Arturo Calle Woman, was under study. By February 2026 Forbes Colombia described a women’s line that the founder’s children had introduced, and the company’s own online shop now sells clothing for men, women and children.

Where the clothes were made is documented for 2019. Carlos Arturo Calle told Portafolio that the group then had four plants: two in Bogotá, one for formal wear and one for leather goods, and two in Pereira, one of them in the city’s free-trade zone. He put the group’s staff at about 5,800 people in Colombia, across manufacturing and retail; Forbes Colombia gave a figure of about 6,000 employees in 2026. In 2016 Portafolio had reported a new logistics centre in the Pereira free-trade zone.

Store counts also come with dates. Portafolio counted more than 80 shops in 2016 and, in December 2019, 104 shops across all the group’s brands, including those in Central America. Forbes Colombia put the total at more than 100 as of February 2026.

The 2019 interview also gave a sense of scale and mix. Across all its brands the group was then putting more than 5.2 million new units into its shops each year, Carlos Arturo Calle said; clothing made up most of its sales, followed by footwear and accessories, and the original Arturo Calle brand still sold more than any of the others. Its online shop was then less than eighteen months old.

Design and documentation.

Colombia’s clothing, bag, leather and underwear brands are mostly home-grown companies, and several still carry the name of the person who started them. Some began as very small workshops: Vélez with belts cut by hand in Medellín in the 1980s, and Totto in a Bogotá leather factory taken over in 1987, according to Portafolio. Both grew into chains with shops across Latin America.

Much of their identity is built in the shop. Store fronts, windows and tags carry the brand as much as any advertisement does: when Totto redrew its logo in 2021, Forbes Colombia reported, the new look went to its stores, signs, shop windows and product tags. Larger-format stores and remodelled shop interiors appear in the companies’ own accounts of how they present themselves, alongside the names of their collections and of the designers, artists and athletes they work with.

Campaigns often draw on Colombian references. Totto has dressed the national Olympic delegation since 2004, Portafolio reported, and Vélez built a 2026 collection with J Balvin around the Antioquian muleteer, the arriero. Regional crafts, rural dress and the national colours recur in the way these brands show themselves at home and abroad, and the companies say so in their own campaign material.

Ownership is usually easy to trace. Several of the groups in this guide are founder-led or family-owned, and their corporate pages set out who founded them, who runs them and which export markets they serve, commonly Central and South America first, then Spain or the United States. This guide keeps to what those pages and dated press reports show, describes family-owned groups plainly, and marks the companies’ own claims as theirs.

A founder’s name, a family firm and an outside manager.

The company has grown abroad gradually. In 2016 Portafolio listed El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama as its markets outside Colombia; Spanish Wikipedia says Panama, from 2012, came first. By December 2019 the group named five foreign markets: Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. In February 2026 Forbes Colombia listed Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Venezuela and Peru.

Ownership has stayed in the family. Forbes Colombia reported in 2026 that the founder had transferred all his shares to his children, and that his son Carlos Arturo Calle had run the operation for many years; Portafolio described the son as general manager in 2016, with the founder as president. In September 2025 the company announced that, for the first time, its general manager would come from outside the Calle family: Esteban González, who has more than two decades in the textile trade and previously ran the Agua Bendita brand, Portafolio reported. Forbes Colombia added in 2026 that the company had formed a board with external members.

The naming system is simple. The main brand is the founder’s full name, Arturo Calle; two sub-brands use its initials, AC Kids and AC Leather; and others carry names of their own, such as Colore, Signatura and Maravela.

For a design guide, Arturo Calle shows how a founder’s name can stretch from one shirt shop to a family of sub-brands. Compare Studio F, the Cali women’s fashion group that also added a men’s line, and Mario Hernández, another Bogotá brand named after its founder. For this guide we use a tailoring blue, a shirt white and a saddle tan with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Arturo Calle’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.