Charly Brand Guidelines: León’s 1949 Shoe Maker, Skechers in 2010 and Liga MX Kits Since 2014

A children’s-shoe business in León.

Charly comes from León, Guanajuato, in central Mexico. English and Spanish Wikipedia both date the company to 1949, and ESPN, in a long feature published in July 2018, described it as “founded in 1949 as a shoe company in Leon.” The marketing magazine Merca2.0, in a January 2019 profile of the group, gave the founding year of Grupo Charly as 1950, so the two dates both circulate.

The business did not start in sport. Merca2.0 says it first sold children’s footwear, and that its main brand was Campanita; English Wikipedia translates the name as “little bell” and says the company originally sold only baby shoes. In 1977, according to both, the company changed course, turning its design, manufacturing and selling towards the sports market under the name Charly. Merca2.0 adds that over the next three decades it widened its range beyond shoes into sportswear.

Spanish Wikipedia lists those lines as football, running, training, lifestyle, walking, sandals and children’s shoes, and describes Charly as a company that designs, develops, makes and sells footwear and sportswear from its headquarters in León. Merca2.0 listed a similar range in 2019: football, basketball, running, training and walking shoes and sandals, plus bags, socks, sportswear and lifestyle clothing.

Skechers in 2010, football in 2014.

The turning point came through another shoe brand. ESPN reported in 2018 that a tariff on manufactured goods from China had made it unprofitable for Skechers to sell in Mexico, and that the American company eventually withdrew its products from the country. Looking for a partner with manufacturing capabilities to return, it signed an exclusive deal with Charly in 2010, ESPN said. Spanish Wikipedia describes Charly as Skechers’ official distributor in Mexico, and Merca2.0 listed Skechers among the group’s licences in 2019.

That deal, ESPN wrote, gave Charly the means to launch its football label, Charly Fútbol, in 2014. The first clubs it dressed were Atlético San Luis and Dorados de Sinaloa, both then in the second-tier Ascenso MX. A year later it moved into the first division with Puebla and Veracruz. ESPN also reported that more than 150 specialty stores had opened in just over three years, and that the brand made the kit for the fictional Liga MX club in the Netflix series Club de Cuervos, with the company written into a storyline.

By the 2018–19 season, ESPN counted five Liga MX clubs in Charly kits: Santos Laguna, then the league champions, Veracruz, Pachuca, Tijuana and Necaxa. The same feature noted that Puebla had left for the Chinese maker Li-Ning that summer, and that Charly, Pirma and Keuka — Mexican brands — together dressed eight of the league’s eighteen teams. Forbes México reported in August 2021 that Charly then dressed six Liga MX clubs, including Pachuca, León and Santos, two clubs in the second-tier Liga de Expansión and Everton in Chile’s first division.

The list keeps changing. The business site El CEO, compiling the clubs’ own announcements in July 2025, listed Atlas, León, Santos and Tijuana in Charly for the new season, with Pachuca under Skechers. In May 2026 the Yucatán newspaper Por Esto reported that Atlante had confirmed an alliance with Charly to supply its kit from the Apertura 2026 tournament, as the club returned to the top division.

Mexican fashion and footwear.

Mexican fashion and footwear brands reach their customers in several different ways, and their identities follow from that choice. Some sell mainly through printed and digital catalogues carried by networks of independent sellers; others sell through chains of their own stores, department-store counters or, in a few cases, museum and hotel shops. A catalogue brand’s pages, a sportswear maker’s team kits and a silk house’s scarf prints each do the work that a shop window does elsewhere.

León, in the state of Guanajuato, is the centre of much of the footwear trade. Business titles such as Alto Nivel and El CEO describe the city as home to shoe and sportswear makers including Andrea, Charly and Pirma, and to many small and medium producers of leather goods. Several companies started elsewhere and moved there: Andrea began in Mexico City in 1973 and moved its making to a León factory in 1981, according to Alto Nivel.

Ownership is usually private, and often in the hands of founders or families. Company pages and the business press describe founders, holding companies and store networks in different levels of detail, and branch, affiliate and outlet counts change from year to year, so each figure in these guides carries the date of the source that gave it. Where a brand’s own website is the only source for a statement, the guide says so.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it and when, who owns it, where its products are made as far as dated sources say, and how it presents itself through catalogues, kits, prints and stores. The colours and typefaces shown are an unofficial interpretation, not the brands’ own.

From club shirts to an Olympic team.

Charly’s work has also reached national teams. On 13 March 2024 the León newspaper AM reported that the Mexican Olympic Committee had signed an alliance with the brand to make the uniforms of the Mexican delegation for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, in an agreement that also covers the Los Angeles 2028 Games. AM said most of the uniforms Mexican athletes would wear were to be Charly’s, with exceptions for taekwondo and swimming because each international federation asks for very specific garments, and that the ceremonial uniform for the opening parade was to come from another brand. English Wikipedia also records the Olympic agreement.

The same AM report said that over the previous decade Charly had signed deals with professional football clubs and was then dressing Club León, Pachuca, Santos, Xolos, Atlas and Querétaro in the Liga MX. Spanish Wikipedia’s list of partnerships, which it keeps by season, shows Everton in Chile from 2020 to 2025 and Club León from 2021. English Wikipedia adds that Charly has opened a shop at Plaza La Alameda in Walnut Park, California, serving the Los Angeles area.

The name now covers very different jobs: running and walking shoes, sandals and children’s shoes, the shirts of clubs with their own crests and colours, and Olympic team kit. In 2016 ESPN described the kit work as handled by a young in-house team, with each design shaped around a club’s own crest and colours.

For a design guide, Charly shows how a regional shoe maker can stretch one short name from footwear to team kits without a single house style. Compare Pirma, another León maker of football kit, and Cuadra, a León boot maker. For this guide we use a kit red, a pitch green and a chalk white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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