FLO Brand Guidelines: The Istanbul Shoe Chain Built on a 1960 Workshop

A made-to-order shoe workshop in Gaziantep.

FLO is the retail face of a shoe business the Ziylan family built over six decades. The company dates its founding to 1960, and the technology site ShiftDelete.Net, profiling the group in October 2021, wrote that its foundations were laid that year by Ahmet Ziylan in a small workshop. A company profile published by the business magazine Capital places the start in the early 1960s, in a workshop of about 50 square metres in Gaziantep, in south-eastern Turkey, making shoes to order.

In the 1970s the business moved its focus to Istanbul, where it began supplying parts to other shoemakers, according to the same Capital profile. In 1985 Ahmet Ziylan founded Ziylan Ayakkabı and began making the company’s first sports shoes there. In 1989 the group launched Kinetix, a sports-shoe brand that the company says added a clothing range in 2005, and it went on to build up Polaris, a family shoe and slipper brand.

The shop chain came next. The company says it entered retailing with the FLO name in 2001, selling shoes for the whole family at accessible prices; the Capital profile gives 1994 as the year the group came to market with the FLO brand. English Wikipedia places the group’s head office in Bağcılar, a district on the European side of Istanbul.

The group also took on other people’s brands. The company says it became the distributor of Dockers by Gerli in 2003 and later its licensed maker, and that it has since signed regional licences for Nine West (from 2019), Lotto and Reebok (from 2022), as well as U.S. Polo Assn.

Lumberjack, a design centre and a factory in Şanlıurfa.

A bigger step came in 2012, when the group bought Lumberjack, the Italian footwear brand. Capital, in an interview with chairman Mehmet Ziylan published in January 2022, described the purchase as the group’s quick route into the European market. FLO now presents Lumberjack as a brand it turned into a Turkish one while keeping its Italian style.

Behind the stores the group designs and makes part of what it sells. The company says its design centre was accredited by Turkey’s Ministry of Industry and Technology in 2021, that it has design offices in Italy and China, and that it makes prototypes in its own pattern room. It says its factory in Şanlıurfa, in south-eastern Turkey, makes about three million pairs a year, and that it works with more than 200 suppliers in Turkey; it gives its total sales as about 50 million pairs a year. These are the company’s own figures.

The group has also spent on technology. In October 2021 ShiftDelete.Net described a customer data platform FLO had brought into use in early 2020 to clean and merge its customer records, and an artificial-intelligence tool, FLO Wise, part of a wider digital programme that also included research work under the name FLO Run, that gives store staff a damaged shoe’s return history, product details and the maker’s quality record when a customer brings it back. At that point, the site reported, the business employed more than 10,000 people directly and sold over 55 million pairs of shoes a year. The company says it has sold online through its own channels since 2014.

FLO is not the group’s only chain. The company lists IN STREET, a sneaker and sportswear chain that it says has close to 200 stores, and Sneakerbox alongside the FLO shoe stores, and it runs single-brand stores for Reebok, Nine West and Lumberjack. Its own brands, the company says, include Kinetix, Polaris, Lumberjack and Butigo.

Design and documentation.

Turkish fashion, denim and footwear chains are mostly met in person, in shopping centres. Trade reports on these companies’ expansion abroad tend to describe the same kind of opening: a new unit in a regional mall, the brand name across the fascia, and a launch event at the door. For a design reader, the store front is where the identity is fixed, and the shopping bag is the version of it that leaves the building.

The names are short and usually written as plain lettering. Some of these chains use a word or an abbreviation rather than a symbol, and where a mascot or emblem once existed, published histories describe it being folded into a typographic logo. Campaign imagery, rather than the logo, carries most of the season-to-season change: model-led photography, designer collaborations and named collections are how the companies present each range.

Collection and store naming is generally descriptive. Sub-brands and formats tend to add a plain word to the parent name, such as Home, Outlet or Baby, so the parent name stays visible on every sign. In this guide we describe those ranges by the names the companies publish, without judging one against another.

The corporate side matters too. Some of these businesses began as small family shops or wholesale labels in Istanbul and later became large groups, some of them listed on Borsa Istanbul. Their corporate pages on founders, owners, board members and listings are part of the brand’s public face, and the guides in this series draw on those pages alongside dated independent reporting. The palettes shown are our own unofficial interpretations, not company colour standards.

From Turkish malls to two dozen countries.

The chain has grown well beyond Turkey. In the January 2022 Capital interview, Mehmet Ziylan said the group had reached 600 stores in 21 countries by the end of 2021, and that its focus abroad was on the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa and the countries of the former Soviet Union. English Wikipedia, in an entry last revised in May 2025, put the total at more than 850 stores in 30 countries, about 500 of them in Turkey. As of November 2026 the company’s own website gives close to 800 stores in 24 countries on three continents, with about 11,000 direct employees, and wholesale sales in 41 countries.

The group has an outside shareholder. Gözde Girişim, a venture-capital investment company listed on Borsa Istanbul, holds 11.50 percent of FLO Mağazacılık ve Pazarlama, the retail company, according to reports by Foreks and Endeks24 in October 2026 based on Gözde’s disclosure to the Public Disclosure Platform.

Those reports concerned a planned listing. FLO had applied to the Capital Markets Board in 2024 for a public offering combining new shares and a sale by existing shareholders, but that process was not concluded, CNBC-e reported. On 19 October 2026 it applied again, this time for an offering of new shares only, with no existing shareholder selling. The application was made in October 2026; the offering had not been completed at the time of writing, and price and timing had not been announced.

For a design guide, FLO shows how a shoe chain can turn a wide spread of brands, its own and licensed, into one plainly named store. Compare LC Waikiki and DeFacto, two other Istanbul chains with stores well beyond Turkey. For this guide we use red, asphalt and cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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