A shoemaker in Portillo de Toledo, 1965.

Joma was founded in 1965 by Fructuoso López in Portillo de Toledo, a town in the Spanish province of Toledo where the company still has its headquarters. Spanish Wikipedia says it was set up as Fructuoso López, Sociedad Anónima, and English Wikipedia says it began by making shoes for general use. In January 2020 El País told the founder’s story: in his town the choices were to work the land, as his father did, or to become a shoemaker, and he chose shoemaking, learned the trade, took pattern-making courses and, after his military service, set up on his own.

López told the paper that he began with borrowed lasts and a Singer sewing machine, their cost to be deducted from his pay for making football boots for a client in Madrid. He told El País that from an early age he had wanted to be in business and to do things for himself, and that the salary mattered less to him than that.

The name came from the family. El País reported that Joma is formed from the opening syllables of the name of López’s eldest son, José Manuel, and English and Spanish Wikipedia give the same origin. English Wikipedia gives the pronunciation as “KHOH-ma,” with the Spanish j.

From 1968, according to both English and Spanish Wikipedia, the company concentrated on sports shoes; Spanish Wikipedia adds leisure footwear to that description. Joma’s own company profile, as carried on its Ukrainian website, uses the same dates, describing shoes for general use from 1965 and a specialisation in the production and distribution of sports shoes from 1968, followed by a move into football.

Colour on the pitch.

Football became central to Joma. English Wikipedia says it entered the football market in 1972, outfitting the Mexican side Atlético Morelia. Spanish Wikipedia describes a 1992 advertising campaign, “El color en el fútbol” (colour in football), built around coloured boots at a time when black boots were the norm, with white boots worn by the forward Alfonso Pérez and red boots by Fernando Morientes. It also lists a 2011 spring–summer campaign featuring the goalkeeper Pepe Reina and a 2016 television campaign, “Entrena Tu Libertad.”

The kit business grew alongside the boots. Spanish Wikipedia names clubs Joma has supplied, including TSG Hoffenheim, RSC Anderlecht, Atalanta, Torino, Villarreal, the futsal side Movistar Inter and Cruz Azul, and says that in the 2022–23 season it dressed Villarreal, Villarreal B, Getafe, Eibar and Leganés in Spanish professional football. English Wikipedia lists Brentford, Villarreal, Trabzonspor and Norwich City among its current clubs, and the national teams of Honduras and Romania and Spain’s futsal team among its national sides.

Olympic and federation agreements followed. Spanish Wikipedia says that on 28 April 2015 Joma signed an agreement with the Spanish Olympic Committee to become official sponsor and supplier of sportswear for Spanish athletes at the Rio de Janeiro 2016, PyeongChang 2018 and Tokyo 2020 Games and at the Baku 2015 European Games, and that it had earlier signed with the Royal Spanish Athletics Federation, in 2009, and with Spain’s handball, cycling, rugby and karate federations. El País reported in January 2020 that the company counted its sports sponsorships as central to its growth, with agreements that year with several national Olympic committees, the Spanish committee among them.

Today, Spanish Wikipedia says, its main activity is the design and sale of sports footwear and textiles, with technical products for football, athletics, futsal, tennis and padel. In 2018, Spanish Wikipedia adds, King Felipe VI of Spain visited the company, a visit the encyclopedia presents as national recognition of its work.

Family firm and brand.

A sportswear mark has to work at very small sizes and at a distance. On a shirt it usually sits on the chest, opposite a club crest or a national badge, and it has to read on a pitch, in a photograph and on a television screen as clearly as it does on a swing tag or a shoebox. That is why so many sportswear identities pair a compact symbol with a wordmark that can be dropped when space runs out.

Many brands also repeat the mark beyond the chest: as a tape running down the sleeve or the side seam, as a band of stripes or shapes on a cuff, or as a pattern woven into the fabric itself. On a team kit those placements share the shirt with the club’s own crest and with a sponsor’s name across the front, so the sportswear brand’s marks have to sit alongside other people’s identities without competing with them.

Each guide below looks at how one brand’s symbol, wordmark and repeated details have changed over time, who has owned the name, and what the documented record says about its history.

A family company in Toledo.

Joma remains a family company. In January 2020 El País described Fructuoso López as founder and president, his wife Marina Arellano as vice-president, and their children José Manuel, Alberto, Fructuoso, Alicia and Marina as responsible for accounts, textiles, footwear, sales and marketing. Design, research and development and product testing were all in the family’s hands, the paper said, while the tax department was outsourced.

Products are designed in Spain and made abroad. El País reported that Joma does not manufacture its own shirts, shoes or balls: López told the paper that he had faced a choice between outsourcing production and closing, and that the company went to Korea and later to China and Indonesia. Designs and textiles are sent to the company’s office in China, he said, which returns a sample for approval before the collection is made. All products, the paper said, pass through the Portillo site before being sent on, whether to Spain or to Asia.

The brand travelled early. López told El País that, decades earlier and with few resources, he had invested in the brand by registering it in many markets, at a time when exporters had to find distributors willing to trust them. Spanish Wikipedia says Joma began creating subsidiaries outside Spain in the 1990s, in countries including the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Panama, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom, and English Wikipedia says it opened offices in the United States, Europe and Asia. In 2013, Spanish Wikipedia adds, Joma Sport joined the Foro de Marcas Renombradas Españolas, an association of established Spanish brands that promotes Spanish marks abroad.

For a design guide, Joma shows how a son’s name can carry a family brand from a Toledo shoe town to football kits abroad, and how colour itself became the subject of an advertising campaign. Compare Umbro and Kappa, two other football kit names. For this guide we use deep navy, signal red and ink with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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