Maskota Brand Guidelines: The Tawil Brothers’ 1994 +KOTA Store & a 2023 Bankruptcy

Two brothers, aquarium fish and a wholesale business.

Maskota’s story starts with fish. According to a profile of the chain published by the Mexican marketing magazine Merca2.0 in August 2016, the Tawil brothers learned as children to breed fish and began selling them to aquariums near their home, which showed them a market that was, in the magazine’s words, almost untouched. Over time the brothers documented how to breed fish and how the necessary equipment worked, and imported species and equipment from abroad, because Mexico did not yet have a developed market for aquarium keepers.

That experience led first to a wholesale business distributing accessories for pets. Out of that distributor, Merca2.0 says, came the first +Kota store in 1994. The magazine described the company as entirely Mexican and, at the time of its profile, gave it a presence in 27 states with more than 260 stores and more than twenty years in the market. Those figures are the magazine’s and date from 2016; they are not a current count.

The brand uses two spellings. In Spanish a pet is a mascota; the chain swapped the c for a K and wrote its name as Maskota, while its stores and much of its communication used +KOTA, where the plus sign reads aloud as the Spanish más. Merca2.0 headed its 2016 profile with +Kota and listed the chain’s social accounts under MaskotaMexico, and the company’s website in November 2026 still uses both forms, writing “masKotas” with a capital K in the middle of the word. The result is one name that works as a spoken word, a pun and a compact sign at the same time.

Advertising followed the store network. Merca2.0 credits a 2011 campaign for the chain, titled “Él” (“Him”), to the agency Y&R Mexico, with a team of creative directors, art directors and copywriters listed by name in the profile.

Shopping-centre stores and a commercial insolvency.

A large part of the chain’s network sat inside shopping centres, and that shaped what happened next. El Universal reported in July 2023 that several of its mall stores had to close in 2020 and then reopened with limits on hours and on the number of shoppers. It also pointed to competition from Petco, which operates in Mexico through Grupo Gigante, and said the company built up debts, including rent.

The legal process began in March 2022. Infobae reported in December 2022 that the company filed its own request for concurso mercantil, Mexico’s commercial insolvency procedure, on 23 March 2022, and that the specialist Second District Court for Commercial Insolvency in Mexico City accepted it on 6 April 2022, according to records of the federal judiciary council. The case then entered the conciliation stage, in which a company tries to reach an agreement with its creditors on a viable plan.

No agreement was reached. On 26 July 2023 the same court declared the company bankrupt, El Universal and adn40 reported. Por Esto reported the same day that the proposal for an agreement had not been filed in time for creditors to consider it before the court’s deadline of 24 July. adn40 explained what the ruling meant: a declaration of bankruptcy takes the administration of a debtor’s assets away from the company and hands it to a trustee, whose task is to sell them and pay creditors. It added that the chain’s sales had recovered after 2020, even beyond the months before the restrictions, and that the company and its creditors had until 9 August 2023 to appeal.

The press reports of 2022 and 2023 refer to the business by both of its names, Maskota and +Kota, which shows how far the two spellings had become interchangeable in public use.

How pet-store chains present themselves.

Pet-store chains present themselves above all through the shopfront: a sign that has to read from a retail park, a high street or a shopping-centre corridor, and a logo repeated on loyalty cards, carrier bags, delivery apps and, increasingly, shop-in-shops inside other retailers. For chains that began online, the website and the app do the work of the sign. Tiendanimal, for example, started as an online shop in Málaga in 2006 and opened its first physical store there in 2012, according to Spanish trade press.

Ownership shapes these brands as much as design does. Many chains have passed from their founders to private-equity investors, family offices or larger retail groups, and some now sit beside former rivals under one parent. Arcaplanet, founded in Liguria in 1995, passed through several investors before the German Fressnapf group completed its takeover in December 2024, RetailDetail reported; in Spain, Tiendanimal and Kiwoko have shared an owner, the Peruvian Mulder family’s Emefin, since 2020, and trade under the IskayPet group name. Corporate pages on founders and owners are often the plainest record of these changes, and this guide states each owner with a date.

Store formats vary widely: large out-of-town units, small city shops, grooming salons, clinics run under separate names, and corners inside DIY or farm-supply stores. Networks change quickly, so every store or country count in these guides is given with its date and its source. Own-label ranges, mascots and loyalty schemes are named only as the companies name them.

The chains and online retailers in this group come from Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia. Each guide sets out what can be checked — who founded the business, who owns it now and how its network is published — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word. The colours and type in each guide are our unofficial interpretation, not the companies’ own.

One name, two spellings and a plus sign.

The name has outlived the court case online. As of November 2026, a website under the Maskota name, titled Maskota México, sells food and accessories for dogs, cats, fish, birds, small animals and reptiles, with a store locator that invites visitors to find their nearest +KOTA store. Its privacy notice names 2F Technology S.A.P.I. de C.V. as the company responsible for customer data. The website’s own pages describe the chain in promotional terms; those claims are not repeated here.

For designers, Maskota is a study in naming. The brand rests on a single altered letter, the K in place of the c of mascota, and on a symbol, the plus sign, that turns half of the word into punctuation. That gives a store sign two lives: as a word that anyone in Mexico can say, and as a short, almost typographic mark that fits on a narrow fascia in a shopping centre. The website continues the device by capitalising the K inside ordinary words, which keeps the brand’s letter visible even in running text.

Its history also shows how much a retail brand’s footprint depended on where its stores stood. A network that Merca2.0 counted at more than 260 stores in 2016 was concentrated enough in shopping centres that the closures of 2020, as El Universal reported, fed directly into the insolvency that followed. The insolvency, the court ruling and the appeal window are all matters of dated public record, while the shape of the business after 2023 is visible mainly through its website.

For a design guide, Maskota shows how a pun and a plus sign can carry a retail name across a national store network. Compare Petco, the American chain that El Universal named as a competitor in Mexico, where it operates through Grupo Gigante, and Cobasi, a Brazilian pet-store chain. For this guide we use aquarium teal, tangerine and sand with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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