Mavi Brand Guidelines: Istanbul Denim Since 1991, a 2017 Listing & Martin Parr Books

A jeans brand from 1991 Istanbul.

Mavi is a denim and clothing brand from Istanbul, founded in 1991. Its name is the Turkish word for “blue”, a point the company makes in its own history and which English Wikipedia repeats. The company says it was incorporated in Istanbul in 1991, and the listed company trades as Mavi Giyim. Its founders were the Akarlılar family, FashionUnited reported in May 2017, and members of the family remain among the named shareholders on the company’s investor website.

The brand went abroad early. Mavi’s own timeline dates the founding of Mavi US and Mavi Europe to 1996, the year Turkish Wikipedia also gives for its move outside Türkiye, and says the designer Adriano Goldschmied worked on two of its early jean fits at that time. It lists its first flagship stores, in New York, Vancouver, Berlin and Frankfurt, in the early 2000s. Today its investor website names the United States, Canada, Germany-based European markets and Russia as its core markets outside Türkiye, and lists subsidiaries in Germany, Russia, Canada and the United States.

In 2008 the private equity firm Turkven invested in Mavi, according to FashionUnited; the company’s timeline records the same step as an investment by Turkish Private Equity Fund II. In 2009 and 2010, it says, it moved from “Mavi Jeans” to the shorter Mavi as it widened into lifestyle categories beyond jeans, and launched a retail strategy around its own shops. Its timeline adds a “Denim Kitchen” store concept in 2012 and the launch of its own e-commerce site between 2013 and 2015, and says its Kartuş loyalty programme began at the end of 2007.

Mavi’s investor website, in 2026, gives 498 Mavi stores and nearly 4,000 points of sale in 34 countries, including 360 stores in Türkiye, with jeans also sold through department stores in North America and Europe that it names, including Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s and Peek & Cloppenburg. Those are the company’s own figures.

Fits, collaborations and faces.

Mavi builds its range around named jean fits and guest designers. The company dates its Mavi Gold collection to March 2013, with the Hussein Chalayan Gold Series, and an athleisure line, Indigo Move, made with Adriano Goldschmied, to September 2016. Turkish Wikipedia adds the designer Rifat Özbek to the list of names who have worked with the brand. More recent collaborations listed by the company include Les Benjamins in May 2021, the bag maker MARCHÉ from June 2023, and an upcycled collection by Murat Türkili for spring–summer 2024, made from jeans taken from the Mavi archive.

Its advertising has long leaned on familiar faces. Turkish Wikipedia’s chronology of Mavi campaigns runs from early-1990s television work through a long series made with the agency ATCW, a 2007 campaign by the photographer Oliviero Toscani and a 2008 film by the director Emir Kusturica. The actor Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ has fronted campaigns since 2010, according to that chronology; the company says he became brand ambassador in 2009–10, and lists campaigns with him and with the actor Serenay Sarıkaya through 2024. The model Adriana Lima fronted the brand in 2012.

Mavi also publishes books. The company lists Blue Jean Place: Istanbul, with photographs by Ara Güler tracing the city’s relationship with jeans from the 1960s on, which it dates to 2001 and Turkish Wikipedia to 2003; Parrjective, Istanbul street style photographed by Martin Parr in Beyoğlu, Galata, Bebek and Kandilli, dated 2003 by the company and 2006 by Turkish Wikipedia, which credits the book design to Esen Karol; and, for its 25th anniversary in 2016, Denim by Magnum Photographers, gathering 61 photographs by 31 photographers including Elliott Erwitt and Josef Koudelka. A 2017 book, Makers of Today’s Istanbul, returned to Parr.

Turkish fashion chains.

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.

On the Istanbul exchange since 2017.

Mavi became a listed company in June 2017. The offering was made by the founding Akarlılar family and Turkven, FashionUnited reported on 22 May 2017, with shares offered to international institutional investors and to domestic retail and institutional investors. Bids were collected on 8 and 9 June, and on 15 June 2017 the shares began trading on Borsa Istanbul, Hürriyet Daily News reported that day from the exchange’s gong ceremony, where the chief executive, Cüneyt Yavuz, spoke of Türkiye’s “excellent textile ecosystem.” The company’s investor website confirms that its shares have traded under the ticker MAVI since 15 June 2017.

The listing kept a role for the founders. Mavi’s investor website explains that its shares are split into Class A and Class B, and that while Blue International Holding B.V. and its affiliates hold at least a fifth of the capital or votes, half of the board members are elected from nominees put forward by Class A shareholders; as of May 2025 the public held most of the shares.

The name ties back to the colour in the company’s own publishing too: its list of books includes a 2000 title on colour, 1001 Tales of Color, which the company says looks especially at blue, alongside brand histories marking its 10th, 20th and 25th years, including a 2011 Photobiography of its first two decades and a 2016 Mavi Anthology.

For a design guide, Mavi shows how a single colour word can carry a whole brand, from the jean label to the photo book. Compare Colin’s, another Istanbul jeans brand, and Koton, another Istanbul fashion chain. For this guide we use indigo, a washed denim blue and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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