Offcorss Brand Guidelines: The Medellín Childrenswear Brand Whose Name Began as “Of Course”

A skirt, a pair of shorts and a pair of trousers.

Offcorss was founded in Medellín in 1979, the year El Colombiano gives in its reports of July 2023 and July 2024. Its founders were the married couple Juan Camilo Hernández and María Gloria Mejía; El Tiempo wrote in May 2023 that Mejía had worked in the children’s-wear section of a textile factory before the two started their own line.

The business did not start under its present name. El Colombiano’s 2023 profile says the couple’s first children’s-clothing company was called Rancho, a name chosen to suit its cowboy-style denim. Before making anything they visited two or three plants to learn how blue jeans were made, with help from a contact at the textile company Caribú. The first garments were a skirt, a pair of shorts and a pair of trousers in children’s sizes 6 to 16, and the first stockist was the retailer Éxito, which took a dozen of each; orders grew, and the clothes later reached the Ley chain and other shops.

The founders’ idea, as both papers tell it, was colour. El Tiempo wrote that the clothes then on sale for young children came mostly in pale and pastel shades, and that the couple set out to make designs in bright colours. El Colombiano says Hernández travelled to the United States to look at American children’s clothing, was struck by what he saw in Miami, and went to the town of Oshkosh in Wisconsin, home of the OshKosh label known for coloured overalls and striped T-shirts.

The name came from an advertising friend. According to El Colombiano, Hernández asked the publicist Michel Arnau for a brand name that would stick in people’s memory, and Arnau answered “of course”. When an assistant was asked to write the phrase down, he wrote “Ofcors”; Arnau added a second f and a second s, and the brand became Offcorss. El Tiempo tells the same story and describes Arnau as the owner of the agency DDB.

Stores, franchises and a colour-led range.

For its first years Offcorss sold through department-store chains. El Tiempo reported in May 2023, citing the business portal Latinpymes, that the first Offcorss store opened in 1993 in the Salitre Plaza shopping centre in Bogotá; it repeated the date and location in April 2026. The same 2023 report says the company adopted a franchise model in 1996, made its first international sale in 1997 and launched an online store in 2010, later adding sales through online marketplaces.

The range covers children from birth to 14, El Tiempo wrote in 2023, when it counted 120 stores in Colombia. By April 2026 the paper described an omnichannel model of physical stores, e-commerce, franchises and outlets, and reported that the company had opened two stores in the Dominican Republic that year. It also reported that Offcorss had spent more than a decade developing children’s footwear, and that licensing partnerships with Disney and Hasbro gave it collections based on characters and franchises. Its shops, the paper said, are designed as a sensory experience, with scent, food and decor.

The brand returned to the runway at Colombiamoda, the Medellín fashion fair, in July 2024 to mark its 45 years, El Colombiano reported. It was its first show there since 2012. The show, held in the Cubo de Madera at Plaza Mayor, presented a collection called Life In Color and was staged like a children’s party, with children as the models. The paper quoted the creative director, Juliana Bonnet, and the director, Yanet Londoño Diosa; the paper wrote that colour had been the central pillar of the brand’s identity since it began.

Colombian fashion brands.

Colombia’s clothing, bag, leather and underwear brands are mostly home-grown companies, and several still carry the name of the person who started them. Some began as very small workshops: Vélez with belts cut by hand in Medellín in the 1980s, and Totto in a Bogotá leather factory taken over in 1987, according to Portafolio. Both grew into chains with shops across Latin America.

Much of their identity is built in the shop. Store fronts, windows and tags carry the brand as much as any advertisement does: when Totto redrew its logo in 2021, Forbes Colombia reported, the new look went to its stores, signs, shop windows and product tags. Larger-format stores and remodelled shop interiors appear in the companies’ own accounts of how they present themselves, alongside the names of their collections and of the designers, artists and athletes they work with.

Campaigns often draw on Colombian references. Totto has dressed the national Olympic delegation since 2004, Portafolio reported, and Vélez built a 2026 collection with J Balvin around the Antioquian muleteer, the arriero. Regional crafts, rural dress and the national colours recur in the way these brands show themselves at home and abroad, and the companies say so in their own campaign material.

Ownership is usually easy to trace. Several of the groups in this guide are founder-led or family-owned, and their corporate pages set out who founded them, who runs them and which export markets they serve, commonly Central and South America first, then Spain or the United States. This guide keeps to what those pages and dated press reports show, describes family-owned groups plainly, and marks the companies’ own claims as theirs.

A family company in Medellín.

Offcorss is part of Hermeco, its parent company, which Portafolio described in August 2024 as based in Medellín. According to the paper, Hermeco dates from the 1980s, and its portfolio once included Aleta, a sportswear brand that released an adult collection while the children’s business was being developed. The company then concentrated on Offcorss, and later revived Aleta as a separate sportswear label for adults, which the executive said entered Mexico in 2023 after contacts made at Colombiamoda.

The company has stayed in the founders’ hands. El Colombiano described Juan Camilo Hernández in July 2024 as the owner and founder of Offcorss, and its 2023 profile said he had turned down offers to sell the business. Day-to-day leadership passed to Yanet Londoño Diosa, who had led the finance area, El Colombiano wrote in 2023; El Tiempo named her as the company’s president in April 2026.

On production, a Hermeco executive told Portafolio in 2024 that the company works with a large number of partner firms in the Colombian textile sector for fabrics, cutting and sewing, and that it employed more than 1,200 people directly. El Tiempo reported in 2023, citing Forbes, that about 90 per cent of the brand’s products used Colombian raw materials and that its main supplier was the Medellín textile maker Fabricato.

For a design guide, Offcorss shows how a children’s brand can build its identity on bright colour and a name that began as a spelling slip. Compare Leonisa, another Medellín family company, and Koaj, a Colombian fashion retailer. For this guide we use tomato red, sunflower yellow, sky blue and deep teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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