Totto Brand Guidelines: A 1987 Bogotá Leather Workshop, Lona Backpacks & Red and Yellow

A leather workshop in Samper Mendoza.

Totto began in Bogotá as the rescue of an older factory. In 1987 the industrial engineer Yonatan Bursztyn, known as Natán, went to see Bonreal, a leather-goods maker in the city’s Samper Mendoza district that was in insolvency proceedings, Portafolio reported in September 2016 and again in November 2025. With backing from his brothers Alberto and Samuel, he negotiated a lease with an option to buy, kept the 38 workers who stayed on and put the business into a new company, Nalsani, which began operating on 1 December 1987, according to the 2025 article. The name was picked, that article says, because ending it with an i “sounded Italian.”

Nalsani first made leather goods, sold to local shops and exported to customers in the United States, Portafolio reported in 2016. The turn came in 1988 at Mipel, the leather-goods fair in Milan, where Bursztyn saw a maker showing products in lona, a heavy woven fabric. He came back to Bogotá to work with it, and the result was a new brand, Totto, named as a nod to the American rock band Toto. Portafolio gives the brand’s founding date as 17 July 1988; El Colombiano wrote in July 2026 that the first backpacks were shown at the Feria Internacional de Bogotá that year. Spanish Wikipedia dates the company to 1987, the year Nalsani began.

The first range was small: backpacks, wallets and accessories in 12 references, according to the 2016 article, which put the catalogue at 39,800 references by then. Bursztyn told the paper that the company carried its leather-goods know-how, which he called artisanal work with a great deal of detail, over to the new fabric. A first clothing collection followed in 1990, and the backpack became a school-bag staple, the 2025 article says.

From a Costa Rica franchise to 45 countries.

Totto went abroad early. Its first store outside Colombia, a franchise in Costa Rica, opened in 1992, Portafolio reported; Bursztyn described the move as partly a fallback while the Colombian economy struggled. El Colombiano reported in July 2026, citing an interview he gave to Forbes, that a poor land purchase in the Fontibón free-trade zone in the 1990s made going abroad more a necessity than a dream, and that Venezuela and Ecuador followed Costa Rica; Spanish Wikipedia dates those two markets to 1997 and adds Guatemala in 1999 and Bolivia in 2003. Ecuador is now its most important market abroad, ahead of Guatemala and Spain, El Colombiano reported. The brand has had shops in Spain since 2009, according to Portafolio.

Production is split between Colombia and Asia. In 2016 Portafolio described a production plant in Bogotá complemented by factories in China and an office in Hong Kong for product development, logistics and quality control.

Sport has been the brand’s most visible stage. Since the Athens 2004 Games Totto has supplied the clothing, backpacks and luggage of Colombia’s Olympic delegation, Portafolio reported in 2016, an arrangement that began when the head of the Colombian Olympic Committee saw a Totto shop at Bogotá’s El Dorado airport. Its collection for the Tokyo Games, worn in July 2021, drew on the jaguar, with full jaguar-skin prints and the Colombian tricolour set against a dark blue, El Tiempo reported. Spanish Wikipedia adds the delegation at Paris 2024. The same 2016 article said the company also supplied backpacks and luggage to Colombia’s Paralympic team, and that its sports links went back further: Totto sponsored the driver Juan Pablo Montoya in 1996, when he raced in British Formula 3, and backed a Colombian mountaineering expedition to Everest in 2001.

The counts have moved over time. Portafolio put the brand’s reach at 46 countries in 2016 and at more than 57 in November 2025; in July 2026 El Colombiano reported 520 stores in 45 countries and about 3,000 direct jobs, with around 9,000 more indirect ones. In 2016 the company had given Portafolio a figure of 12,467 direct jobs worldwide, 3,400 of them in Colombia.

Shop fronts, campaigns and founders.

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.

Red, yellow and curved lines.

Totto’s identity has kept two colours. In November 2021, after three decades in the market, the brand changed its logo and image, Forbes Colombia reported. The company described the new graphic style as clean and versatile, “more sophisticated, casual and adaptable,” kept red and yellow as its signature colours and gave more room to curved lines and movement. The change was applied to the look of its stores worldwide and to signs, shop windows, products and tags, the article said. Spanish Wikipedia shows the earlier logo as the one used until 2021.

The company is still run by its founder. Bursztyn is its chief executive, and Benny and Natalie Bursztyn hold the product and marketing vice-presidencies, El Colombiano reported in July 2026. The name is easy to confuse: Totto, the Bogotá bag maker, has no link to TOTO, the Japanese maker of bathroom fittings.

For a design guide, Totto shows how a brand built on an everyday object, the school backpack, can carry one colour pair across stores in dozens of countries and through a redrawn logo. Compare Vélez, a Medellín leather-goods maker founded two years earlier, and Mario Hernández, another Colombian bag and leather name. For this guide we use a warm red, a sunny yellow and a deep ink blue with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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