Spanish Espadrille Maker Turns 80 as Gulf Demand Reshapes Its Retail Map

Toni Pons, the Catalan company whose hand-stitched espadrilles have become one of Spain’s more durable footwear exports, turns 80 this year. It marks the anniversary in the middle of an expansion push — and, increasingly, with the Gulf on the map as a retail market rather than a holiday one.

The company closed 2025 with revenue of 32 million euros, three per cent up on the previous year, and has set out a strategic plan for 2026 to 2028 built around store expansion. The target is a network of seventy stores by 2028, in Spain and abroad; at the lower end of the company’s own projections that would take turnover to roughly 40 million euros. Wholesale remains the main channel, with distribution in around ninety countries, and production stays in Spain, with espadrille manufacturing concentrated around Alicante, Elche and Murcia.

These are not large numbers by the standards of global footwear. They are unusual ones for a category as narrow as the espadrille, a shoe built on a braided jute sole that is still stitched by hand. The firm began in 1946 as a small factory in Osor, a village near Girona, making jute espadrilles and leather boots. It is now headquartered in Girona and led by Jordi Pons, a member of the founding family who joined the business in 2012 and took charge in 2016.

The Gulf’s place in that map has changed quietly. For most of the period in which Spanish espadrilles built their international profile, they reached regional consumers through travel — bought in Barcelona or Palma, worn in Dubai. Distribution followed tourism rather than the other way round. What has changed is that the demand now exists locally and, increasingly, so does the retail.

URIS, official retailer of Spanish footwear brands Toni Pons and Castell Menorca in the UAE, with stores in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, sits in that gap. The company also ships across the Gulf, including to Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar, and its catalogue is built around the same categories that drive the Spanish brands at home: espadrilles, wedges and summer sandals.

The commercial logic is climatic before it is anything else. Summer dressing in the UAE is not a three-month event; it is most of the calendar, and footwear is expected to hold up across office hours, malls, travel and evening plans in the same day. That has favoured formats that are breathable and stable rather than decorative. Espadrille wedges have been among the clearer beneficiaries: they deliver height and a defined silhouette while spreading load across the sole rather than concentrating it on a narrow heel, which matters when a shoe has to survive a long occasion rather than a photograph.

Flat summer sandals follow a similar logic at a different price and occasion point. Both categories benefit from a shift retailers across the region describe in comparable terms: buyers are less interested in a shoe per event and more interested in one that returns across seasons. In a category built on natural materials and a construction method that has barely changed, that is a structural advantage rather than a marketing line.

Toni Pons has approached international retail largely through local partners, with franchised points of sale in markets including Saudi Arabia, while keeping its own stores concentrated in Spain. The model gives it reach without the capital demands of direct expansion — relevant for a company whose growth plan also involves a move to a new 13,000-square-metre logistics facility representing an investment of 14 million euros.

Whether the Gulf becomes a core market or remains a well-served secondary one is still an open question. The direction, though, is clear enough: a category that arrived in the region in suitcases is now arriving in stock rooms. For a company marking eighty years, that is a more meaningful measure of the anniversary than the number itself.

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Also published on Medium.