Kelme

Elche is Spain's shoe capital, and it was there that brothers Diego and José Quiles registered the Kelme trademark in 1960 and officially founded the company in 1963, a small footwear business that would become a multinational. The symbol arrived in 1977: the claw, inspired by the region's Iberian lynx, with a motto to match, leave your mark. And it did. The Kelme cycling team, founded in 1980, raced twenty years at the highest level; the first professional football boot came in 1982, the year of Spain's World Cup; in 1992 the brand dressed the Spanish delegation at the Barcelona Olympics, the one of the record 22 medals; in 1994 Conchita Martínez won Wimbledon in Kelme; and between 1994 and 1998 the claw reached where no Spanish brand had gone, the white shirt of Real Madrid, including the night of La Séptima, the 1998 Champions League that ended a 32 year wait. After the peak came hardship and reinvention: today, still headquartered in Elche but majority Chinese owned since 2018, Kelme is a futsal powerhouse, historic sponsor of Spain's futsal league, and dresses everyone from La Liga clubs to the island championships of the Azores. The claw never left the map; it just changed territory.