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The Kukuxumusu label was launched in Pamplona during the San Fermin festival of 1989. Its highly original name means “kiss of the flea” in Basque. Gonzalo Domínguez, Koldo Aiestarán and Mikel Urmeneta – the brand’s creators – were looking for a fun money-spinner that would add some extra colour to a festival that takes place in the first week of July every year and which Ernest Hemmingway made famous in his novel Fiesta. The idea took the shape of T-shirts with illustrations depicting the bull-running. The product went down so well that they decided to take it to other Spanish cities.
Today, Kukuxumusu adapts its illustrations to every kind of medium, from T-shirts to posters, pottery and key-rings. The T-shirts are sold at more than a thousand points of sale in Europe. The brand’s simple philosophy is to use drawings of ordinary animals to make ironic comments on basic human habits.
The first Kukuxumusu shop opened in 1996 and in 1997, the brand started selling on line. The year 2004 saw the opening of a new kind of store, Kukuxumusu Kosmos, offering not only the typical T-shirts but their very latest blankets, towels and jewellery. There are now about twenty official Kukuxumusu shops in Spain.
Kukuxumusu also produces illustrations for other companies under licence agreements and its graphic designs turn up in unexpected places like notebooks, pens, table cloths, socks, rucksacks and even games for mobiles. The sales and marketing networks of its trading partners have taken Kukuxumusu to more than 60 countries all over the world.
But Kukuxumusu has not forgotten where it came from. The San Fermín festival is its "business card" and it has created a guide on the web especially for the occasion: www.sanfermin.com/guia
