Wala

Wala is the Catalan answer to Decathlon, and its family tree begins in an espardenyeria, an espadrille shop opened in Lleida in 1939 by the Querol family. From that tiny traditional footwear store grew Grup Unipreus, a family company that eight decades and three generations later turns over more than 50 million euros a year with 400 workers, still run by the Querols. The Wala brand was launched in 2009, when the group opened a store of nearly 5,000 square metres with 150 employees on Barcelona's Passeig de la Zona Franca, an open declaration of war on the French giant, and grew to include shops in Lleida, Barcelona, Girona, Tarragona, Vic, Sabadell and Sant Pere de Ribes, over 25,000 square metres of sport with 700 brands in the catalogue. The Barcelona store sits precisely in the Sants-Montjuïc district, UE Sants territory, and from that neighbourhood comes the connection documented in this collection: when the local club needed shirts, it went to the local megastore. From the 1939 espadrille to the sublimated jersey, the Querol business never left the same trade: shoeing and dressing people who move.