Montana colors

The company is very popular with writers as it was the first European brand to design a spray specifically for them. Leader in the Spanish market, fourth in Europe, the brand is currently distributed in about 30 countries.

In 1993, Jordi Rubio was a young sales manager at Felton, an industrial paint company. During a market study on spray paints, it appears that a garden center, a sales outlet in Barcelona, is making much higher sales than the others. Intrigued, he goes there and discovers that the seller, called Moockie, is a famous writer of the Barcelona graffiti scene. Jordi Rubio is suddenly immersed in a world, a culture that makes a very different use of these paint products, normally intended for the car industry and DIY.

Around the 1990s, a decade after the Spanish democratic transition, the Catalan capital experienced an Olympic euphoria. Music, visual arts and graphic design saw the emergence of young talents such as the emblematic Javier Mariscal, who came from the world of fanzines and comics and went from the underground to the spotlight when he drew Cobí, the iconoclastic mascot of the 1992 Summer Olympic Games.

Born in the street, graffiti exploded in New York in the early 1970s and after the Franco regime's iron grip, Barcelona became an important place for this movement that was still in its infancy in the Iberian Peninsula. Jordi Rubio sensed a potential for bombs specifically designed for graffiti, he proposed to Felton a project in this direction which was immediately rejected by his employer. His boss replied: "Stop dreaming and get back to work".1 For the paint industry, the denial is total: they indiscriminately equate graffiti with a form of vandalism and do not believe in the economic viability of this niche market.

Convinced of the contrary, Jordi Rubio resigned with Miquel Galea (Felton's laboratory technician), and together they founded Montana Colors S.L. in 1994.