But everything has a beginning, and this is our story.

The origins

The family tradition in leather goods began with a great-uncle of the current owner of the brand, Aurelio Diloy, who started manufacturing saddlery products in a small village in Aragón. We are talking about horse girths and similar items. The founder of the company used to spend his summers in the village, spending many hours in his uncle’s workshop, observing and learning. At that stage, it had nothing to do with watch straps yet, but everything to do with leather.

The first contact with the watchmaking industry

In the 1960s, the founder of Diloy, Gregorio López Andrés, began working as a sales representative for the company Girod, selling wristwatches until Girod closed down. That was when the idea of manufacturing watch straps first began to take shape. He continued for several years as a representative for various watch brands, selling Seiko, Citizen and Casio, while also selling some straps he made entirely by hand. When the first digital watches started to be sold, he realised that once the strap broke, there was no possible replacement. Together with a business partner, they began manufacturing the first polyurethane (PU) resin straps in Europe as replacement straps for Casio.

The foundation

1982 marks the year when Gregorio López (founder of the brand) stopped working as a sales representative in order to devote himself 100% to watch straps. In 1989, he incorporated the company under the name Lori Kuan, S.A. During those years, although leather straps were still being made by hand, our main strength was PU straps for Casio. Plastic production is a fully industrial process, and he sought to apply what he had learned in the plastics industry to the leather goods sector. Gradually, the artisanal production of leather straps became “industrialised” through investment in moulds, machines for semi-turned edges, importing adhesives and special paints for leather (which were not available in Spain at the time), importing hides from Italy specially tanned for watch straps, and so on.

For many years, we were a private-label manufacturer, selling to numerous wholesalers under their own brands. However, our main activity was manufacturing rather than distribution.

Internationalisation

In 1992, Gregorio López Jr. (Goyo) joined the company. Like many young people, he wanted to do things differently and had not yet learned that some things “cannot be done”. He therefore set out to start exporting, and the company began opening markets in Germany, Italy and beyond, later expanding into Latin America and opening several subsidiaries in Mexico, Colombia, Panama and Poland. But always with the same idea in mind: private label.

Goodbye to private label. Diloy as a brand

Eventually, Asian competition forced us to change direction. Our long-standing customers would place orders on credit and take a long time to pay, but with the money they owed us, they were buying cheaper goods in Hong Kong. In other words, they were competing against us using our own money.

By the end of 2003, we had exported more to Portugal than we had sold in Spain. That Christmas, we made a firm decision: to stop selling wholesale under private labels and to start selling under our own brand. But which one? And why not use the name of that saddlery workshop in a small Aragonese village where Gregorio had spent his childhood summers? What better way to pay tribute to those memories tied to the smell of leather?

So we registered Diloy as a brand, hired sales representatives and began going to market with the Diloy brand, competing with companies that for many years had been our customers and had gradually stopped buying from us in order to import Chinese products. This did not earn us many friends. Curiously, some of those importing companies, which have never seen a piece of leather in their lives, are the ones who invent videos about national manufacturing and claim to defend domestic products — but that is another story.

We applied the same model internationally, and today 80% of our exports are under the Diloy brand, with only 20% produced under customers’ own brands.

The current structure

Today, we remain a family-owned company with 100% Spanish capital, and despite having offices in other countries, all key decision-making continues to be based in Spain.