Tributes paid to Mango founder Isak Andic after his death Spanish PM praises Andic’s ‘great work and entrepreneurial vision’ after his death in hiking accident in Catalonia.
Tributes have been paid to Isak Andic, the billionaire founder of the Spanish high-street fashion chain Mango, after his death in a hiking accident in Catalonia on Saturday.
The young entrepreneur subsequently progressed to running a wholesale business, selling clothes in Barcelona’s street markets, but realised there was more money in retail and opened the first Mango store in the Catalan capital in 1984 as Spain was still emerging from the shadow of the Franco dictatorship.
Born to a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul in 1953, Andic emigrated to Catalonia with his relatives in the late 1960s, where he started selling T-shirts to fellow students at Barcelona’s American high school.
According to media reports, Andic, who was 71, died after slipping and falling 100 metres down a ravine while hiking in the Montserrat caves near Barcelona with several family members.
