He started with nothing. He built a shoe empire.
Fortunato Frederico was orphaned before he was even three weeks old — his father died when he was just 15 days old. He was raised in a Catholic crèche and educated at a seminary, where he discovered a love of books and music that had nothing to do with wanting a life in the church (by his own account, he was "a bit of a rascal" back then).
At 14, that seminary education ended and the real one began: sweeping floors at a Guimarães shoe factory. He worked his way onto the machines, then into running an entire assembly line, all the while quietly studying the industry from the inside — clocking every trade fair he could get to, learning what made a shoe sell versus what made a shoe good.
By 33, he'd seen enough to bet on himself. In 1984 he founded Kyaia with business partner Amílcar Monteiro — 50 people, 500 pairs of shoes a day, and a dream he'd been carrying since he was 14.
A decade later, at an international trade fair, he came across a small British footwear concept built around a bold flying-insect logo and the line "Don't Walk, Fly." He fell for it on the spot, tracked down its makers, and bought the whole project outright. FLY London was born in 1994 — modern, young, unapologetically bold, exactly the brand he'd been picturing.
Softinos followed in 2006, AsPortuguesas in 2017. Along the way, Kyaia grew into a group of five factories and hundreds of workers — many of whom Fortunato still knows by name, insisting on knowing them as people, not headcounts. He's put money back into that same workforce too: staff housing for visiting teams and clients, and a crèche for Kyaia employees' children.
A boy who lost his father at two weeks old, and grew up sweeping someone else's factory floor, ended up building one of Portugal's largest footwear houses — and he still calls it "flying," not walking.
Kyaia Factory
SS26 Collection
The Brands
