Bully for Them
Jenny Block discovers how an advertising campaign for Spanish brandy came to represent something else: an entire country.
The road to the workshop isn’t paved. The old Volvo clunks along the rocks and shards of stone lining the alleyway. When the car stops, two tiny dogs chase each other in a race to reach it. Their yapping obscures the sound of a bright blue corrugated metal door sliding sideways to open. A courtyard is revealed, but there aren’t any beds of flowers or paths of manicured grass, only a gravel lot and a low-lying cinder-block building. From every vantage point, you can see the familiar silhouette. Black. Robust. Unmistakable.
Here, in a battered workshop rife with tools and tradition, the heart of the Osborne Group, and some say of Spain itself, resides. Here, in El Puerto de Santa María, in the sherry triangle of Spain. Here, on the outskirts of town, miles from where the corporate offices are. It’s the Tejada family workshop, an unassuming place, where a most imposing figure is forged — the Osborne bull, the symbol that rose from ad to icon.
What is now the Osborne Group was founded in 1772 as a producer of fine sherry and brandy. Since then, the company has added numerous varieties and vintages of wine to their offerings, as well as other business interests, including bottled water, Iberian pork products, and the Mesón 5J restaurant chain. The business continues to be family owned and operated. And despite its other endeavors, wines and spirits — including sherry, brandy, and port — continue to be the central focus of the company.
Osborne’s products are distributed in more than 40 countries, and in 2005, the company increased its 2004 business by 6.4 percent. Naturally, the creation of Osborne products in Spain and the vast distribution of them outside the country are important to the Spanish economy. But the products and the international business they have created as exports are only part of what Osborne has given its homeland. Strangely, and quite unintentionally, Osborne also gave them what has grown to become the symbol for an entire nation — the profile of a proud and virile bull.
The now readily recognizable image didn’t debut to such fame, of course. In 1956, Osborne hired commercial artist Manolo Prieto to create a logo for use on the bottles of its Veterano brandy. The company wanted something representative of Osborne and its native country, as well as something that would easily translate as a billboard. That is, something simple, powerful, and memorable. Enter the bull. Prieto penned a silhouette that necessitated no fine detail. Its black coloring and easily decipherable features made it ideal for the bottle and for the roadside. Osborne was thrilled.
So thrilled, in fact, that the shape of the Osborne bull remains true to the original Prieto drawing even to this day. El Toro has, however, gotten bigger and stronger over the years. Not long after the bull existed as a line drawing, it was transformed into roadside signage. In 1957, the very first bull-shaped billboard — or “bullboard” — was erected. It was only 13 feet high and was cut from a single sheet of wood. At the year’s end, there were a total of 16 bulls in place. But after only a few years, it became clear that they couldn’t weather, well, the weather. The elements made quick work of battering the timber bulls. That’s when Félix Tejada entered the picture. Osborne hired the metalúrgico (Spanish for “metalsmith”) to engineer a bull that would be as strong physically as it was emblematically.
What he designed is a remarkable feat of engineering. The Osborne bulls found in Spain today weigh nearly 9,000 pounds apiece, and each measures almost 45 feet high — the average height of a four-story building. El Toro is a massive jigsaw puzzle of sorts, made from seventy 35-by-75-inch pieces of 5/64-inch-thick iron; 1,000 bolts; four scaffolding-like turrets held in place with bases that, combined, weigh 55 tons; and 20 gallons of black paint. Tejada is both the brains and the brawn behind the entire endeavor; his family workshop is the backdrop for each bull’s “birth.”
When Tejada explains the process of engineering the design, crafting the pieces, and building the bulls, he speaks with the pride of a father. No wonder — until five years ago, he himself made all the bullboards, fashioning each new bull according to his design plan, forging the pieces and the scaffolding in his workshop. Then, along with his team, he assembled each at its final roadside home.
“We put all the pieces together with fire. So we have buckets of water prepared. We’ve never had an accident,” Tejada says with well-deserved satisfaction. It might sound old-school, and, well, it is. But Tejada doesn’t believe in fixing something that’s not broken. Osborne apparently abides by the same tenet. “[The Osbornes] have never bothered me,” Tejada says. “Lots of things in the business have changed. But they’ve never asked me to change a thing.” The people of Spain clearly value tradition.
That, of course, includes those traditions inspired by the bulls. Graduating marines in El Puerto climb the bulls, crowning them with their graduation caps. In Tejada’s own family, whenever a child reaches the age of seven, he or she climbs up through the turrets to the top of the 45-foot bull that sits on the road leading to the town of Conil de la Frontera. And all throughout Spain, people paint the bullboards, decorate them, climb them, you name it — and it rarely fails to make the paper.
From day one, Tejada has remained true to his original engineering plan for the bulls. Only the eight bulls that stand in the rotunda of El Puerto de Santa María are different from the rest. They are only 13 feet high and weigh a mere 2,650 pounds. They also have paneling covering their scaffolding to keep people from climbing them. That’s another brainstorm belonging to Tejada, whose skill does not go unnoticed outside of Osborne. One local architect brought his students to Tejada’s workshop so that Tejada could explain the design behind the bulls. Over the years, other architecture students have come to the workshop to incorporate the making of the bull into their final project.
Tejada has officially been retired for five years now. His sons, Félix Jr., Jesús, and Pedro, and his nephew Juan Antonio Sánchez have taken over as the primary bull makers. But Tejada still goes to the workshop to help them from time to time. “I’m an old bullfighter, you know,” he says with a sly smile. As Tejada interacts with his sons and nephew, it’s easy to see that he simply can’t be away from any family member for very long. That, of course, includes the bulls; those who have a hand in creating them say that they consider the bull one of their brothers. A good one, too, explains José Gómez Ariza, an Osborne family friend who does public-relations work for the company. “He’s perfect. We don’t have to feed him, but he feeds us,” Ariza jokes.
But things weren’t always so good for the extended bovine family member. In 1962, a law was passed mandating that billboards be at least 400 feet from the side of the road. At that time, there were hundreds of 23-foot-tall bulls dotting the Spanish landscape, and they all had to come down. Instead of simply moving them, Osborne decided to dispense with the originals and to install much larger (and fewer) bulls in order to ensure that motorists could still see them at the newly regulated distances. Osborne increased the bull’s size to 45 feet, the height it is now, and used the opportunity to make one additional change. The bulls were initially painted with the words Veterano Osborne. This time around, though, they decided to paint the words Osborne — Sherry & Brandy on the bulls, hoping to make what was the symbol for one of their products a symbol for all of them.
In 1988, the roadside homes of their adopted brethren were again threatened. Another law regarding roadside signage was passed, and this one prohibited advertising next to public highways altogether. In hopes of skirting the measure, Osborne had the writing on the bulls painted over. Although it brought them reprieve for a short time, it wasn’t long before they were fined and instructed to remove the bulls. That’s when things got really interesting. It suddenly became clear that the bulls had a much larger extended family than Osborne could have ever imagined. Overwhelming numbers of Spaniards protested the removal of what they had come to think of as “their” bull, arguing that it had become a vital part of the Spanish roadside and, in fact, of Spain itself.
Quickly, the media took hold of the story, and for nearly four years, vigorous public debate ensued. People all across Spain signed petitions and spoke out in support of the bulls’ continued existence. Osborne protested the fine and the orders of removal in court. And in December of 1997, much to Osborne’s delight and surprise, the Spanish Supreme Court acknowledged that the Osborne bull is indeed integral to the Spanish countryside — so much so that citizens identify themselves with it. In the words of the court, “It has gone beyond its initial advertising purpose and has become part of the landscape. As a result, it is declared a part of Spain’s National Heritage.”
Today there are 90 bulls and counting. El Toro is recognizable not only to the people of Spain but also to people all over the world. It has become synonymous with the Iberian country, regardless of whether people know of its humble advertising beginnings. Osborne celebrated the bull’s 50th anniversary in 2006 and 2007 with Art Bulls for Charity, a campaign to raise funds for Share Our Strength’s fight against childhood hunger. Noted personalities with connections to Spain — visual and performing artists, chefs, actors, fashion designers, and the like, including actors Antonio Banderas and Angie Harmon and chefs Jacques Pépin and Ferran Adrià — decorated three-by-three-foot scale models of the Osborne bull for exhibition in New York, Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, and Washington, D.C. They were then auctioned online in conjunction with the 2007 Food Network South Beach Wine and Food Festival in Miami in late February.
Connecting the Osborne bull and the art world is hardly a stretch. Keith Haring, Javier Mariscal, Juan Gatti, and Luis Mayo, among others, have all paid homage to the bull in their work. In 1964, other prominent artists played an important part in creating the packaging for Osborne’s Conde de Osborne Solera Gran Reserva Brandy: Salvador Dalí was commissioned to design the bottle and label, glass artisans from the Catalan region were responsible for handblowing the prototype for the white glass decanter, and potter Antoni Cumella created the bottle’s indigo ceramic stopper. (The packaging is still in production, available as a limited-edition collector’s item.)
From an unadulterated commercial image to a universally adored national icon — the transformation seems improbable. But when you’re traveling through Spain, it’s hard to imagine a symbol better suited to represent the country and its people. When you’re standing in the Tejada workshop alongside the creators of the bull and hundreds of the familiar figures, it’s impossible to imagine any other people in any other place bringing them to life. It’s as if only from tradition can tradition be born.