The establishment is located at 62 Huertas Street in Madrid (Spain)

Flamenco-world.com, December 2004

From the Net to the streets. www.flamenco-world.com opens its first store in response to the demand of the thousands of customers and readers who have backed the leading flamenco website on the Internet over the past eight years. The establishment is located at 62 Huertas Street in Madrid (Spain), in the new cultural hub of the Spanish capital. The project's directors are aiming to “create a point of circulation open both to enthusiasts and the curious, with room for other activities encouraging contact between artists and the public”. The store shelves in two rooms top-quality flamenco products which are also in the online catalogue: CDs, DVDs, shoes, guitars, box drums, skirts... And all of it presented in a place painstakingly designed, since “we want to transmit that modern, elegant image of flamenco which artists like Paco de Lucía have worked on”.

After eight years leading the spread of information, the sale of products and providing flamenco services on the Net, Flamenco-world.com is undertaking a new phase focusing on “the tangible”. The website is now mirrored by Flamenco-world.com's first shop, located at 62 Huertas Street in Madrid (Spain). “We want to cater to the demanding enthusiast, but also to the tourist and the curious seeking a place representative of that part of Spanish culture which is flamenco, presented enticingly and seriously, as heritage of the people and not just of sybarites”.

And in order to do so, not a single detail has been left out, from the shop's location to its decoration. The store is located in the heart of the so-called "Letters Quarter", between the Prado Museum and Plaza de Santa Ana, a cultural hub where Madrid's flamenco activity has historically been concentrated: “Here there are old singing cafés, joints for young flamencos, tapa bars, academies and tablaos”. Joining this route is the Flamenco-world.com store, whose decoration project opts for elegance, clean-cut lines and some flamenco touch or another, with the color red, metal and wood as its distinguishing features. The products are shelved in two rooms. The first one is a welcoming area where at first sight, you can find the latest in CDs and DVDs, box drums, shoes, shawls, accessories, books, postcards... The second room displays specialized products for baile and guitar, as well as the entire record archives classified in alphabetical order and by style.

The first Flamenco-world.com store is included within a more extensive enterprise which, in the mid-term, will focus on self production and the development of a franchise chain. The company's directors have “confirmed through the website that there is interest in flamenco all over the world. And cities like New York, London, Paris and Tokyo have a large enough following so as to host this establishment, which at the same time operates as an ‘embassy’ of Spanish culture, just like other cultures proudly display themselves such as those of Africa and Asia”.

Flamenco-world.com originated in Madrid (Spain) in 1997. The website, which is published daily in Spanish, English and Japanese, has registered growing development in visits, customers, subscriptions and turnover, revalidating its leadership on the Internet year after year. By 2004, it has over a million and a half visits monthly, twenty-five thousand customers and sixty thousand subscriptions of enthusiasts, professionals and institutions from all over the world, with a special following in the United States, Europe, Taiwan and Japan.

magazine@flamenco-world.com