I was fifteen, I didn't want to dress like everyone else, so I drew a sheep and put it on a t-shirt.
Xai means sheep in Catalan.
I got into bikes around fourteen. Dirt jumping came shortly after — it was the cheap way into a sport that isn't cheap, and there was a scene growing right around me. XAI started a year or two later, in high school, and it had nothing to do with bikes at first. I was a teenager working out who I was, and I didn't want to look like everybody else. So I made my own shirts.
The sheep was just a drawing I liked.
The first batch was awful. Bad blanks, bad print — I was so embarrassed by them I didn't want to sell them. The ones that did go out are still around: some being worn more than twenty years later, some kept as collector's pieces. Terrible craft, real connection. I've never quite got over that.
My grandma paid for that batch.
Over the next six years I did the illustration, the graphic design, the web and e-commerce, the garment manufacturing and screen printing, the shipping, and the events. I didn't know how to do any of it. I learned as I went.
I got into punk and hardcore after XAI already existed, and the sheep suddenly meant something I hadn't intended. A sheep is the symbol of the herd — of doing what everyone else does. Mine was the one out of step. Fora del ramat.
I didn't design that meaning. It caught up with what I'd meant at fifteen and couldn't have explained.
Once the meaning arrived, it went on a shirt. The friendly sheep got redrawn as a skull and set inside a collegiate arch — the same shape hardcore had been using for years.
The identity ran on that tension from then on: a soft, wobbly, hand-drawn mark against scrawled brush lettering. It was never art-directed into existence. It just ended up looking like what it was.
The sheep changed a little over the years, but it stayed the same sheep.
I stopped eating meat around 2009. A brand named after a sheep printing MEAT IS MURDER wasn't something I was going to pass up.
It was a joke and it wasn't. The shirt said it so I didn't have to.
That's Thomas Lemoine and Anthony Villoni wearing it, which still makes me laugh.
A drawing is the easy part. The rest of it is stock, sizes, bags, tags, stamps, envelopes and the post office.
I had a rubber stamp cut of the sheep and used it on the paper the orders were wrapped in. Every parcel went out stamped, and addressed by hand. If you bought a shirt, what arrived had been touched at every stage by the person who drew the thing on it.
Nobody taught me any of this. Each piece turned up as the next thing standing in the way.
XAI was never a sponsored team. It was friends, from all over Spain, from whatever they happened to ride — surfing, BMX, dirt jump, snowboarding, skate. Hector Saura, Marc Garriga, Carlos Langelaan, Alejandro Viña, Gemma Corbera. Along the way we met people like Anthony Villoni and Thomas Lemoine, who ended up in the photos too.
Gemma turns up all over these pictures. Sick rider, good friend — both then, both still.
One of the shirts was just XCRW — XAI Crew. That's what it actually felt like, so that's what it said.
Once the mark existed it went everywhere it could fit — stickers on bikes and helmets and car windows, banners for events, the van, even the desktop wallpaper. None of it was a brand guideline. It was just the same sheep, applied by whoever had a sticker.
Dirt jump events we sponsored and sometimes organised ourselves, jump exhibitions at night parties, market stalls wherever people gathered. Whatever gave people a reason to turn up.
[Event name and year to confirm] had a proper photocall backdrop with the sponsors on it — which, for a brand run out of a bedroom, still feels funny to look at.
In 2012 I opened a store in Barcelona, in the basement of a skate shop called Backside BCN. A sheep brand opening a farm was too good to pass up, so that's what it was called.
We built it ourselves down there, with a mini ramp inside to skate on, with some of the best friends you can get. Without them the brand would have died before it started.
Then we filled it: concerts in the shop, dirt jump events we sponsored and sometimes organised ourselves, jump exhibitions at night parties. Whatever gave people a reason to turn up.
I built and ran the online store myself, back when running e-commerce meant learning it from nothing — product pages, sizes, stock, the lot.
Pre-sales regularly sold out.
It lived at xaiclothing.es.
Most of XAI happened before social media. The years I can still show are the last ones, roughly 2010 to 2012, because that's when photos started living somewhere other than a hard drive.
The first five years are mostly gone — in people's drawers, in boxes, in memory. Which is a strange thing to say about work that reached as many people as it did.
The sheep survived, though. I still have the original file.
