JUNO TALKS with Moritz Maier
How will Alpina return to pop culture? With Moritz Maier, Head of Marketing for the Uvex Sports and Alpina brands, we discuss the art of rejuvenating a brand without losing loyal customers.
When we attended Eurobike this year, we noticed quite a difference in how your brands Uvex and Alpina were presented. We wanted to ask you about that.
What made you curious?
Uvex came across to us as a clear, contemporary, and cohesive brand – almost Porsche-like, German, and techy. Everything seems to revolve around performance. With Alpina, we had expected a crazy, lifestyle-focused brand presence. We were familiar with Alpina’s bold advertising from the ’80s, which sometimes felt like Italo-disco, and the way the brand describes itself on its website – as wild, free-spirited, and super creative. At the trade show, however, we experienced the brand as primarily a sports brand.
At its core, we are a sports brand, and our sales channels have evolved accordingly over the years. We’re primarily present in sports and cycling retail, where we’ve established strong and reliable partnerships and built broad distribution. The Eurobike itself is also more of a sports trade fair. Playing up Alpina too strongly as a lifestyle brand there wouldn’t have been the right venue. But you’re right – Alpina is also about lifestyle. We’re currently expressing this side of the brand more through digital platforms and the topic of eyewear.
Eyewear is where Alpina started, after all.
Yes. The Uvex brand was founded in the ’50s as a performance and occupational safety brand. To address the growing lifestyle sports eyewear market, Alpina was established in 1980 as a second brand under the Uvex Group. Over time, Alpina’s fashionable image became somewhat diluted, and the brand expanded significantly, especially around the year 2000. That was good and important for economic success and laid the foundation for our current market positioning. But in the process, we forgot to maintain our brand profile.