67,600 spectators enjoyed three days of wonderful World Cup races in Wengen on the weekend of January 18-20. Never before have there been so many. It wasn’t just the festive atmosphere and the racing that delighted visitors, the newly launched first official Pandinavia merchandising collection also made fans’ hearts beat faster!
The Lauberhorn races are among the classics of the Alpine Ski World Cup and today consist of a downhill, a slalom and a combination. They have been held annually in Wengen in the Bernese Oberland since 1930. The flagship of the races is the Lauberhorn downhill run, which is around 4.5 km long and the longest in the world with times of around 2:30 minutes!
Winter hats and winter sweaters for cold days!
Not surprisingly, the organizers also wanted to dedicate a contemporary merchandising collection to the legendary races this year and approached Pandinavia with this in mind. “It was a super cool challenge to develop a suitable collection for this traditional event, which is unique in Switzerland,” says Reto Lauper, project manager at Pandinavia. “Every merchandising project is different, every collection has to be specifically tailored to the respective event,” adds Sue Spiess, Head of the Textiles Department at Pandinavia and creative head of the “Lauberhorn Collection” operation. “This is the only way to ensure that the collection is well-received and not perceived as a dozen items. When creating the items, it was therefore important to us to reflect the needs of ski fans and also to express the local connection of the items to the occasion. So we matched the basic colors of the textiles to the colors of the Wengern coat of arms and supplemented them with fashionable, up-to-date contrasts,” says Spiess. She and project manager Lauper were not deterred from selling their own collection to fans in the sales tent on the Wengeneralp (1874 m) together with the project team, despite temperatures as low as a biting minus 14° C. In the village itself, a vacant bakery was quickly converted into a merchandising store due to a lack of space, which was met with amazement by long-time fans. Instead of the traditional Berliners, there were trendy beanie caps and cool shirts and jackets! In the end, everyone was happy: the fans, who loved the collection and were now able to take home high-quality souvenirs from their favorite event for the first time, the OC, whose concern was to have found a professional merchandising partner, and the Pandinavia team, who were happy about a considerable turnover and were able to go home totally frozen but happy. The partnership with the Lauberhorn races, which will be celebrating their 90th anniversary next year, will run for three years and the project team is full of ideas for the upcoming collection.
