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Bauer

Transforming the biggest name in hockey to lead in culture

  • Design
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  • Innovation
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  • Insight
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  • Strategy

The challenge

For decades Bauer Hockey has been an industry leader and a pioneer of innovative, technical hockey equipment. 

 

But to maintain leadership in an increasingly competitive market, Bauer needed to stand for something much bigger – and tap into the grit, grace, and community-oriented soul of hockey for a new generation of players.

 

Over a multi-year relationship, we helped Bauer show up more meaningfully in culture: with a purpose-led brand perspective, brand experience and approach to product marketing.

Decode

We discovered that across age and nationality, on or off the ice, the Bauer community deeply values the family-like bonds that hockey creates: when the team wins, we all win. We recognized the opportunity for Bauer to pull away from the category’s focus on maximizing individual performance – and be the brand that makes individuals feel part of something bigger. In close collaboration with Bauer leadership, we crafted a disruptive new emotional purpose and brand ethos: Give everything for the team.

We brought this new brand perspective to life across all key touchpoints, guided by a visual and verbal strategy that ensures Bauer always sits within a team context – whether you’re coming to the brand as a youth player or a pro.

With a fresh culture-forward strategy, Bauer was ready to unlock new growth in DTC. We applied our strategy to the transformation of Bauer.com, reorganizing the website to lead with team stories and recontextualizing product to highlight its role in creating team moments, not just tech and spec.

Recode

Following the successful repositioning of the brand, Bauer recognized an opportunity to further extend into culture by expanding its lifestyle apparel business.  We helped them craft a powerful positioning and tension-driven design strategy for a new lifestyle product range, leveraging the brand’s heritage in hockey and tapping into a growing hockey-core aesthetic. 

Our lifestyle apparel strategy was delivered along with a go-to-market blueprint spanning communications, partnerships, product design, distribution, and a five-year investment case for the Bauer board.

Transform

The transformation of Bauer to become a leader in culture has impacted every aspect of the brand ecosystem. Highlights include:  The “Everything for the Game” campaign which increased Bauer’s overall market performance and competitive share across every region. Partnership deals including Travis Mathew, Lululemon, Aetrex, and the PWHL enabled by Bauer’s strong market position. 

Since starting our partnership:
Category position maintained YOY #1
Increase in valuation 170%
Share of the hockey equipment market 50%
Mary-Kay Messier
Vice President of Marketing
Bauer Hockey
Working with TRIPTK has had an unbelievable impact on our organization, driving positive change for our brand, our culture and our business.
Together we set forth on a powerful course to define our brand as purposeful, consumer-centric and culturally relevant. 

TRIPTK is a true partner, fully invested from identification of the strategic challenge right through to implementation.”