Louis Moto is Europe’s largest company for motorcycle clothing and accessories. It carries a number of popular brands such as AGV, Cardo, HJC, and Kriega. The company also has its own in-house labels, occupying the value-for-money segment with affordable and stylish riding gear.
To add to the company’s growing list of brands, we helped Louis create a new positioning strategy, name and identity for Rekurv, a label catering to younger, sporty riders.
Rekurv is tailored to a younger generation of riders looking for the bare essentials when it comes to riding gear. As such, Rekurv’s apparel does away with the unnecessary details that tend to drive price up, and instead, focuses on a sporty fit, optimal protection, and maximum comfort. The result of this is minimalist, good-looking riding gear that’s extremely affordable. As Rekurv is the international mainstream brand for Louis, it had to appeal to a broad range of customers with high repeat purchases.
In collaboration with our friends at Opportunity Catalysts in Hamburg and the C-Suite of Louis, we developed a brand platform based around ‘The Joy of Speed’, appealing to their key audience’s love of the riding experience along with youthful dynamism and contemporaneity – straightforward, active and outgoing.
The name we created, Rekurv, nods to the taut power and tension of a recurve bow, while also being all about ‘the winding road’ – Re:Kurv.
The wordmark was deliberately created to be a ‘barcode’ to decipher – an arresting design that warrants further investigation – a discreet but powerful label.
Our brand world took inspiration from the road itself – an ever flexible, winding road that zags across each application. The flexibility of this asset makes it super simple to use boldly across any application.
The colour scheme throughout relies heavily on the classic red and black of motorcycle gear – Not a decision we entered into lightly, but after lengthy discussions with the ‘motor heads’ at Louis, we ultimately decided to go for it at full throttle and use the other elements to distinguish Rekurv.
We combined the graphics with simple, bold statements in Druk, from Commercial Type, to bring the strategy to life as well as creating a broader palette of assets for the in house designers to use. Druk was chosen for both its flexibility and boldness, alongside the more utilitarian and technical IBM Plex for contrast.
All assets we created were stress-tested not only for print and digital communications but more importantly for the apparel itself. From a zip detail to a decal to a mesh liner screenprint, the design had to work within the most robust tolerances.
Naming in a second (third) language for an ‘international’, coined name can be an interesting challenge linguistically. There’s always a potentially rude colloquialism lurking somewhere – so it always pays to be upfront about it! Luckily, Rekurv tested extremely positively amongst EU customers.