That’s all very well of course, but then there
was the timing of launching a major hardware brand just as the world was going into lockdown. To put it mildly it was not an ideal situation, as EPOS’ head of global gaming marketing Maja Sand-Grimnitz readily admits. Yet in spite of the darkness into which the world was soon plunged, the light offered by games and gaming provided something of a unique opportunity - to create a level of online awareness that could rival that of any in-store campaign. Two years on, it’s an opportunity that EPOS appears to have reaped the benefits of.
What were the challenges in trying to establish EPOS when you did? Maja Sand-Grimnitz: We saw that there was a space in the market for a quality brand that had even more focus on engineering and also a slightly different take of what audio can do for the gaming experience. We saw that there was an audience out there
who was using their lifestyle products for gaming, because maybe the existing traditional gaming brands didn’t quite match their needs anymore. So we believed there was room for a brand like ours in the market, but without kidding ourselves that it’s a competitive market with a demanding consumer. And then we launched just before the pandemic,
which gave us the time to get the brand out there before the world got consumed in all the craziness. For all the bad things that the pandemic brought, it did also bring a lot of people being at home engaging via gaming. We like to get people out into stores to touch
and feel our product, but it just hit a time when that wasn’t possible. Luckily, our audience is used to consuming information and media online. So we just had to focus on how we tell the story of what to expect from our products. In that sense we didn’t lose the opportunity to talk about our products and get them in front of the consumer.
There’s obviously been a lot of supply issues for hardware manufacturers. Have they impacted EPOS? Yeah. I don’t think any brand who’s in any kind of tech has gone without feeling the consequences of supply chain issues, be it on the transportation side or the chip supply side. So I think like any other company that has affected us a bit and we
July 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 43
“Who would have thought that suddenly the world would shut down and you couldn’t go to a store? That was really strange for us all”
have had to adjust timings of product launches and our focus.
Esports continued to be popular during the pandemic, but at the expense of in-person events. Did that affect your strategy in terms of sponsorships and the like? We didn’t have to change much because we play in the online space, primarily. But our partners had to adapt a lot, be it the teams or the tournaments. Suddenly they couldn’t gather their teams and had to put all the events online. So we had a lot of talks on how we could support that and how we could still make it exciting for the fans who didn’t get the opportunity to go out and experience the atmosphere. But I think the big benefit for gaming is that
it’s an industry that’s used to being innovative in the online space, so we went with our partners on adapting where needed. It was more about just staying in close dialogue with them and understanding what changes and challenges they met and how we then fit into that.
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