Cecilia Taieb on The Terramar and Cupra’s New Era

The inspiration is land and sea: we are in Barcelona and this is the city with land and sea, it was a big inspiration. We first launched the Cupra brand in Terramar, a place close to Sitges. We looked at the car and we said we need to call it Terramar. We are only 6 years old, but we feel with this car we are growing up as a brand. We are growing obviously in sales and that’s going really well but also mentally as a brand we are growing up. We were kids, a start-up. We’re still a start-up but growing up in the sense of where we are going with our client base so I think that this car which is an SUV is going to help us bring Cupra to a bigger audience.

It’s very important for us, racing is in our DNA: racing has always been a big part of what we are doing. We do ETCR, we are champions of ETCR, we’ve done extreme, we’ve done Formula-1 so we’ve always been in the world of racing. The America’s Cup starts thinking of coming to Barcelona and we always say we inspire the world from Barcelona so when they came we’re not gonna be sponsors or supporting one team, we’re gonna support the whole organisation because it’s in our hometown and they’re gonna inspire the world from Barcelona just as we do. Anything that comes to Barcelona that wants to spread the word outside, we’re always going to support. So racing, Barcelona, there was a natural connection and also the fact their motto is “There is no second”, this is exactly how we feel as brand. There is actually no second, we’re always gonna be first and we’re always gonna win.

One of the main messages, and also why I think the brand has been successful so far, is because people make the brand. We’re all authentic, we’re our own way. Nobody’s telling me how I need to dress, how I need to speak, how I need to present and every one of us is like that and I think people have connected to this authenticity. And that’s why the tribe is growing and growing, and we have more and more followers and you know people that think alike. We want to inspire the new generation, the next generation, and I think by doing this type of event and also everything that we are supporting – Primavera Sound, America’s Cup, the Barcelona Football Club – make the tribe bigger and bigger because they feel like they can identify with it. We always say we want to attract a tribe that doesn’t want to drive what their grandparents or their parents used to drive, they don’t want to drive a car for status but because they like the design and what it represents and because it’s different and I think this is the whole part of how you are attracting a bigger and bigger. The new generations don’t fall for marketing and they want something different and I think that’s where we come in with a response.

Cupra Design House was born a few months ago and what we’ve basically decided is Cupra needs to be more than a car brand because that’s how it’s been for the past 6 years, and we’ve grown to be more than a car brand so like what can we do? First of all, we have all our own Cupra clothing collection that were gonna grow and grow – we have t-shirts and bikinis and things you can wear on a day-to-day basis. With the America’s Cup, we created a special collection and you can see that the logo’s not huge, but there’s the motto ‘No Second’ which is so dear to us. Then we have a second pillar to our Cupra Design House which is going to be key partnerships with designers but also companies that think alike and we want to do things together. I cannot announce the next partnership yet but it’s something that’s going to come soon. And the third one is Cupra Beyond. Sometimes we have companies coming saying will you design our nightclub, or can you design a whole floor of a hotel with a Cupra feel. So, there’s been some discussions and since people are coming to us, we said why don’t we create Cupra Beyond? How do we fuse our identity somewhere else or collaborate or maybe imagine a piece of furniture or something. To us, the sky is the limit. We don’t know how it’s gonna go, we wanna try because there’s been demands so let’s see where it takes us.