Rimowa
- The TED Conference is legendary for offering attendees high-quality free stuff.
- This year, attendees are getting a $550 piece of luggage from luxury brand Rimowa.
- Each piece of luggage comes with a special TED tag, as well as custom red straps on the inside.
The TED Conference is legendary for offering attendees - who pay anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000 to be at the weeklong annual event - plenty of high-quality free stuff.
In past years, attendees have had access to something called "The Gift Cave" - a room filled with all manner of free take-home products, including Lululemon bags, Allbirds sneakers, and Ring home security systems. Think of it as a normal conference swag bag taken to an unimaginably fancy level.
But this year, attendees are getting something a little different: a $550 piece of luggage from luxury brand Rimowa. The company is giving away 2,000 of its TED-branded polycarbonate Salsa suitcases to attendees.
Rimowa
On the first day of the conference, the bag was everywhere. Attendees rolled it past the TED bookstore, into the coffee bars, through buffets, and even took it inside the theater where the talks are held.
Rimowa is a 120-year-old brand recently acquired by LVMH, a luxury goods conglomerate. The brand is now in the process of adjusting its communications strategy.
"We had already been a leading manufacturer of luxury luggage. We'd put the emphasis on having a superior product, but when it comes to the communication part, we'd neglected it a little bit," Hector Muelas, the chief brand officer at Rimowa, told Business Insider.
Rimowa chose the Salsa suitcase for TED attendees because it was the first polycarbonate suitcase to hit the market when it was released in the early 2000s.
"We wanted to have something with a bit of the DNA of innovation in it," Muelas said.
Each piece of luggage comes with a special TED tag, as well as custom red straps on the inside of the suitcase. Considering how omnipresent the suitcase already is at the conference, it is clearly a piece of effective marketing.