Gucci Racing's F1 Experiment

F1 meets fashion. Fashion meets F1.

Last week, Gucci broke the internet by becoming the first luxury fashion house to serve as a title partner for an F1 racing team. 

Starting with the 2027 FIA Formula One World Championship, BWT Alpine Formula One Team will begin a new reign as the “Gucci Racing Alpine Formula One Team”, with its car draped in Gucci colors – reportedly black and gold, with a touch of blue as a nod to Alpine.

The 3-year, ~$150M title partnership is more than meets the eye for a traditional sports partnership.

It’s not just a logo on a car but an introduction into a new product line. 

Gucci Racing is the iconic brand’s new business and experiential platform built around the “values of performance, precision, discipline, and excellence at the intersection of luxury and sport.”

So we’ve been asking ourselves all week: 

What does this partnership really mean?

A cold, hard truth about Gucci to help paint the picture: 

Gucci’s brand has been in decline for the last few years. Revenue fell 14.3% year-over-year in Q1 2026 – its 12th consecutive quarter of decline. Gucci’s holdco, Kering, has suffered a 68.5% share price decline over the past five years. And while Gucci’s brand awareness remains at the top, Kering management has recognized that brand desirability has fallen from #1 to #5.

Despite all the turmoil, this partnership may be one of the boldest – and potentially most fruitful – marketing moves either brand has ever made.

With Kering’s new CEO Luca de Meo, his bold “ReconKering” plan to revive the business, and fashion’s broader desire to integrate with sport…

This partnership may just be a match made in heaven.

On June 16th, 2025, Gucci made the bold decision to hire Luca de Meo as their new CEO, who was formerly the CEO of the Renault Group. 

Yes, the holdco of Alpine F1.

The core issue he’d identified with the brand can be summed up by a quote of his:

That is the Gucci problem in one sentence.

The brand has been suffering from a desirability gap. 

For years, Gucci over-indexed on accessibility. It rapidly expanded its product lines, widened its retail footprint, and leaned heavily into aspirational younger customers. At one point, 55% of Gucci’s sales came from audiences under the age of 35. 

That worked when the luxury market was hot. 

But when the personal luxury goods market flipped – dropping from 400M to 350M customers globally from 2022 to 2024 – Gucci’s core Gen Z and Millennial customers began trading down into more affordable, boutique labels instead.

At the same time, high-end clients felt the brand had become too accessible, so they moved elsewhere.

Luca de Meo’s turnaround strategy, which was laid out in Kering’s recent capital markets day presentation, is built around a few clear ideas: reduce the retail footprint, refocus on iconic products, and bring Gucci back upmarket. 

But the core theme is even simpler: “bring Gucci back to cultural relevance.”

Something that sports can bring.

Two to three years ago, this was not as obvious.

But luxury fashion’s integration with sports has quickly become one of the most important marketing tools for both sports properties and fashion houses.

A good friend of ours – David Bettenhausen, CEO of Fashion Meets Football – put it perfectly: 

Premier athletes have become a new aspiration layer.

They have cultural relevance, global reach, and built-in storytelling. That makes them perfect vehicles for luxury fashion brands trying to extend beyond traditional campaigns.

But the playbook has evolved.

Luxury brands are now moving into team and league partnerships, using sports properties themselves – from European football to F1 – as premium, global distribution channels. 

Sports teams and leagues already carry the exact traits luxury brands want: aspiration, legacy, scarcity, cultural weight, emotion, and high-value fanbases.

Kering’s biggest competitor, LVMH, has already championed this idea. Just look at the last two to three years alone: 

LVMH has embedded itself across global sports through bespoke partnerships, major event sponsorships, and athlete-led storytelling. Gucci, meanwhile, has run a few strong athlete campaigns, but has never reached the same level of sports integration.

That’s what makes Gucci Racing so important. It’s Gucci’s first real attempt to catch up, with a few more innovative spins in the mix.

By buying into F1, Gucci is buying into one of the fastest-growing marketing vessels in the world. The league has built a 1.5B-person global audience that directly captures the demographic Gucci once owned:

And because of Luca de Meo’s history with Renault and Alpine, Gucci has the opportunity to place an asymmetric bet that no one else can. While most teams are tied in long-term sponsorship contracts, with strong ties to Renault ownership and management, Luca can stretch his sponsorship dollars further than a typical F1 title partner – think the traditional tech sponsors like Oracle w/ Red Bull and HP showing up on Ferrari.

Yes, we expect the standard logo placements.

But there are three deeper integrations we think Gucci Racing can use to turn Alpine into a living, breathing extension of the brand:

One of the biggest impacts of Netflix’s Drive to Survive is that it turned the F1 drivers into characters.

That’s the perfect canvas for Gucci’s new creative lead Demna Gvasalia. 

We expect Alpine drivers Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto’s new exclusive Gucci Racing gear and styling to be an emphasized storyline in the coming seasons, giving the viewers an immediate taste of the new Gucci rebrand.

It’s their new billboard that will scream exclusivity – a bespoke Gucci product that only Alpine’s drivers get to stunt.

A crucial part of Luca de Meo’s turnaround plan is refocusing Gucci on its VICs (or Very Important Clients) through an experiential platform.

The Paddock Club provides the perfect infrastructure to do that. It can become a scalable, ultra-exclusive activation site for Gucci across the most important cultural territories in the world that Kering’s management has targeted: Las Vegas, Miami, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi.

There’s serious potential in dressing models, celebrities, athletes, and investors in new Gucci designs, wielding direct influence over new customers and existing high-end clients. Along with their “urban & destination-based luxury centers”, the Paddock Club could become the scalable piece that can rebuild desirability in a more intimate way than before.

The final layer is wellness.  

Sport is the pinnacle of elite performance, recovery, and longevity. Through Kering Next, management has identified longevity and wellness as a major future category, built around the idea of “living longer, aging better as the ultimate luxury need”.

While they haven’t shared much more details on what this product line will actually look like, our imagination has led us to a few ideas:

It’ll be fun to see how Gucci clashes with LVMH’s own F1 partnership. 

But as a title sponsor with a new Gucci Racing platform, we think this partnership has the potential to go much further.

LVMH has the broader league-level platform. Gucci has something different given its creative influence over the team, the infrastructure, and the cultural IP it holds.

That can give Gucci real elasticity over the next three years.

It’s the perfect sandbox to test products, content, experiences, wellness, and scarcity with an elite audience, all while using F1’s platform as the premium cultural engine to make Gucci feel desirable again.

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Now - here are some cool roles we found and personally curated this week. Enjoy!

1. Serena Ventures (Serena Williams’ Venture Fund) - Investor

2. Goldman Sachs - Vice President, Capital Solutions Sports: $300K

3. UC Berkeley - CFO, Intercollegiate Athletics: $265K

4. Universal Music Group - Investment Team or Operations + Strategy

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6. Andreessen Horowitz - Chief of Staff

7. Union Square Ventures - Investor

8. Clear - Director, Sports & Experiential Partnerships: $210K

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10. NBA - Experiential Business Lead: $190K