Rimowa Design Prize for 2025 Awarded in Berlin

This year’s top award in the Rimowa Design Prize, with a prize pool worth a total of 55,000 euros, went to the student design project, “hottie.” The creation helps resolve period pain via a combination of electrical nerve stimulation and heat therapy, all in a wearable device you put on under your clothes.

The creatives responsible, German design students Marc Hackländer and Elisabeth Lorenz, were feted in Berlin on Tuesday evening, as local design fans gathered in the glass-roofed atrium of the Gropius Bau, one of Berlin’s best known historical buildings.

It makes a lot of sense to host the prize here, Jenny Schlenzka, director of the Gropius Bau, told the well-heeled, mostly black-clad, cocktail-sipping audience. The grand exhibition space and cultural center was first built in 1881 as a museum to celebrate the applied arts, she explained.

The Rimowa Design prize, in its third iteration this year, does much the same. The ceremony this week was the culmination of a process that took around five months. Entries were received from 39 universities and design schools around the country, then were eventually whittled down to just seven finalists by a special jury of local designers.

The jury included Moritz Krueger, creative director of boutique eyewear brand Mykita; Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, senior curator at the Museum of Applied Art in Frankfurt on Main, and architect Niklas Bildstein Zaar, among others. Rimowa chief executive officer Hugues Bonnet-Masimbert and Rimowa chairman Alexandre Arnault are honorary jury members.

The seven finalists then received mentoring from jury members on how to advance their ideas.

“This [the Rimowa prize] is a testament to the importance of German design,” Bonnet-Masimbert told the audience. And, he added, “this is more than just an award, it’s a celebration of how design can elevate the world around us.”

The third edition has drawn even more entries and “the prize is making a significant contribution to the design community,” Bonnet-Masimbert told WWD. 

The theme for the prize was, as always, mobility. The designers interpreted that in a wide variety of ways, some occasionally surprising. Projects included a lightweight aluminum and carbon fiber trolley, a wearable device to help people suffering dementia get home safely (among other kinds of assistance), an air purity measuring device you could wear like a necklace, a modular system of benches for urban spaces and a clever, contemporary version of the traditional crutch.

The special mention award, worth 10,000 euros, went to the latter, designed by students Tom Kemter and Niels Cremer. All the other finalists got 5,000 euros. But it was the “hottie” designers who walked away with 20,000 euros.

“We are just a little overwhelmed,” Hackländer said, onstage after the announcement was made.

“It was a one-of-a-kind experience,” Lorenz added.

“They were very clear on what the problem was they wanted to solve and had a clear perspective on how it could go forward,” explained the pair’s mentor Nic Galway on what made “hottie” stand out. Galway is senior vice president, creative direction at German sportswear brand Adidas.

It was also an inspiring process for us, Galway admitted. The young designers were invited to visit Adidas’s own studios and did so several times. “We got a lot out of it too,” Galway told WWD. “It was refreshing.”