The design equivalent of the Oscars came to a close yesterday, with BRP Design & Innovation Team winning the Red Dot Award: Design Team of the Year 2025. Over the years, the awards program has provided this very distinction to absolute industry legends like the Thule Design Team, the Logitech Team, Studio F. A. Porsche, Flavio Manzoni & Ferrari Design Team, as well as the Adidas Design Team, to name a few. Awarded annually since 1988, the ‘Team of the Year’ goes to studios and companies that consistently exhibit outstanding innovation, creativity, and exceptional design quality.
“This honorary title recognises a company’s overall design achievements and highlights the collaborative efforts of the design team. Awarded teams showcase a deep commitment to innovation, user-focused design, and sustainability principles,” says the Red Dot Award: Product Design. Yanko Design had the opportunity to interview Denys Lapointe, Chief Design Officer at BRP just moments after he collected the award on the Red Dot ceremonial podium. Here’s a look at what the most decorated design team of this year has been working on for the past few months.
Denys Lapointe – Chief Design Officer of BRP
Yanko Design: Many, many congratulations on winning Red Dot Design Team of the Year. I’m sure it’s a very proud moment for you and your entire team right now. If you had to describe how you feel in just three words at this very moment, what would they be?
Denys Lapointe: Excited, proud, and energized. It’s been years of work leading up to this, and it brings so much pride to the entire team. In fact, we have an internal survey that measures team sentiment, and after this announcement, our team score went up by four points. That shows how meaningful this recognition is for everyone.
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Yanko Design: That’s amazing. And of course, your Can-Am Maverick R MAX has secured a win this year as well. Tell me more about this project – what about it stands out to you?
Denys Lapointe: This product is designed for enthusiasts and is mostly used in widespread areas where there are lots of deserts or trails, like in Canada, the US, or even in the Middle East. It’s designed for enthusiasts. It’s like a Lamborghini for off-roaders – something very distinctive that stands out and uses form language that’s more on the aggressive side because of the nature of what it does. It provides a feeling of being able to ride something with 200 horsepower going through moguls about one meter in size. It’s a unique, fun experience for enthusiast-type individuals, like driving a sports car in the desert or on trails. It’s really for individuals seeking a high-thrilling feeling. It’s not necessarily for everybody, but it’s for those seeking this kind of thrill. It’s a great, powerful product. The engineering is amazing, and to see that it wins races everywhere it participates – including the Paris-Dakar rally – it’s great.
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Yanko Design: We have many young designers in our Yanko Design community who look up to leaders like you. Could you share a bit about your own journey with BRP and what initially drew you to mobility design?
Denys Lapointe: My father is, or was, a designer. So I followed in his footsteps. My father took me to my first F1 car race when I was two years old in Canada. I’ve been passionate about transportation for many years and decided to study design. I didn’t have the means to go to some of the top schools in the world, but nonetheless, I went back later in my career after designing several products. I went back to the more formal design schools, but to hire people. The nice thing is that today, my son is actually a third-generation designer. He went to RCA in London to finish his master’s degree in transportation mobility.
Yanko Design: Your company boasts 135 multicultural and multidisciplinary design experts coming together to make BRP what it is today. What role does diversity play in shaping the creativity and output of your design team?
Denys Lapointe: We encourage all our design managers to engage with schools worldwide to identify emerging talent. We even created our own design challenge involving eight international schools to find talent beyond traditional recruitment channels. For us, we believe that if you’re all from the same schools and you all have the same degree and you were all exposed to the same culture, you’re not bringing enough richness from the rest of the world. So we actually have 20 nationalities represented in our three design studios everywhere. I believe that the perspective that each individual brings from coming from all over the world is so different, which challenges us on a daily basis. Of course it brings its fair share of challenges – language being one of them – but it brings so much richness when people are coming with their toolbox, with their skill set, with their interpretation of opportunities.
We try to take in all this creativity, blending all of this together. I think it’s so much richer if you approach it this way. So we are very open to the world – for the world to come within one of our studios, based in the south of France, in the U.S., and in Canada. We’re very open to bringing all kinds of people coming from all over – cross-generations, cross-gender. We endorse these huge differences because it brings a lot of creativity and a lot of things that we wouldn’t have seen the same way with the same eyes looking at the same lens. Different perspectives are very important.
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Yanko Design: That resonates with us at Yanko Design too. We’re a small team spread globally, all working towards one goal: advocating for good design. How do you foster a culture of risk-taking and experimentation, especially in an industry with such high safety and reliability standards?
Denys Lapointe: One of the things that we’ve done at BRP that is quite different from other industries is that we realized that in a linear process, when you want to diverge, sometimes the risk stops at a certain point in the linear process. We realized that all the best ideas sometimes got tossed away because now we need to converge and eliminate risk beyond a certain point in order to bring products that are safe for people to use. So we decided to go the other way and we created what we call an advanced concept process, which enables us to diverge as much as we can and then start converging slowly, but validating with consumers at an early point of this divergence to validate if the concept resonates with people. So we’re a lot more risk-takers at that point because, first, we want to validate whether the consumers will really appreciate what we have in mind. And secondly, because we’re not in production, we can test in a very different manner. With this, if it resonates well with the consumer, then we put it in our regular stage-gate process, which is more linear, because we validated the risk. So it’s one way to avoid throwing all the best ideas away, but validating if those ideas would resonate with the consumer. It’s very important.
Yanko Design: That’s a smart approach. With new technologies emerging rapidly, what excites you most about the future of mobility design?
Denys Lapointe: Oh, there’s so much we can do. Unfortunately, I cannot share what we’re working on because it’s too exciting. But there’s a lot of good stuff, good things going in all kinds of directions that will be novel that we will introduce in the future. I’m very stimulated by what our teams are working on for the future, encompassing sometimes technology with new product architectures that will enable consumers to live totally new experiences that consumers don’t know about as of today. This process really is very stimulating to me. In fact, it’s going to be tough for me at some point to give up on this process because it’s actually what I like the most. It’s to start with a little white piece of paper and contribute in creating new industries like some of these products we see here today.
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Yanko Design: So, what advice would you like to give young designers hoping to break into the world of mobility and industrial design? What is that one piece of advice that you would like to give?
Denys Lapointe: Have faith in yourself. Continue to work hard. I think perseverance can do a lot. And don’t get despaired the first time you do something and you think your concept is not good enough. I remember doing my first car sketch when I was a kid and I threw it away because I thought it was bad. But ultimately I kept on working and getting to learn from others and going to school… I mean, creativity can come in all kinds of forms. You just need to find the skills and learn the tools to be able to express your creativity. So hopefully, if you don’t get discouraged at first, just push and move on, and at some point, things will become clearer.
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Yanko Design: Finally, what does “Adventure by Design” mean to you personally, and how do you hope it resonates with BRP’s global community?
Denys Lapointe: “Adventure by Design” is our motto. When our marketing folks actually brought up the idea at some point, I was touched by it at first, but it also represents a burden on all of us to create new adventures and create stimulating adventures so people are drawn by these communities that we’re creating all over the place, all over the world. Hopefully, it’s bringing the best out of our designers and our engineers and our marketers, and it’s stimulating to continue creating these new experiences. So “Adventure by Design” suits us, and I’m proud that our marketing folks have opted for this.
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Yanko Design: Thank you so much for your time today. It’s been truly inspiring speaking with you.
Denys Lapointe: Thank you, it was a pleasure.
The post “Lamborghini for off-roaders” designer BRP wins Red Dot Design Team of the Year 2025 first appeared on Yanko Design.