Thule receives a Red Dot Award: Product Design 2011

The well known Swedish active lifestyle brand Thule has been awarded the famous Red Dot Award; one of the design world's most prestigious awards, for best product design for its roof rack Thule SlideBar. The SlideBar is awarded for its innovative and groundbreaking ways it simplifies heavy and cumbersome loading to a car’s roof rack.

Thule SlideBar is a roof rack, but in order to facilitate the placement of bulky and heavy loads, the railing on both sides of the car can be pulled out in a new and groundbreaking way. The now award-winning product was first shown at the world's largest trade fair for car accessories, Automechanika in Frankfurt, in September 2010.

The Red Dot Award is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of design and has awarded innovative design since 1955. It is handed out by German institute Design Zentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen.

This is the first time in Thule’s nearly 70-year history that the company receives the prestigious Red Dot Award.

”Thule has always been synonymous with quality, design, function and innovation, so it feels great that we are now being awarded for the excellent engineering efforts we put in to all of our products. Getting a Red Dot Award symbolizes and is a token of our hard work,” said Greger Juhlin, VP Product Development at Thule.

The Red Dot Design Award is divided into the following three categories: Product Design, Communication Design, and Design Concept. With more than 14,000 annual submissions from more than 70 nations it is now the largest and considered the most prestigious design competition in the world. In this year’s Product Design category, Red Dot received 4,433 nominations. Thule was elected as one of the winners together with the likes such as BMW, Boeing and Kia Motors.

For more information about the Red Dot Award, please visit http://en.red-dot.org/