Building a team’s power of attraction
- The team
- FDJ UNITED - SUEZ
- The starting point
- 2022
- The work
- Strategy
Narrative
Brand
Development - The journey
- An ambition built season after season
From 2022, work began on the brand, communications and their connection to FDJ-SUEZ’s commercial development. The aim: to give the project an identity, a presence and a power of attraction that matched its sporting ambition.
This study traces that work through to the international partnerships and major sporting milestones of 2025 and 2026.
© Some of the work presented was carried out by Marius Brosse during his tenure as Marketing and Communications Director at FDJ UNITED - SUEZ, as part of a collective effort with the team’s management, staff and creative partners.
2022. The starting point
FDJ-SUEZ already had a history, a collective culture and a strong ambition. Under Stephen Delcourt’s leadership, the team wanted to take the next step.
Taking over brand and communications was part of that ambition. The team’s image needed greater consistency, its distinctiveness needed to emerge, and its presence needed to connect more closely with the project’s development.
The work involved several dimensions: how to tell the team’s story, the quality of its content, its proposition to partners and the organisation needed to make it all work.
The starting conviction: invest in the project’s power of attraction before its greatest victories would come to affirm it.
From 2022. Building, then sustaining high standards
Giving the team a recognisable identity
Photography, films, portraits and launches became essential points of contact with the brand.
The creative direction drew on cinema, fashion and major sports to develop an expression of FDJ-SUEZ’s own. Light, framing, faces and details mattered. That standard had to carry through everyday content as well as major announcements.
Season after season, this consistency made the project more recognisable. A fan could identify the team. A partner could imagine the place their brand might occupy within it.
The ambition became visible before it was even presented.
The narrative grew from close contact with the riders and staff.
The preparation. The personalities. The gestures of support. The tension before the start. What was said at the finish.
That proximity revealed what the results rarely tell: the relationships between people, the daily commitment and the emotions that run through a season.
The difficult days were part of the story too. Continuing to tell it when victory was out of reach gave the collective its full place and sustained the relationship with fans.
The aim was to give people reasons to return to the team, race after race.
Connecting the brand to commercial development
Work with partners could gradually draw on a tangible proposition: an identity, quality content, a culture and a vision for development.
Presentations connected brands’ objectives to what the team could offer them. Athletes and stories. A way of telling the story of sport. Opportunities to create together. An ambition to support.
The work itself gave substance to those conversations. A partner could see how their brand would be represented and how the relationship could come to life.
Organising for continuity
Sustaining this standard meant bringing creative work, communications, commercial development and the people on the ground together.
The work also involved coordination: sharing information, clarifying responsibilities and organising production around the sporting calendar.
As the project grew, the organisation needed to handle more content, partners and demands while preserving the coherence of the whole.
Late 2024–2025. The project takes a major step forward
Following the work begun in 2022, several announcements made the change of scale particularly visible.
Demi Vollering joins the team for the 2025 season.
Announced in October 2024, her arrival marked a major milestone for the sporting project. The champion highlighted FDJ-SUEZ’s collective spirit and attacking mentality. The announcement of her arrival.
Specialized becomes a partner from 2025.
Announced in December 2024, the agreement brought the team the brand’s equipment and technical support. Discover the partnership.
Nike joins the project in January 2025.
As the official supplier of lifestyle apparel, Nike supported the presence of the team and its staff beyond competition. Discover the partnership.
These milestones were part of the collective development led by the team’s management, alongside its long-standing partners and sporting staff. The brand work helped make that ambition clear and gave this new scale a coherent expression.
On the road, the 2025 season also marked a turning point: Demi Vollering won the Vuelta Femenina, the first Grand Tour in the team’s history. FDJ UNITED-SUEZ finished the season at the top of the UCI team ranking, with 23 victories. The team’s season review.
August 2026. A new chapter with Red Bull
On 1 August 2026, at the start of the Tour de France Femmes, Red Bull became a major partner of FDJ UNITED-SUEZ.
The collaboration opened new creative possibilities and access to Red Bull’s performance expertise, including the Red Bull Athlete Performance Center. Discover the partnership.
The launch featured an announcement film, photography and behind-the-scenes coverage of the shoot. The helmets, the athletes and the meeting of the two worlds gave this new chapter an immediately visible form.
2026. The Tour de France as a collective achievement
A few days after the Red Bull partnership announcement, Demi Vollering won the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in FDJ UNITED-SUEZ colours. A first for the team. The story of the victory.
This victory belongs to the riders, the sporting staff and everyone who has supported the project since its beginnings.
The contribution presented in this study lies in the work undertaken since 2022 around the brand, content, partnerships and their coordination.
Expanding what the team can draw on to go further.
Building over time
This work across several seasons illustrates a common principle: strategy, narrative, brand, commercial development and organisation reach their full strength when they move forward together.
An identity gives content coherence. Content makes the project tangible. Partnerships open possibilities. Organisation makes it possible to realise them.
This continuity helps the project grow while keeping what people see connected to what is being built.
The aim is to connect ambition with execution, then give the teams the means to keep moving forward over time.
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