HellRaisers announces Mazda deal and Yana "b2ru" Khimchenko

Yesterday HellRaisers Esports and Mazda announced a new deal between the companies. HellRaisers celebrated the collaboration with a short and bright video that spread across social networks at RX-7 speed.

WePlay could not ignore such an announcement and asked Tatiana Kuzmenko, HellRaisers Business Development Director, about future plans. Spoiler alert: The future is coming soon.

Collaborating with such a large brand is serious, congratulations. How did it happen? Did you get their attention, or did Mazda come up with a deal?

Thank you. We are very proud of this partnership and are ready to create cool projects together. It was our initiative, but I knew that the brand was interested in esports. It was only necessary to find common ground. I myself once worked for three years in a car-importer company, so this market is close and interesting to me. And I have been working in esports for 5 years, previously heading NAVI's Marketing and Partnerships. Thanks to this experience, it was not difficult to establish communication and agree on a partnership.

How long do you plan to cooperate?

Now is a difficult time and many brands think for months, not years as before. It is difficult to think ahead. So far, we have planned projects before the end of the year. We are confident that these projects will found long-term cooperation.

In your official commentary, you said that HR is planning more than just the Mazda logo on T-shirts. How soon will HellRaisers fans see the fruits of your cooperation?

Now there is no time for buildup, so we act as quickly as possible. We have a very ambitious team, everyone is passionate about the project. In fact, in two weeks we agreed on a partnership, made a cool video for the announcement, prepared a press release and all media materials, and already shot the first video with the MX-5 roadster. While you are reading the announcement about the partnership, the guys are finishing editing the first video, we plan to release it just the other day. Until the end of the year, you will see a lot of video content with other Mazda models.

Is there a special line of merchandise planned for this, or maybe especially successful players will be rewarded with keys to a brand new car?

At the moment, we are in the process of developing a line of new merch. After rebranding, we have many interesting ideas and plans in this direction. These are various collaborations with designers and well-known clothing brands. But this is a long-term project that takes a lot of time. Therefore, with Mazda, we did not focus on merch but instead focused on video content. But it is possible that we will come up with something because we are very flexible and open to bold decisions.

It seems to me that only the lazy one did not notice how similar the logos of your brands are. Is this pure coincidence, or is there an idea in such a step?

It seems to me that before contacting the brand representatives, I already had the idea of ​​a video for the announcement in my head. After all, this is the perfect logo match to use. So I would say it was a coincidence that turned into a cool idea.

Who did the promotional video for the collab? It is very stylish.

I just voiced some of my ideas, and the guys from Production developed and turned them into a stylish video. Everyone did their bit, the whole team worked on the video.

And today HellRaisers also have presented Yana "b2ru" Khimchenko as the club's content producer.

Yana was famous for working at NAVI for five years, but they've parted ways just a couple of days before. Well, we'll have a lot of content to see in the future!