Big events like this month’s StarLadder Budapest Major 2025 are never easy to host. You need venue scouting, city permissions and contracts, marketing, sponsorships and partnerships, lots of broadcasting partners, and much, much more.
Partnerships and sponsorships are one of the ways of alleviating the burden placed on a single company. When you have a company provide catering, another one for PCs and peripherals, and a different one altogether for desks and chairs. The latter is exactly what Blacklyte, a relatively new company on the market, provides.
They’ve taken over the space quite quickly, for being just two years old, and the companies and teams they partner with have lots of good things to say already.
At StarLadder Budapest Major 2025, I came across their joint booth with Team Liquid, where they were showcasing their Athena Pro chairs and Atlas desks, hosting 2v2 matches, and giving out prizes.
There, Team Liquid’s Business Developer Menno Wielhouwer, and Blacklyte’s Event and Partnerships Manager Ben Kupka. Seeing them hosting a booth together, my immediate question was about how this partnership came to be.
“It actually started in a very random sense,” said Ben Kupka. “Our CEOs basically stumbled across each other at an event and started talking, and then that conversation led to it being placed into my hands to further the discussion. From there, we got it done by the Austin Major.”
I was curious if any of the Team Liquid players have already had any input on the products, or if it was planned to all. Ben confirmed that it was: “Yes, we’re definitely planning it. We’ve started working on it, but as production goes, it will take its time. But once we have the product finished, we’re about to show it to the world.”
With this deal being done in such a short time, I turned to Menno Weilhouwer and asked about Team Liquid’s approach to partnerships in general, and what value the company brings to the table for them to partner with it.
Menno replied, “In general, at Team Liquid, we take partnerships very seriously, so we want to make sure that any product or brand that we partner with is something we actually want to share with our audience. We stand for a certain quality in our players, in our games, in our content, and in anything that we do, so we look for partners that match or exceed that same level of quality. It was the same with Blacklight as well.”
Having seen Tem Liquid push partnerships to the forefront, like with Honda and their League of Legends team, I asked if this was possible with Blacklyte as well.
Menno replied: ”I think the Blacklight partnership is already starting off with elements from a lot of the partnership capabilities. And yeah, I would say there’s definitely more to what’s possible. Maybe that’s a conversation for the future.”
After seeing Blacklyte desks and chairs used on stage at this Major, I looked for confirmation that those are the same products that the regular customers could purchase.
Ben said, “Of course, yeah. That’s why we do it. We want to show off the quality and the durability of our products. One of my favorite moments was right after the famous clip of Niko punching a hole in the table. It was when we signed a deal with Blast. We wanted to jump on that right away and say, ‘You can’t damage our tables like that.’ Stuff like that was just a cool opportunity.
And so, that’s what we get out of partnerships with these organizations: fun events, memes, and everything like that. But then we have to do activations, be there, hang out with the players and the communities, and show off our products.”
With the year coming to a close, I asked about any future plans for the next year that the company could share. Ben’s answer was unsurprising: “Oh, we’re always doing new stuff. Basically, we’re always looking to do collabs. We will try to be at every major we can possibly be at. And we love Counter-Strike, but at the same time, we’re trying to do as many games as we can.
We’ve been at the Rocket League World Championships recently, and we’re looking to do some more stuff with Epic. So, we’re very excited. Stay tuned for game collabs, team collabs, and everything in between. Also, check out the Team Liquid chair.”
With that, I circled back to the products they were there to advertise. So I asked if there was anything special about their chairs and what set them apart from the competition. Ben said, “Really, it’s just quality. The quality that we produce, we stand by it. It’s the best we can. But also the care that we put into the designs, and partially with what we’re going to be doing with Team Liquid, is getting feedback and using that feedback to build and grow.
What we’ve learned from our competitors is that you can’t just stay the same. You have to keep going and keep evolving.”
I tested the chairs and desks there myself, and they were comfortable and solid enough that they looked to last a long while. Still, I was curious if the company had a set number of years they built those to hold up for.
Ben was candid in his answer, “The truth is, we are a new company. We are two years old. So we can talk about it as a hypothetical, in a sense, because our products have never gone that long. But at the same time, we are confident in its longevity, because the way we view it is like somebody buying a car. You don’t buy cars very often. You ride them until the brakes go off or it breaks down completely. So we view it the same way. Eight to ten years is kind of what we strive for. That’s our goal.
We charge a good amount for our product, so we’d like people to get their use out of it.”
The last question we had time for was about the booth that they were hosting. Of course, one of the primary goals is to show off the product, but it’s also a great opportunity to gather feedback. Ben confirmed this: “Yeah. That is one of the main things we are here for. Obviously, we want to show off the products. Realistically, just let people try it because they’re interested, and maybe buy it after testing.
But at the same time, we take all the feedback we can from people. We meet people who have already had the product, or don’t have the product yet, and they give us feedback on what they like and don’t like about it. We keep notes, and as the trends continue, we make the necessary adjustments. Other than specific examples where you have custom-built stuff, but yeah, we just listen to the community and these events and take notes.”
Ben and Manno said that they’ll most likely be present at many events moving forward, showing their products off and making Team Liquid-centric activations, and they’d be happy to say hi if you ever visited their booth.
