Helping elite buyers to design their dream vehicle is now a lucrative sideline for carmakers.
Musician Eric Clapton turned heads at the UK’s Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2013 with his custom-designed Ferrari, rumoured then to be worth £3mn. While the chassis and power-train were from the then-current 458 Italia, the body was a homage to Ferrari’s 512 Berlinetta Boxer, a model made between 1976 and 1984 and said to be Clapton’s favourite.
The car was a potent demonstration of Ferrari’s exclusive “One-Off” programme — the apogee of luxury-car makers’ personalisation schemes, an area of growing importance for their businesses.
From complex, multicolour paint jobs and personal liveries to interiors embellished with original designs, customers’ hunger for personalised supercars is far from sated, and high-end manufacturers are focused on catering to those tastes.
“Our customer needs are not transportation — our customer needs are a lot about fulfilling wishes,” Frank-Steffen Walliser, chief executive of Bentley, told the FT’s Future of the Car summit last week, noting that investment in personalisation is “steadily growing”. “We see, over the last four years, a steady year-by-year increase in the value per car.”
Companies that have mastered the art of offering clients personalisation — including Ferrari, Lamborghini, Rolls-Royce and Bentley — are thriving, amid broader automotive sector challenges. “It’s a route of massive profitability,” says Stephen Reitman, automotive equity analyst at Bernstein.
Take Ferrari, whose first-quarter operating profits surged 23 per cent year-on-year, to €542mn, on a 13 per cent jump in revenues to €1.79bn — underpinned by the Italian carmaker’s compelling personalisation offering. While Ferrari says 19 per cent of its first-quarter revenues came from customisation and spare parts, analysts estimate that customisation raises car prices by an average of 30 per cent, often more.
“They have all these options they put in front of you, and they do a wonderful job selling it,” says Scott Sherwood, an independent analyst of supercars and luxury car brands. “After ticking a few boxes, you’ve run up another €100,000 on a €400,000 car.”
Making a car their own helps clients access models with long waiting lists, as when Ferrari launched its four-wheel-drive Purosangue. “To ensure they [got] the car, they [had] to have a higher spend on personalisation,” Reitman says.
Luxury-car makers say personalisation is not only about giving clients a distinctive vehicle, but also allowing them to participate in the design process.
“When you commission a motor car from us, you also commission an experience,” says Marius Tegneby, a Rolls-Royce spokesperson. “The highlight is the handover and the reveal of the car.”
Given the high pay-off, luxury-car makers are investing in elegant ateliers, where invited customers work with designers to consider their options and examine material and colour choices.
Rolls-Royce now has “private offices” in Shanghai, Dubai, New York and Seoul, as well as at its UK headquarters, where clients collaborate with designers to create bespoke interiors, with embroidery and marquetry. They can also select from the company’s 44,000 paint colours — or create their own. “It’s like commissioning a piece of art,” says Tegneby.
Rolls-Royce is building a new £300mn extension at its headquarters to allow space for its increasing number of time-consuming bespoke projects.
Ferrari is building a new paint shop to allow more elaborate — and lucrative — custom paint jobs, promoted through its ateliers in New York, Shanghai and at its Maranello HQ, for its high-end Tailor Made customisation programme.
But the apex of personalisation — reimagining not just car interiors but the shape of the car itself — is Ferrari’s exclusive One-Off programme, open only to its highest spending, most committed customers. Each year, Ferrari delivers just one — or occasionally two — One-Offs, each several years in the making, typically involving multiple client trips to Maranello for meetings to design a unique car body to encase the underpinnings of an existing model.
“It’s a creative journey — it’s a beautiful experience for them,” says Flazio Manzoni, chief design officer. “It’s not only achieving or creating a car that doesn’t exist yet. But they become like a part of the creative team of the project.”
Analysts say Ferrari could increase the number of one-off projects to capitalise on strong interest, but Manzoni says this is unlikely, especially given the demands each puts on the company. “Ferrari doesn’t do it as a business,” he says. “It’s a way to reward the most important clients and collectors . . . We give them a chance to materialise their dreams with a car that is absolutely unique.”
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