Curation: the new black

Prestige marques and even mass-market brands’ push towards personalisation will not degrade Rolls Royce’s point of difference. That’s the clear message from the iconic UK brand’s head of design, Giles Taylor.

Taylor who came to the British brand in 2011 after a career at Citroen and Jaguar says “curation” and unique materials are the next frontier in terms of bespoke personalisation.

“We’re absolutely aware of what [mass market brands] are doing – Fiat 500, MINI and the like. But we do things very differently.

“We curate materials from right around the globe. Beautiful materials, you can’t just find down the road. And we have a very beautifully, craft-orientated, factory atelier to deliver beautifully fine handcrafted products to the customers.

“And we will be more about that in the future,” Taylor explained.

Rolls Royce says 100 per cent of Phantoms have “an element of bespoke design”. Only five per cent of Wraith coupe buyers order entirely off the factory spec sheet and up to 15 per cent of Ghost buyers customise one or more aspects of their cars.

Taylor expects the new Dawn drophead, launched at Frankfurt, will echo these stats. Indeed, the company engineered its Goodwood factory to accommodate such a high level of individualisation.

“The manufacturing process does not like deviation, but we’ve created a process that accepts deviation. So if a customer wants an incredibly bespoke [vehicle], that’s quite an engineering challenge, then the car can be taken into its own private space where it can be worked on out of sequence,” explained Rolls Royce spokesperson, James Warren

Taylor says that beyond curation, even fully bespoke vehicles are a potential future direction for the brand.

“If you go back to the day, we supplied a technically perfect chassis from Sir Henry Royce. We as a company chose the best coachbuilders to put together solutions to take to the customer… We’re very aware of that [history] and maybe some time in the future… we should be doing it.

“That full bespoke vehicle could be an opportunity for us in the future,” he explained.

But one thing you won’t see anytime soon is a Rolls Royce sportscar – despite the fact long-time contemporary Bentley is planning just that.

“Rolls Royce has never done sports cars. We’ve always done tourers, grand tourers, we’ve done two-seat tourers – you know, they do exist. [But] If you asked me a straightforward question would I like to do that [two-seater tourer] with Rolls Royce, yes, but it wouldn’t be a sports car,” Taylor said.