You know things are changing when Bentley realises its products aren’t luxurious enough. The luxury car brand, which early this year declared record profits on record sales volumes in 2022, doubling the previous year’s profits, then announced that it needed to overhaul its production lines. Why? Because it sniffed a bigger opportunity.
For which read more personalisation and more rarity. Bentley volumes in 2022 were only four percent up but revenues increased by almost 20%, as a result of customers specifying personalised and bespoke options. So production has to be flexible enough to accommodate more of those options. It stated the aim to quadruple business in its bespoke Mulliner division, named after the heritage coachworks brand which is part of its stable. Mulliner branding goes from special features and finishes to limited-edition runs of regular cars and smaller series of vehicles targeted at collectors.
When Bentley says it’s altering a system which has seen a turnaround from losses of £260m in 2018 to profits of over £620m in 2022 to you know that the behaviour of luxury car buyers is changing.
All which is good news for CASMIN GROUP, a business set up to manage sales of ultra-rare and ultra-personalised or bespoke vehicles for both UHNW buyers and the boutique manufacturers of these products. Because where Bentley is part of the Volkswagen Group behemoth, the manufacturers Casmin represents are small, engineering-led, agile and don’t need to create a parallel production line for small-series products. They only do small series, which is exactly what UHNW customers and collectors want. What they generally don’t do is end-to-end sales, CRM and brand-building.
Casmin currently has a Prodrive Hunter on its books, made by the Prodrive engineering consultancy which works behind the scenes for global car manufacturers and has been involved F1, the World Rally Championship, and sports car racing – with both Ferrari and Aston Martin, with which it has an ongoing partnership. How many Hunters have been made? One. What’s it based on? Nothing you’ve ever seen on the road. It’s completely unique – a dream product for an UHNW customer.
And it’s what the large manufacturers, even Bentley, can’t do. The recent Mulliner Bacalar and Batur models were based on the Bentley Continental, which shares a platform with other VW Group brands, and were built in runs of 12 and 18 – very limited numbers but not one of one.
With its network of partners in engineering, manufacture, design and coachbuilding Casmin can commission a one-off vehicle for a customer, from brief to delivery. The customer has the opportunity to shape the car in every respect to reflect their specific vision and taste. That’s the ultimate, but the company is also working on the development of a run of eight units of one of the world’s most luxurious and prestigious luxury cars, coachbuilt with a body configuration and style not available from the manufacturer’s own range.
At a slightly less rarefied level Casmin’s offering is representing manufacturers of existing ultra-rare products which can be made to order with bespoke specifications for each customer. It is currently representing the RML Short Wheelbase, an homage to the legendary 1960s 250 SWB, powered by a Ferrari V12 and costing £1.35m. RML Group, which comes out of motorsport but has long built prototypes, show cars and continuation models for major OEMs, is making just 30 units of the Short Wheelbase. At a more affordable price point of under £500,000 there’s the Caton Healey, a reimagination of the original and iconically British Austin Healey 100/4. The Healey is the first production car from Caton, which has grown out of bespoke engineering company Envisage, formed specifically to create one-off cars for car manufacturers.
Casmin is also contracted with Delage, the historic French manufacturer of luxury and racing cars which has been revived by a team including 1997 F1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve, to sell its futuristic D12 – the nearest thing to a Formula 1 car for the road. But made-to-order products like these can have significant lead times, and Casmin recognises that some customers, no matter how wealthy or driven by exclusivity, don’t want to wait for a specially commissioned or built-to-order car. They’re willing to trade some personalisation for a ready-to-go car.
So the company always has a selection of cars already built, mostly unregistered. Many will have a unique specification and some will even be one-offs. Right now there’s a one-of-one Italdesign Zerouno Duerta Roadster – a Lamborghini-based hypercar re-engineered and redesigned by the legendary Italdesign styling house – plus one of the 10 special Land Rover Defenders used in the Spectre Bond movie, and a one-of-one Vengeance Volante, a coachbuilt DB9 endorsed by Aston Martin. And Casmin will source vehicles to meet a specific customer brief.
Casmin co-founder Ian Smith outlines their philosophy. “We’re not brokers,” he says. “Ours is a highly tailored service for both manufacture and customer. We have deep knowledge of the luxury market and trends. Our contacts book means we know who the buyers are for any given product. We know the world they inhabit and their individual likes and needs. So we can match the product to the buyer, and we can create an entire customer journey, bespoke to the brand, the product and the customer.
“If required, we can deliver all the customer-brand interfaces from first contact to test-drives and other brand experiences, through sale, pre-delivery programmes and active relationship management during the lifetime of ownership.”
Casmin even offers added-value services through a network of luxury lifestyle partners, from hybrid vehicle storage and display solutions at customer’s homes to private jet use, personal styling and car fragrancing.
Smith has a long history in luxury car sales, in recent years running the private office for Rolls-Royce and VIP sales at McLaren, where he met his co-founder Nick Campolucci. Campolucci’s specialism is developing bespoke customer journeys and sales processes, and says there’s an additional dimension – which could just be the killer app for the business.
“We create the potential to do much more than sell just one run of vehicles. We aim to deliver an experience which make advocates of the customers and to gain an even deeper knowledge of what they want. We can then develop that insight into product concepts which can be fed back to the manufacturers to inform future product plans for ready-made sales to the same customers.
“Cars can be pre-sold, giving the manufacturer financial certainty for costly runs of very limited numbers of vehicles, and giving the customers exactly what they want plus the knowledge that their asset’s value will be protected because of its rarity. It’s a sales pipeline which is invaluable to a start-up or boutique operator, but also of increasing importance to more established brands wanting to meet the expectations of new-generation luxury customers demanding rare or bespoke vehicles which are not part of their main production.”
But back to Bentley. Even the great British luxury brand was reported as saying that that the luxury cars sales boom may be about to falter as the global economy struggles.
Not quite, according to Casmin. “There are really three luxury car market segments,” says Smith. “There’s the Audi to Porsche segment, then the ultra-luxury segment for the likes of Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Ferrari and so on. But then there’s the truly bespoke segment for certain UHNW customers. That one is very small, but the wealth profile of that demographic is set to explode over the next five years, especially in new UHNW markets, so the segment is able to ride out any storms. And it’s only just starting.”
Content Credit: Mark Carbery
Image Credit: Casmin Group
For further information contact us at [email protected]