Shaken but not stirred

The Name is Reichman – Marek Reichman. And if that sounds like something from 007, don’t be surprised, as Nic Mitchell discovered when he caught up with the Teesside graduate who is now the design director for luxury car company Aston Martin.

Looking more like a 21st-century castle, complete with moat and drawbridges, it could have been lifted straight from a Bond screen set. And after navigating our way inside (I was looking for the customer showroom – not realising that all Aston Martin customers are important and we needed the imposing VIP entrance) – we met our man.

Now head of design at Aston Martin, 41-year-old Marek, pictured, was in a lively and friendly mood having just got back from the Le Mans 24-hour endurance race. Aston Martin had won the GT1 class for the first time in 48 years and Marek was bemoaning the lack of coverage in the ‘Fleet Street’ papers for the British success story, much as you’d expect Bond to do.

It was a theme Marek returned to as he contrasted the British approach to enterprise and innovation with what he had found in the United States. Like many young enterprising graduates Marek was keen to make his mark, but found his room for expression restricted in the British car industry he entered in the early 1990s.

His lucky break arrived after winning an in-house design competition following BMW’s takeover of Rover. The prize: three months working in the Californian car market! Those three months in the States turned into three years as Marek lapped up the sun, lifestyle and refreshing enthusiasm for new ideas. And he returned in 2000 for five more years working on flashy American Ford models before landing his dream job with Aston Martin.

‘People there are incredibly different. They might speak English, but their approach to innovation and risk-taking is a world apart. They like to celebrate success. We’re too reserved. We don’t do a lot of praise and tend to be a bit conservative. In America, I had people jumping up and down and giving me high fives. Everyone was so enthusiastic,’ said Marek.

‘That’s what bugs me so much about the lack of positive publicity about us winning things. We live in a culture that just doesn't celebrate success, and that's why we end up with two lines in the Daily Telegraph for a UK victory at Le Mans, our first for 48 years.’

Marek was back in Middlesbrough last year to collect an honorary Master of Science degree from the University of Teesside – 17 years after graduating with a First in Industrial Design from Teesside Polytechnic.

Amazed at the new-look campus and shiny new buildings, Marek recalled with fond memories his time as an undergraduate here.

‘I was just 19 and torn between industrial design and a career as a martial artist. I was very into being fit, but decided to move away to study design. Leeds was too close to Sheffield for me and I was impressed with the warm welcome I received when I met Bob Clay, Tim Platt and other lecturers at Teesside. They were so enthusiastic. That’s important to me. It also was a fun place and I had a very good peer group, one of whom – Julian Wiltshire – is now working with me as one of the four Aston Martin designers. That’s half our design team being Teesside graduates.’

He loved the degree’s emphasis on product design. Of course, he designed a Porsche-type SUV, but he also came up with a dishwasher for single guys (he hates dirty pots in the sink) and a flat-screen TV. ‘If only I had pursued that idea further, but perhaps it was ahead of the times’, he recalls.

So what are his tips for making UK industry more enterprising and better able to compete with the US?

Well, apart from praising people with good ideas, he believes in shining a light on inventors. ‘It always seemed bright and sunny in California. Although we can’t do much about the weather in the UK, we can design the places people work in to encourage innovative thinking’, he says.

His own all-glass surround design studio is open to every possible natural light source, and it overlooks the VIP showroom and its four top-of-the-range Aston Martin models which are also bathed in a sea of light.

Marek’s 3Ds for good designers:

Dive in – that’s where you research and understand your market and what you are going to do with the product

Design – that means thinking outside the box and trying to improve not just the aesthetics but also the functionality and uniqueness of the product

Develop – that’s when you get your idea into manufacture.

Of course, you also need tenacity and the ability to be a fabulous team player, but without the 3Ds you are unlikely to succeed in your Bond-like mission to save British industry.

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