Lawrence Stroll’s presence with Aston Martin is a hugely visible one for 23 weekends a year, wearing the British Racing Green colours of the Formula 1 team he owns. Yet as the owner of the Aston Martin road car brand, Stroll is somewhat less visible, his appearances typically limited to investor calls.
But this week we heard Stroll’s reflections on his three years at the helm of the road car business at the Financial Times’ Future of the Car Summit, his 20-minute appearance whetting the appetite to hear more from this most engaging of speakers and storytellers.
While Stroll remains a relative newcomer to the automotive industry, his experience working in the world of luxury goods is decades long and where he earned his billions. His desired positioning of Aston Martin as a luxury goods maker echoes that of how Rolls-Royce CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös has successfully transformed his company.
“I inherited a company off the back of a colourful, troubled IPO with what could really be described as a wholesale push model rather than a retail pull one,” he said, talking of his arrival at the company in 2020. “Aston Martin didn’t operate in a ‘luxury’ way, despite what it said.”
Stroll speaks of Aston having an oversupply of cars when he arrived, supply outstripping demand and cars being sold wholesale to dealers at discounted prices. Covid had already stopped the production line at Gaydon, but Stroll didn’t restart it until he had sorted out the oversupply issue and built the demand for the cars again.
“We needed to match demand with supply. We stopped production at Gaydon for close to a year; you can imagine the cost of that with no margin coming in. But we needed to create consumer demand and I firmly believe we should manufacture a few percent less than demand requires.”
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