INTERVIEW
Designing Jaguar’s purrfect new clothes
Mark Smyth sat down with Jaguar’s director of design, Ian Callum, at the Frankfurt Motor Show
The design team of any car company is always a central part of the business. After all, if something does not look good and fit the image of the brand then it risks not selling, although there have been some exceptions to the rule over the years. "Designers have a responsibility," says Ian Callum, Jaguar’s director of design. "We can ruin a brand in five years." Fortunately, he says, the design team at Jaguar is still very much listened to when it comes to business decisions. He points out that he has been asked about designing an SUV many times since 1999 but until recently, he had always said no. "SUVs can’t drive the culture of the business," he says adding that in the early brief he was not seeing enough Jaguar. Eventually of course, around five years ago, Callum agreed to pen an SUV, mainly "because that’s what people want". But he insists that any SUV model "has to be on our (Jaguar’s) terms." The first was the successful F-Pace, which even took the World Car of the Year title...
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