Stefan Buescher: Points for Style

What is the Porsche way of life? What is the defining spirit, and how do you transfer that to Porsche’s lifestyle products?

The special Porsche way of life draws its inspiration from the brand and its unique history. For almost seventy-five years, the brand has been informed by its founders, their passion for sports cars, and the iconic Porsche 911 – a success story that has shaped the Porsche brand and that today, more than any other automotive brand, thrives on the excitement of contrasts. The Porsche Lifestyle Group builds on the sports car lineup with an exclusive offer of lifestyle products for Porsche fans.

How important is the collaboration with Michael Mauer in terms of design?

In the future, we want to take an even more uniform approach to the design of all products. The Porsche and Porsche Design brands share the same origins. And we plan to emphasize this shared design DNA even more strongly. Design is of enormous importance not only for the sports cars, but also for our lifestyle products. This includes anchoring design thinking in all strategic and operational areas. In concrete terms, this means that the design principles will be applied even more rigorously to the lifestyle products other than the car. That also means that the design teams from the Porsche and Porsche Design brands will be working even more closely together than they already are.

Will there be a creative director?

At Porsche, we are and always will be one family – and that holds true for our design team as well. Michael Mauer, Porsche AG’s chief designer, has an international team of automotive design experts around him that he can rely on. Meanwhile, Studio F. A. Porsche, led by Roland Heiler – to be succeeded by Carsten Monnerjan in March – gathers together all the lifestyle and industrial design experts within the company. What is new is that we have further intensified our collaboration by organizing all creative processes in an agile manner. Across both brands, we can draw on the creative design power of more than ten studios around the world. From Weissach to Zell am See, from Berlin to Palo Alto and Shanghai, we’re networked globally. Our motto for the future: “One brand. One design. One lifestyle experience.” My mission is to focus even more attention on the Porsche Lifestyle products and intensify that experience.

Looking at the current catalog, the brand stores, or the competition, what exactly defines the Porsche brand?

This is probably best explained using the brand and product identity that Michael Mauer and his team have defined for Porsche. Put simply, the design elements that define brand identity let us know that it is a Porsche. The differentiation of the models defines the product identity. Working together, we have also defined certain design principles that can be applied to many different areas. As we intensify our collaboration with Carsten Monnerjan and his team, we will also adopt this strategic orientation even more consistently for Porsche’s design products.

What would you say is a typical product? After all, there have been more than a few icons in Porsche’s history.

Obviously the Porsche 911. There’s probably no other car that has such a clear history, as Michael Mauer says. The continuous but at the same time cautious evolution of the design language is absolutely unique.

How do I recognize a typical lifestyle product from Porsche?

You see this quite well with our Porsche Design Timepieces, our “sports cars for the wrist”, as we call them. One product that definitely stands out here is the Chronograph 1 – All Black Numbered Edition, one of the highlights we presented to mark the brand’s fiftieth anniversary. Designed to look like the rev counter on a Porsche 911, it is based on the iconic Chronograph 1 from 1972.

→ Read the whole interview in rampstyle #28 "Into the Great Wide Open".