How BMWs Trace Their Roots to LA, not Munich

Designworks, in Santa Monica, California, is one of three global creative consultancies wholly owned by the BMW Group. In addition to penning industrial products for John Deere, Starbucks, North Face, and Embraer, it has competed with BMW's core automotive studios in Germany and Shanghai to create winning designs for the roundel brand.

Maintaining a local studio is particularly important, because it can decipher for the bosses in Munich the capricious tastes of American car buyers. "The Southern California market is maybe the most competitive in the world," says Adrian van Hooydonk, the Group's global design director, who ran L.A. Designworks in the early 2000s. "If a new car comes out, you see it on the road the next day, and within three weeks, you can tell if it is a popular success."

As BMW, with its Spartanburg, South Carolina, production facility, is now the largest exporter of vehicles from the USA, the site is also increasingly important to the Group's global efforts. So, we recently asked van Hooydonk to explicate some of the notable influences that the California studio had on BMW's products during the past 25 years. These are the six he identified.