READ OUT LOUDTHE STORY BEHIND

- MINI-NOT A STATUS SYMBOL BUT AN EXPRESSION OF PERSONALITY

BEFORE YOU START….

please look into your camera and tell us slowly your name, city and country… Then you can start reading this paragraph out loud… Have fun!

It seems a good idea to take and old and trusted success product off the shelves, dust it off, restyle it and milk it again. Luckily, it’s not quite that easy nor is it often a very successful approach. There are exceptions, however: in the year 2000,

mini succeeded in restyling a car that evokes strong emotions and making it ready for the future.

When Mini’s Head of Brand Communication canceled two daysbefore the interview, I feared that already by week three, my plan to do one interview a week for 20 uninterrupted weeks, was going to

go awry. It took me a lot of convincing to arrange an interview with Gert Hildebrand, Head of Design at Mini, instead. I spoke with him, under the watchful eye of a BMW Group PR-lady in the highly secure

– no pictures, please – design department in an industrial zone justoutside of Munich.

In the fall of 1959, 50-year-old, yet to be knighted, Alec Issigonis, designer and technical engineer at British Motor Corporation, laid the basis for the first design of the Mini in a series of sketches.

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