Inquisition
The Seat spin-o ’s British boss couples infectious enthusiasm with a solid plan. By Jake Groves
The man making sense of Cupra
Sometimes a business card is worth a thousand words. Wayne Gri ths’ dual role within the VW empire, spelled out on a cardboard rectangle, speaks volumes about the challenges facing even the best-resourced car companies moving into the 2020s. It doesn’t look easy – but Gri ths, a confident and coiffured Brit, is revelling in the battle to make it work.
He’s both CEO of Cupra – the Seat high-performance subbrand that’s now starting to stand on its own two feet – and sales and marketing vice-president for Seat, the Spanish company that’s frequently at the centre of rumours about where exactly it sits within VW.
It’s no coincidence that a sales and marketing wizard got the top job a year ago when Cupra’s increased autonomy was confirmed. He recalls a conversation with Seat president Luca de Meo: ‘Together we decided that I take Cupra as it was a branding and strategy job.’
The move should help bring clarity to both Cupra and Seat, makers of fine products that haven’t always found the audience they deserve. While other VW Group brands are happy to have in-house performance sub-brands – VW with GTI and R, Skoda with vRS, Audi with S and RS – a different approach was needed for Seat and Cupra.
‘Outside Spain and Germany, one of the main reasons people didn’t buy a Seat is because they didn’t know what the brand said. We saw this as a great opportunity for our own unique brand above the mass segment but below the premium segment in terms of pricing,’ says Gri ths. ‘But to try and copy other premium brands is not our job, because there are brands in the group that already do that very well.’
Hence last winter’s conscious uncoupling, and an emerging Cupra product plan. The current Ateca will be joined by a Cupra-badged hot version of the next-generation Seat Leon and by the all-new Formentor, a coupe-crossover developed specifically for Cupra. The all-electric Tavascan SUV, shown at the 2019 Frankfurt show as a concept, looks very likely to go into production too, using VW’s MEB platform.
So very much a job for a sales and marketing expert. Gri ths, born near Manchester, has pretty much the perfect CV for the role. ‘My dad was a car dealer, so I grew up in the business… washing cars and fixing them. Then I went to university and studied international business and German.’
He joined Audi in 1989, spent two years with Seat, returned to Audi, and was appointed Seat’s vice-president for sales and marketing in 2016, joining the board in December 2018.
He’s pleased with Cupra’s progress so far. ‘To establish all that with our own identity involved a lot of investment in terms of product, marketing and the dealer network. We already have
200 specialist dealers not only in Europe but in Mexico and Algeria, and the feedback we’re getting is really positive.
‘Last year, sales were up by 40 per cent – 14,000 cars on just the existing Leon Cupra. What gave it the kick [when Cupra was made ocial] is that the dealer network, everyone, the organisation saw the future of where we are going and that motivated us to go and get what we’ve got today.’ In Mexico, Switzerland and Germany, around 30 per cent of Leons sold are Cupras. And in Germany, Cupra badges adorn half of all Atecas sold.
Fundamentally, though, Cupra is still in the process of untangling itself from its parent. The current Leon Cupra still has Seat badges on it, albeit in Cupra bronze, and they’ll stay in place until the 2020 replacement arrives. The Cupra Ateca, meanwhile, may be the first car to wear just a Cupra logo but it’s still essentially a Seat with the powertrain from a Golf R.
Griths says: ‘The Cupra story isn’t always high performance any more; we’re evolving into something more sophisticated. Particularly with the new Leon family [expected in 2020], there will be Cupra models. The challenge for the long-term future of the brand is an electric Cupra and the definition of what that means; is it hybrid or pure electric?’ Griths is already in the process of answering that question with the Formentor plug-in hybrid and the all-electric Tavascan.
Surely Wayne has bigger, wilder dreams for the Cupra brand, though? ‘We have a few concrete ideas, but I’m not allowed to talk about them’, he says with a wry smile. ‘We have halo cars in the plan, but we obviously have to finance these; if we are successful with Leon, Ateca and Formentor then we will get to the volume level of business that allows us to invest in these cars.’ Griths wants them to be ‘fast, very cool and electric’.
Any doubts? Any sleepless nights, gnawed by the growing suspicion that it’s all been a terrible mistake. No. Griths believes he, de Meo and the rest of Seat made the right decision: ‘We could have gone with the sub-brand thing longer, but we would never have achieved the potential that Cupra can have as a standalone brand.’