‘A different level of luxury’: How Rolls-Royce makes custom, 6-figure cars for the ultra-wealthy

“When a client first walks in, the first thing I notice about them is their energy,” Cara Vitry, a bespoke designer at Rolls-Royce, told Business Insider. “It’s kind of like mind-reading.”

Understanding each client’s desires and interests is an important part of Vitry’s job. She said she starts her work with a pen and paper, later moving to a laptop, multiple monitors, and a rendering tower when it’s time to design.

One customer, Rebecca Fowler, recently worked with Vitry on her third customized Rolls-Royce, a purple Cullinan SUV, which starts at more than $440,000, not including customizations.

For Fowler, price is barely a thought. She’s also planning on designing a fourth car, a Coachbuild Nightingale. At an expected price point of $9.5 million, the company is only planning on building about 100 of the model.

“It’s just a different level of luxury,” Fowler told Business Insider.

At the facility, roughly 60 miles southwest of London, cars are mostly built by hand in a painstaking and laborious process. One car takes about 600 hours in total to complete across roughly 90 different workers.

At other companies’ factories, a car might spend about a minute at a station. At Goodwood, each car spends an average of 32 minutes.

“We never measure volume. It’s all about the value,” Marius Tegneby, Rolls-Royce’s head of global luxury and corporate communications, told Business Insider.

The factory’s specialized workers are highly skilled and undergo extensive training. Before even touching a customer’s car, a worker will spend months training in their specific role.

When production started at the factory 23 years ago, one car was completed each day, according to Tegneby. Now, the workers finish an average of 28 cars a day, translating to between 5,500 and 6,000 a year.

If one of those still doesn’t cut it, a unique color can be created for the client, with its own name, Tegneby said.

Beyond the finish color, customers can get a coachline painted on the car, which could start at more than $1,000. These 3-millimeter pinstripes are hand-painted by one craftsman, the company says.

Tegneby said the coachlines are one of the finishing touches on the vehicle, sometimes taking three hours to paint.

The starry-sky design found on the ceilings of many Rolls-Royce cars is hand-crafted in a slow, delicate process by the company’s starlight headliner team.

Over the course of seven hours, a specialist drills more than 1,000 holes one by one before filling each with fiber-optic strands and trimming them to create the stars.

One customer requested a recreation of the night sky on January 1, 2003, which is the day the Goodwood factory opened. To create these custom skies, the specialist uses different cutting styles to achieve varying levels of brightness for the stars.

Rolls-Royce also offers LED shooting stars, which fire off randomly.

Customers can pick from roughly 30 sets of wood and up to 20,000 different combinations, Tegneby said.

The factory’s marquetry team creates specialized artwork for a vehicle’s doors, dashboard, and interior panels. Wooden veneers, each 4.6 millimeters thick, are cut into hundreds or sometimes thousands of pieces before being reassembled by hand. Then, they receive multiple sanding, finishing, and polishing treatments.

“Depending on the complexity of the pattern, it can be done within a few hours, or it could be days of assembling,” specialist Audrey Fasquelle told Business Insider.

In the early 20th century, the company built only the chassis and engines of vehicles, leaving customization to independent third parties. It wasn’t until 1949 that Rolls-Royce built its first complete car, the Silver Dawn.

The company faced challenges in the following decades. It declared bankruptcy in 1971, and sales dropped by nearly 60% in the early ’90s, with the company making fewer than 1,400 cars a year, The New York Times reported.

In 1998, Volkswagen bought Rolls-Royce Motors, but BMW acquired the rights to use the Rolls-Royce name for $66 million. In 2003, BMW established the Goodwood factory, ushering in the brand’s modern era and putting a renewed emphasis on the custom designs commonly associated with the company.

Alex Hirschi, a popular auto influencer known online as Supercar Blondie, has been a longtime Rolls-Royce admirer.

“The first moment in a Rolls, I was like ‘What is this sorcery?’ It is magic. It’s like you’re floating on a cloud,” Hirschi told Business Insider. She bought her first Rolls-Royce in 2020 and a Spectre model in 2024. Although she loved the car, she wanted more.

Through the German company Mansory, which adds further customizations to high-end cars, Hirschi sought to give her Spectre what she called “a little bit more of a mean look.” This meant a purple finish, wider body, lower suspension, and her Supercar Blondie logo on the exterior and dashboard.

The customizations on her dream car came at a steep price. The Spectre originally cost Hirschi $625,000, but the Mansory upgrade was about $700,000, more than the original car itself.

“Every time I walk past that car, I stare at it,” she said.

The company’s plans would double the size of the facility. Though Rolls-Royce’s overall sales numbers have been declining, the sales’ total value is higher because of the hefty price tags of custom bespoke designs, the BBC reported.

The expansion comes amid a broader shift in the automaker’s clientele. In 2010, the average age of a Rolls-Royce client was 56, Tegneby said, and women made up just 1% of its customer base. Today, the average driver is 43, and more than 15% of the company’s customers are women.