Whenever we make a hard pivot in life and head in a radically different direction – one that even makes people question our choices- that is exactly when we need to get very clear about our intentions, be able to explain the “why” behind what we’re doing, and fully commit to the clarity of vision we have for the future.
Few luxury marques have sparked as much intense debate recently as Jaguar. During Monterey Car Week, I joined Brandon Baldassari, Jaguar’s North American Brand Director, for a candid discussion regarding the brand’s bold, polarizing new design direction. Beyond the aesthetics, I wanted to understand the strategic thinking behind the fearless shift – specifically, to learn why Jaguar was willing to challenge its most loyal enthusiasts to secure its future, both as an EV brand and one with a radically different-looking design language.
Last year, when I saw the Jaguar Type 00 in person for the first time at their Open Studio, I was speechless. I grew up around Jaguars, as my family owned five of them over the years, and somewhere along the way, I had built an idea of what this brand looks and feels like. The Type 00 was completely different from everything I associated with it, so my brain didn’t have any reference point to refer back to. It was so unique I called it a unicorn, as it has a two-dimensional quality (given the silhouette, wheel design, and even the matte exterior) which reminds me of a sketch out of a superhero comic book.
It took an entire weekend, several conversations with the brand’s leaders, and a deliberate effort to clear out everyone else’s opinions before I could actually ask myself how I felt about it, rather than how I’d been told to feel. That process — the shock, the reassessment, the eventual click of understanding — turned out to be exactly the point.
Jaguar is 90 years into its history, and Baldassari doesn’t shy away from the stakes of what comes next. “We need to be around for another 90,” he told me. “The old business model wasn’t working. So it had to be a transformative pivot. It couldn’t have just been like we’re going to edit in the margins and tweak. We needed the hard pivot.”
What’s remarkable is how that pivot actually happened inside the company. Baldassari shared a story I hadn’t heard before: when it came time to define Jaguar’s next design language, JLR didn’t simply hand the brief to the Jaguar design team. Instead, three separate internal studios — Jaguar, Range Rover, and Defender — were each given the identical, deliberately open brief, with no obligation to reference anything that had come before.
“They obviously took cues and inspiration, but they weren’t handcuffed to being a derivative of what’s come before,” Baldassari explained. The result was an internal competition, adjudicated by Chief Creative Officer Gerry McGovern and the board. The winning design — the one that became the Type 00 and now the production Type 01 — didn’t come from the Jaguar studio at all. It came from the Range Rover team. It’s a detail that reframes the whole reveal.
What looks, from the outside, like Jaguar reinventing itself is really the story of an entire design organization being told to forget its own name and start from the vehicle itself — with only quiet nods to the past, like subtle cues from the E-Type and XJS, woven back in afterward. Baldassari was candid that the design team knew what they were walking into. “They actually said that to us,” he recalled. “You’re going to feel uncomfortable at first. Some people will never fall in love with it. Some people will love it immediately, and most will warm up to it over time. And that’s exactly what happens.”
The question then became, who is the new Jaguar intended for? If the design brief was radical, the marketing brief is arguably just as brazen: Jaguar isn’t trying to keep everyone. “This is not a huge segment,” Baldassari has said elsewhere, and he confirmed as much to me directly — the strategy is low-volume, up-market, and built on one-to-one engagement rather than mass reach. “It’s not about doing an ad on the Super Bowl,” he said. “It’s about getting the car in front of as many of the right people, at the right places.”
That distinction is where I wanted to dig in, because it’s the question I keep coming back to as someone who’s watched this brand my whole life: who, exactly, is the modern Jaguar customer, and how is she different from the one I grew up around in Pebble Beach?
When I think about a car brand, I don’t just think about the car — I think about the entire
ecosystem it lives in: what the people who drive it wear, where they go, how they live. That’s how I’ve always approached understanding a brand, almost the way a creative director would. So when I picture the classic Jaguar customer, I envision an elegant, understated woman driving through the English countryside, dressed in tall leather boots and a traditional tweed blazer, en route to a grand country estate for afternoon tea.
The moment I saw the Type 00, that image in my mind changed entirely. The woman I now picture is dressed in vibrant colors and graphic prints, living in a contemporary penthouse in an urban setting (like NYC or Miami), bouncing between designer fashion shows and art gallery openings. To me, these are genuinely different women — even if their wealth, education, and social standing look similar on paper.
I described it to Baldassari in terms I suspected he’d recognize instantly: if you think of Sex and the City, the classic Jaguar woman is a Charlotte — refined, traditional, conservative, elegant in an old-money way. The new Jaguar woman is a Samantha — flamboyant, conspicuous, unafraid to take up space, a courageous entrepreneur who was never interested in playing it safe. “Yeah, yeah, yeah — that’s 100%,” he said. “It is.”
When I asked him who he pictures this car for, his answer tracked closely with my own read: “It’s someone who is super bold, independent, has worked really hard, has some level of success in their life, and is very comfortable being like — I don’t need to hide my success. I worked hard to get here. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved. And it’s too easy for that person to make the safe choice and buy the BMW or the Lexus. They don’t want that.”
Now that I could reframe in my own mind who the new Jaguar is designed for, I could fully understand the brand’s ethos: Copy Nothing. It’s now apparent that they are targeting someone who isn’t a trend follower. She’s a trendsetter, a woman whose presence creates a ripple effect through the people around them. She’s the Sigma, not the Alpha.
The modern Jaguar customer isn’t just buying into originality; she’s meant to embody it. She’s a woman who walks into a room, turns heads, and leaves an impact. She’s completely unforgettable and totally individualistic. Her distinctive style, her authentic persona, and even the way she thinks reflect the type of tastemaker who creates real influence. But she’s not an influencer; she’s just influential – whether that’s through her career, her social circles, or just by being herself. She leads by example without even trying to. She is unapologetically herself, and that’s exactly why she’s iconic.
Even the brand’s new tagline “Inspire Like No Other” reflects the type of person they are targeting – a woman (or man) who is an inspiration in their own, unique way.
Tastemakers like Harry Styles, Lewis Hamilton, Donatella Versace, and Lisa Vanderpump are the types of style icons I could imagine resonating with the new Jaguar. Each of them has a distinctive sense of fashion that doesn’t follow a trend, but rather makes a statement on its own. And they all have larger-than-life personalities and naturally exude charisma, sex appeal, and star power. From Formula 1 to fashion, to me, these celebrities are the exact customer avatars I could envision being a perfect fit for the brand.
As we discussed this, Baldassari offered a real-world example from a recent focus group. He told me about a woman who arrived in her own Lamborghini Urus, dressed entirely in her own distinct, eye-catching style, radiating the kind of self-possessed confidence and magnetic presence that made the room take notice. “She loved the car,” he said simply. It’s the kind of anecdote that does more to define a brand’s target customer than any demographic slide deck could.
Jaguar’s rollout of this new identity hasn’t happened through traditional advertising — it’s
happened through presence at events. Over the past year, the brand has staged its Type 00 reveal at a celebrity-studded activation during Art Basel Miami, popped up in Paris, and returned to Monterey Car Week with its Open Studio activation. I asked Baldassari to walk me through how his team thinks about choosing moments like these.
“Our general strategy is around one-to-one engagement and finding the right places to
engage with people,” he told me. “Miami Art [Week] is a great example.” It’s not about broad visibility — it’s about being physically present in the cultural spaces where the brand’s target customer already spends her time: art, culture, fashion. For a brand repositioning itself around originality and daring self-expression, meeting that audience inside the art and fashion world, rather than asking them to come to a traditional auto show, is itself a statement of intent.
Jaguar’s next chapter is already taking shape. The Type 01, a four-door GT, debuts this fall
— and Baldassari was clear that an unusual amount of the concept car’s visual assertiveness has survived the production journey.
“Most car companies show a concept car, and then the production version is diluted,” he said. “The fact that the engineers were able to bring what still looks like a concept car into production form is incredibly impressive.” He pointed to the front end specifically, and said, “It’s super bold, upright, in your face, and a little bit gangster.”
A preview of the Type 01’s interior architecture, along with a prototype wearing a distinctive new wrap, appears at this year’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance — fittingly, alongside a heritage display marking the Concours’ 75th anniversary, honoring Jaguars once owned by racing legends, Hollywood icons, and the Royal Family. It’s a striking juxtaposition: the brand’s most radical reinvention, sitting a fairway away from the cars that built its reputation in the first place.
In a similar manner, heritage luxury brands like Rolls-Royce have successfully pivoted from staid classicism to bold, contemporary styling, and Jaguar is charting a similar course. As I remarked to Baldassari while drawing this parallel: “They’re no longer driving Miss Daisy.” Instead, the brand is targeting a fresh demographic: tech founders, chart-topping artists, and global icons like Paris Hilton. It’s a clear blueprint for how Jaguar hopes to completely redefine its aesthetic and its audience.
After our conversation, what stayed with me most wasn’t a spec or a stat — it was how deliberately Jaguar seems to have built discomfort into its own strategy. Baldassari and his team knew people would need time to warm up to the Type 00’s design. They knew a smaller, sharper customer base was the goal, not a compromise. And they built a design process specifically engineered to escape the gravity of their own 90-year history.
Having spent an entire weekend last year wrestling with my own internal pivot regarding the new Jaguar, I finally understand the gamble they are taking. It is a psychological shift – but once it clicks, it’s impossible to see the brand any other way. For a 90-year-old company with so much history in its rearview mirror, the most exciting realization is that Jaguar isn’t coasting on its legacy; it’s at the starting line of a completely new journey.
[Image credits: Christina-Lauren Pollack for Inspirations & Celebrations, Jaguar Land Rover. All opinions are my own.]