You might not know it, but you’ll find workshop equipment built by Dura Manufacturing everywhere from C&M to Bugatti’s ultra-exclusive dealer network. We chatted to their founder Dominic Wishlade, to find out what makes them such a fascinating cog in the automotive machine.
The automotive industry is a big, sprawling place. For every big hitter whose name everyone knows, there’s dozens and dozens of fascinating characters that don’t necessarily sit in the spotlight, but are nevertheless vital to the industry’s operation.
Dominic Wishlade is one of those people. You might not have heard of him, or his company, Dura, if you don’t work in automotive servicing or repair. Take a look at their website, though, and at the list of clients at the bottom. Aston Martin, Bugatti, Ferrari, McLaren, Porsche, Rolls-Royce – all are among the manufacturers they supply.
Dura designs and manufactures fitted workshop cabinets. Again, it’s an area many of us likely don’t give much thought to, but wandering around their showroom in Brackley, it feels more like you’re among high-end kitchen units than anything destined to end up in an automotive workshop.
There’s a real sense that genuine thought to design and craftsmanship have gone into these units, elevating them beyond purely functional items. Indeed, Dominic’s background is in design – he studied industrial design at Coventry University, during which time he shared a house with a pair of automotive design students.
One of them was Russell Carr, who’s now head of design for Lotus, and penned the Emira that C&M is currently running as a long-termer. The other was Rob Dickinson, who, after spending most of the 1990s as the frontman of alternative rock band Catherine Wheel, later put his degree to work as the founder and creative director of Singer Vehicle Design.
Clearly, it was a student house containing some substantial creative and enterprising spirit. While his housemates burrowed their way straight into the car industry, Dominic looked at it from the outside, and asked himself how his industrial design expertise could be applied industry-wide.
“I worked for a company manufacturing garden machinery, and I was trying to think of other things we could do because it was a very seasonal business,” says Dominic. “I had this idea for a fitted garage, based around the fact that everybody had fitted bedrooms, fitted bathrooms, fitted kitchens, but open the garage door, and it’s a mess.”
The initial idea was to fit out residential garages, but it soon became clear there was a huge opportunity amongst corporate clients. “The showrooms were amazing – all chrome and glass… but if you went into the workshop, it was a tip, just a disparate group of equipment. There was no ownership of the environment.”
Dominic saw an opportunity to neatly integrate everything in a manner that could maintain a manufacturer’s corporate identity (he loves this term), creating in the process a working environment for the hugely important technical and servicing staff that was just as slick and modern as anything customer-facing.
In 1997, Dura was created to capitalise on this opportunity. His first big client was Aston Martin, then in the midst of one of their periodic swings out of a period of uncertainty as they prepared to launch the original Vanquish. “I made a prototype, and invited a couple of guys down from Gaydon. The DB7 was in its ascendency, and Aston were going through their own corporate identity at the time. We were really fortunate, because they really loved the concept and decided they’d roll it out into their dealer network worldwide, which was a pretty brave thing of them to do. At the time, we were subcontracting the manufacturing and I was based in a grain barn down the side of a golf course.”
Dura has changed a little since those early days. All the manufacturing, for all the worldwide clients, is now done in-house at their facility in Plymouth. The significance of a company whose entire operation is British-based supplying companies worldwide isn’t lost on people, with Dura receiving numerous business and enterprise awards.
And their customer base really is worldwide, from small independent firms to the largest OEMs in the world. Dominic cites Japan as a major market, with a massive supply network servicing all the major manufacturers there.
Recently, they struck a deal with Gordon Murray Automotive, which isn’t overly surprising given the two firms are headed up by people who share an obsessive attention to detail. Looking around Dura’s display units, Dominic tells us of the painstaking efforts he went to in ensuring that the gas struts on an overhead cupboard were perfectly damped. It reminds us of tales of Gordon Murray spending hours upon hours perfecting the weight and feel of the T.50’s gearshift.
You’ll see Dura branding at C&M, too, by the little workshop that used to house suspension savant Ben Broke-Smith of String Theory Garage. Dominic fitted out Ben’s space here, and when he quickly outgrew The Hill and moved to new digs in Stratford-upon-Avon, Dura stepped in there, too.
The fundamental appeal here is of something that’s not only incredibly functional and well made, but uses these aspects’ inherent qualities to produce something of wonderful visual design. It’s the same traits that define the best architectural and vehicle designs – the form doesn’t follow the function, but is instead born from it.
Dominic sums it up: “We’re a very design-led company. Some companies, when you talk to them about furniture, give you a blank look and say ‘you need to talk to the equipment people’. That’s kind of frustrating, because while it is equipment, it’s not just functional – it is part of the interior design.”
There’s a very good chance that your car has, at some point, been worked on somewhere outfitted with Dura’s products. It takes a shrewd businessperson to tap into these niches, but that’s what makes people like Dominic such interesting cogs in this vast machine.