Mike Wuerthele
Apple's former design lead Jony Ive has signed a long-term partnership deal with car manufacturer Ferrari and holding company Exor.
The multi-year deal between Exor and Ive's LoveFrom was announced on Monday.
"The first expression of this new partnership will bring together Ferrari's legendary performance and excellence with LoveFrom's unrivaled experience and creativity that has defined extraordinary world changing products," the statement from Ferrari holding company Exor said.
"In building great companies, we also believe in building great partnerships. Soon after LoveFrom was founded we began to talk with Jony and Marc about opportunities to combine their world-renowned creativity with ours, in complementary and incremental ways," Chairman and Chief Executive of Exor and Chairman of Ferrari John Elkann said. "Ferrari represents a first, exciting chance to do great things together as we build our future. I'm also delighted that Jony is joining our Partners Council where we look forward to benefitting from his uniquely valuable perspectives."
Beyond just Ferrari, Exor owns a stake in Christian Louboutin. It also holds large portions of auto industry group Stellantis, a majority stake in both media firm Gedi, and sports group Juventis. Exor Seeds has invested in 42 companies globally.
Ive and Marc Newson broke their customary silence, and issued a statement about the deal as well.
"We have been friends with John for many years and are great admirers of his insight and vision. We are thrilled to be embarking on such an important, long term collaboration with Ferrari and more broadly Exor," the pair said. "As Ferrari owners and collectors, we could not be more excited about collaborating with this extraordinary company and in particular with the design team expertly led by Flavio Manzoni. We see some uniquely exciting opportunities working together which we believe will yield important and valuable work."
Ive will join Exor's Partners Council. The Council is an annual forum, and "draws on the experience, expertise and insights of a group of highly successful Exor friends and partners, to share ideas and explore potential business opportunities" according to Exor.
Ive departed from Apple in 2019 after nearly three decades with the tech giant. He was involved in many iconic projects iMac to iPod to iPhone, and even Apple Park itself.
Even with Monday's announcement, LoveFrom remains secretive. The company does not have a public-facing website, but it was discovered in October 2020 that Airbnb had hired LoveFrom to assist in the design of future products and services.
The Apple Silicon iMac released in April of 2021 was at least partially designed by Ive. It's not clear if the design work was done before or after Ive's departure from Apple in 2019.
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9 Comments
So does that mean Ferraris will focus more on looking good than anything else?
Such good news that RACE (Ferrari NV) is down .52% as I write this... Time to sell my Ferrari stock!
For Ferrari’s sake, I hope Jony is enthused enough to show up at meetings and provide real design support, as he “reportedly” wasn’t doing his last couple of years at Apple.
it just seems that when Steve Jobs died Jony lost all motivation to carry on and was unable to lead his design team effectively. It’s a shame. But I think the ID team is in good hands now.
One colour, slightly plasticised? I shouldn’t scoff, I like his designs, shame Apple Silicon was 5-years too late.