Southern California-based luxury electric vehicle automaker and high-tech incubator Karma Automotive unveiled its new dedicated design studio at its global headquarters in Irvine, Calif., before a group of local stakeholders, business leaders, and employees. The state-of-the-art studio further establishes Karma Design as a dedicated business unit for the company, to both drive the company’s unique design identity and syndicate its styling services.
The 12,000-square-foot design studio represents a multimillion-dollar investment and underscores Karma’s efforts to enhance and grow its design services. The new studio strengthens the company’s design capabilities as it readies itself for both future Karma design projects and those on behalf of other OEMs and startups. The new business unit is also tasked with offering luxury-lifestyle design services beyond automotive and developing and guarding the unique Karma’s design language.
“Karma Design plays an important role in Karma’s diversification efforts as we embrace new market opportunities and evolve toward the next phase of our future,” says Dr. Lance Zhou, Karma CEO. “Our dedicated in-house design team will lend their expertise to other OEMs, startups and those seeking to leverage our luxury- lifestyle design services beyond automotive.”
The new studio is designed to offer Karma’s signature luxury offerings to others and features a customization room for clients to tailor jewels, colors and materials to their unique specifications, in addition to a trim shop. A floor-to-ceiling power wall provides designers the opportunity to show full-scale concepts digitally, while clay modeling is completed on a new surface plate and state-of-the-art measuring towers.
“As Karma moves forward in new and excited directions, our new Design Studio is equipped to deliver luxury design services to both discerning Karma customers and business enterprises,” says Andreas Thurner, Karma’s Global Vice President, Design and Architecture. “The architecture of the new studio is minimalistic and modern; it is certain to bring fresh inspiration to our designers, partners and customers.”
Led by Thurner, Karma Design’s dedicated team encompasses skilled designers from across the globe with experience in a variety of industries including automotive, fashion, luxury goods and more. In addition to designing future Karma product, Karma designers will also lend their creative expertise and signature luxury offerings to OEMs, startups and design projects beyond automotive.
Karma’s design team is responsible for the iconic design language exhibited in the company’s striking SC1 and SC2 concept cars, and its reimagined 2020 Revero GT, which recently received the 2020 Luxury Green Car of the Year Award. The new design studio is part of a wider investment of more than $10M in new infrastructure at Karma’s Global Headquarters in Irvine, Calif., including a new dynamometer test facility and conference center.
