Auto Makers Shift Into New Gear

It simply wasn’t enough to be what we drive.

Now we wear what we drive. Or dream about driving.

And that means hats, jackets, shirts, shoes, sweaters and sweats, gloves, Ts and ties, watches--even slippery silk underwear--purchased through automobile showrooms, which are suddenly competing with Nordstrom as places to shop until your wheels wobble.

Friendly Ferrari dealers, for example, have raced up-market to haughty Asprey of Bond Street, London. They offer the Ferraristo who has everything a one-tenth scale, hand-beaten, micrometer-precise, solid silver model of a Formula 1 race car. Principals only, please. Costs depend on model and the price of silver at market close. But expect to pay $75,000.

“We do have more ordinary items, the key chains, the wallets, bathrobes, golf bags, driving gloves, an attache case and a set of matching leather luggage for just $2,500,” says Giampaolo Letta, spokesman for Ferrari of North America. “We also sell an old style deerskin leather helmet for $175, like the one Nuvolari wore, for those who drive our vintage cars.”

That luggage, incidentally, is pigskin, tailored to fit the trunk of your Italian fantasy in gift-wrap red, and comes monogrammed with Ferrari’s prancing stallion and your car’s serial number.

Although not quite an explosion, shopping car showrooms for everything but cars has grown in the past decade from coffee mugs sold through parts departments to a cluster of plump catalogs and a clutter of boutiques--including tweedy displays selling clothing of the landed gentry from Land Rover dealerships.

There’s the Rolls-Royce Collection and the Bentley Selection, Toyota Outfitters, the Ford Collection, Land Rover Gear, Saturn Stuff, and the online Lexus Emporium. Jeep has licensed its heritage and allows its name to appear on boonie jackets sold by Dayton-Hudson department stores and on a military-hefty portable radio available from Hammacher Schlemmer and similar stores of sharper imagery.

And in dignified rivalry with Bloomingdale’s--with a mailing list geared to that precise level of expensive loot--comes a glossy, full-color, 55-page catalog of Mercedes-Benz Personal & Automotive Accessories.

There are Wittnauer watches wearing the MB trihedral, Caran d’Ache ballpoints, Bally bomber jackets and silk boxer shorts designed by artist Nicole Miller printed with Mercedes machines, ancient and modern. As Saturn owners wear hearts on their sleeves, so a Mercedes driver may now wear a 300SL Gullwing on his thigh.

And the ultimate in pricey personal transportation--next to a Mercedes 500SL: an aluminum mountain bike that collapses into its own case. At $3,300, the price might also collapse the average Kmart shopper.

Steve Beaty, head of accessories marketing for Mercedes, says the catalog was developed and expanded to squash two woes.

One: Sweatshop entrepreneurs who rip off the historic logo and glue it to $3 baseball caps, hardly in keeping with Mercedes’ upright, uptight, upper-class image.

“Especially when the logo falls off,” Beaty notes.

Two: Customers who complained, loudly and in several languages, about high pricing of say, a Mercedes polo shirt.

“They had a point,” Beaty says. “Why pay twice the price of an ordinary shirt just because it had our triangle on it?”

So Mercedes recruited big names--Bolle for sunglasses, Dennis Holt for automobile art, Bally for leather--to design products exclusive to Mercedes and its catalog.

Beaty recalls one customer shopping for a package deal: a mountain bike and a sedan. The bikes, surprisingly, were back ordered. The man, emphatically, said no bike, no deal.

“Of course we rushed one out to him,” Beaty says. “He bought the bike and [a $44,000] E-Class.”

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Saturn pitches its gift items to lower rollers.

“What you’d pay for that Ferrari luggage would make a great down payment on one of our new cars,” says Greg Martin of Saturn sales and marketing. “We’re honest enough to say our product doesn’t have the cachet of BMW or Mercedes.”

So Saturn’s showroom and catalog sales stay with typical families and affordable standards. Saturn shirts. Travel clocks. Coloring books. Stuffed animals. Ties and a quartz watch--and nothing more than $100. By a gentleman’s agreement with the UAW, there are no Taiwan tags on the T-shirts because just like the car, every Saturn souvenir is made in the United States.

Companies are understandably cautious about releasing amounts of dollars earned, or lost, by this aftermarket marketing. But Lexus is recording annual catalog sales of $650,000 from a seven-year program growing at a rate of 15% a year. Jaguar says that in five years, its book has swollen from 30 items to more than 150.

But not every suggestion makes the cut.

“We had a vendor come to us and suggest a Mace canister that would carry the Lexus logo,” remembers Gusty Lowenberg of Lexus. “Had to tell him: ‘I don’t think so, guy.’ ”

Clearly, the reputation and market position of the company dictate the variety and style of its byproducts. Ford’s catalog places heavy emphasis on its successful motor sports campaigns, with goodies ranging from a $3 pocket patch to a $1,200 leather jacket with checkered stripes. Jaguar sells its leaping kitty hood ornaments mounted on a block made from the walnut that goes into its dashboards. Land Rover’s products reflect most things British and all things outdoors, which includes gamekeeper’s jackets and wool shirts in Tattersall checks.

“And a collapsible shooting stool, so you can have a cappuccino from the Thermos while sitting at the back of your Range Rover,” says Terry Drake, supervisor of the 2-year-old Land Rover Gear program.

There is, Drake acknowledges, a certain vanity involved in buying Land Rover clothing to advertise ownership when away from your Land Rover. In the case of one man, it was more a matter of aspiration.

He visited the agency in Mission Viejo not to buy a vehicle, but to stock up on clothing. Drake says the customer explained he was “starting his Land Rover lifestyle, his odyssey, early by wearing the gear . . . and would be buying his Discovery in a year or two.”

Saturn’s Martin understands that mood.

He rides a Japanese-built Yamaha motorcycle.

But he buys his biker clothing from all-American Harley-Davidson.

“No defense,” he says. “I think their boots look cool.”