Our Tailor Made Pista Journey

Hi Everyone, one thing I’ve thought about doing for the past 18 months was a step by step write up about the experience of going through Tailor Made, but never got round to doing it. Now that I’ve just received my TM Pista and I’m stuck at home in lockdown like everyone else I thought I’d take the opportunity to share the experience with you all.

Firstly, I’ll start by saying I’ve got nothing but good things to say about this whole process, the whole thing start to finish has exceeded my expectations and if any of you have the chance to go through the process I can’t recommend it enough.

1. The Beginning

As soon as the Pista was revealed I loved it, I was a previous owner of a 458 and although clearly more powerful and technologically advanced I was never really enamored with the styling of the 488 GTB. For me the Pista changed all that I loved the tech and the way it looked right from day 1.

At the time I’d recently taken delivery of one of the last year of production F12’s so wasn’t really looking for another replacement but there was something about the Pista that kept playing on my mind.

It didn’t take long for me to head down to my dealer to start discussing how I might get my hands on one. I’d ordered new cars before but had never been on a factory tour or done anything with the Atelier or Tailor Made, with the Pista being a special edition car I figured it might be worth going full-on and seeing if there was the possibility of getting a TM slot. After some back and forth discussion I got myself an allocation and a slot with TM. Timing was to be determined but I wasn’t in a rush and was excited with the prospect of having something that was truly going to be one of one.

2. The Factory Visit

It took a few months to get a date confirmed for the appointment at Maranello, but it did come and we were locked in for a visit in late Dec 2018. My dealer organized a whole day for us at the factory, the day was freezing cold with snow of the ground, our day started in the morning on a factory tour, followed by lunch at Cavallino. The tour was excellent and enabled us to see many areas of the factory including the Foundary, V8 line, V12 line, the Classiche department, the garage where the XX series cars are kept and the F1 department.

After lunch we headed back over to the factory and to the TM department. We were greeted by Stephanie who spent the afternoon expertly guiding us through the process. The TM facility is a modern building inside the factory, once inside we went into the design studio. The first impression of the design studio is overwhelming, there are what seem to be hundreds of color plates on the walls, with countless options for interior materials / fabrics / colors. In addition to those on display there are also countless books and swatches of samples, you could honestly spend days just looking through the options.

For anyone considering going through this process, I would recommend that you have some idea of what you would like to do with your design before you arrive otherwise I could easily see how you could get into analysis paralysis.

I had a clear idea in my head that I wanted a red car with some sort of contrast detailing, with that as a starting point the TM team started by working to collect all the red sample plates that we liked the look of. With so many to choose from it was somewhat of a complex task however with the help of a light box to simulate different conditions we soon reduced the list down and came to a short list.

At this point we sat down at the design table to start work with the team. The team compromised of Stephanie plus 2 colleagues, one team member focused on helping with color / contrast choices and the other running a live session on photoshop connected to the largest flat panel screen I’ve ever seen. As we were selecting design options the photoshop rendering was being updated in real time to visualize what we were creating.

We tried a red car with what felt like every contrasting color available. Nothing really worked for us however we did like the simplistic design of red with white. We worked with this concept for a while and then realized what we liked was a white car with a red stripe. Once we’d settled on that combo it was back to the light box to pick the exact colors. When looking at the red’s initially we had really liked Rosso Coburn, it had such a vibrancy to it and when compared to other options was the red we most preferred. Then came the selection options for the white, who knew that there were so many options for white, we were looking for something a little special so started looking at the metallic and multi-layer whites. We finally settled for Bianco Liana, to our eyes this what the brightest, ‘whitest white’ we could find that has a sort of pearl effect in it and contrasted with Rosso Coburn very well.

The exterior color choices were now done but what about the design for the stripe, after going all through this TM process we wanted to so something unique with the stripe, having looked again at countless options, we liked the idea of an asymmetrical stripe, there was a simple two stripe design which was shown to us, but we wanted something a bit different so worked on a multi stripe asymmetrical design. As soon as we saw this drawn on the photoshop rendering we knew that was it.

I always felt that the design of the Pista called out for a stripe down the side and as such we decided to take the red detailing down the side of the car too.

Now the exterior was done, we were focused on interior details. I’ve never been a huge fan of alcantara for interior seat surfaces and was interested to see if there were any other material choices for the interior. The dash components are only available in leather or alcantara, I believe due to the airbags having to be certified to break through the material. We chose alcantara for the interior component except the seats. Looking through the materials we chose ‘Micro Prestige’ a synthetic material which gives the appearance on a grain less leather with a slightly rubberized feeling texture. We followed though the color accents from the exterior into the interior seat design.

And like that we were done, the whole process took several hours and as we left we were given a USB stick with our design on it in a TM tin.

3. The Confirmations

Several months went by and then we received a detailed drawing of some of the design elements which we had specified for the car, it was a nice touch and was clearly hand drawn by the design team. Along with the drawing came additional renders of our design for our sign off.

When we received the renders we weren’t happy with how the side stripe had turned out, it was much bigger that we had expected and not to our taste. We fed this back to the TM team, via our dealer, and they came up with a new design that we were very happy with, they changed the side stripe design to a design that complimented the asymmetrical stripe over the top of the car.

We signed off the design and now we waited…

4. The Wait

We finally confirmed our design in the March 2019-ish timeframe and then we knew it was going to be a wait until production started. We confirmed the rest of our options with the deal (car play, carbon fiber etc), these are the ‘standard’ options when you spec a car at the dealer.


5. The build

Several months went by and then finally we got the email to say that our first production line photo was available. Like everyone else’s picture this just shows the body in white, this was quickly followed though with the remaining 2 production line pictures. We were excited.


6. The arrival.

The car finally arrived at the dealer in March 2020, it looked amazing as we had hoped. We had it clear bra’d and then shipped to us. Overall we couldn’t have been happier with the outcome, it is a car we are going to keep for a long time to come.


Hopefully this gives you a little insight into the TM process for those who haven’t had the opportunity to experience, many thanks to everyone at our dealer and the factory for the amazing experience and phenomenal car.


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Thanks everyone for your kind comments, they are much appreciated. Very happy with the way the car came out, I think having the option of this program is amazing. It really does give people the ability to create something custom which suits their own tastes / desires. Looking through the Pista pictures threads there are so many excellent choices people have made, the folks at the factory are great as well to make sure you don't make any serious faux pas! At one point we chose some colors which were translated to the designer who was working on photoshop (he only spoke limited English), his face said it all, sort of a, why on earth would you do that, he did it though on the screen and true to form it looked terrible. There were a lot of polite comments in the room about, not being sure if that was a great look, we just laughed and said, 'no it looks terrible', you could hear the sigh of relief in the room I guess there is always a challenge between keeping the client happy and being in good taste.

Regarding price, the TM paint and interior specifics came to ~$80k, this was paint, stripe, custom door sills, micro prestige interior, special stitching, mats etc
This is in addition to the 'standard' option list items like carbon fiber, car play, lift kit etc.

My impression is that mine was on the more 'modest' end of what people have done with TM. I'm sure you might easily be able to double that or more, if you went for more exotic choices and complex paint designs / patterns. One thing to note is that price is not a point of discussion when in the design studio, the design you work on is packaged up and an estimate of cost comes several months later with the renders etc.

 

One more shot to show how bright Bianco Liana is... here is a shot with my friend's 458, his car is Bianco Avus.
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