“We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback,” Allen Brown, Ford’s color and materials design manager, told Automotive News. “I got a sense that it was almost a sense of relief [from suppliers] that we were still operating at capacity, engaging them and requiring them to do stuff. It takes a little longer, but it’s still moving, getting the suppliers what they need to get the parts to go into the vehicle.”
The early days of the work-from-home experiment were rocky, Brown said, as Ford attempted to redirect supplier deliveries to workers’ homes.
Ford also had to scramble to order and expedite delivery of $150 handheld lights, which they had previously experimented with in-studio.
But after the initial stretch, which Brown described as a “shock to the system,” workers got in a groove.
The designers spend most days validating samples, making sure the color on a Mustang’s headliner, for example, matches the color on the pillars.
They’re also working with suppliers on vehicles further out in Ford’s product pipeline, creating new hues to sell alongside the Grabber Blue, Twister Orange and Race Red offered today.
