Category: Business

It’s Not Hyperbole

Food & Drink, Marketing / Advertising, Patriotism, Trades

When I first referred to Jeremy Clarkson as “The Greatest Living Englishman”, it started off as a nod to his unflinching honesty when it came to everything he looked at, such as his (non-)review of some Vauxhall car model back in the 1990s:  “If they’re not going to bother to make an interesting car, I’m not going to bother to review it.”

That caused Big Business (in this case, Vauxhall’s then-parent company General Motors) to go apeshit, because that’s not the way car reviewers are supposed to behave.

It’s that same unflinching honesty that he displayed in his first bumbling efforts at farming which turned his Clarkson’s Farm TV show into a runaway smash hit, and along the way almost single-handedly changed the way the British regard both food and the farmers who produce it.

So when he turned that same agricultural ignorance towards brewing beer — simply because he had a barn full of unsold barley which he needed to sell — one might think that it was just another celebrity using their name to sell a product.

In this case, one would be not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong.  And if you want to see a case study in marketing that, in hindsight, never had a chance of failing, then I implore you to watch this video.

Time and time again, “the experts” believed that Clarkson was making a mistake, and every single time he proved them not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong.

He turned a few thousand pounds’ worth of unsold barley into a £75 million company, and in the process, changed the way British people think about farming, about beer and about the people who farm and the people who brew beer.

And he did it all with his usual unflinching honesty and openness, which gave the lie to the usual corporate veneer of respectability and care for both their employees and their customers.

Which is why he truly is the Greatest Living Englishman.

I can’t wait to try it the next time I go over to Britishland.

So Long, Faerie

Corporate Wokism, Drive Time

It’s probably too late, of course, but I see that Jaguar Land Rover (JLR, to use their stupid non-brand acronym) has finally decided to can the woke twerp who turned Jag into… well, nothing.

Just the “relaunch” ad’s smug payoff line was enough to set my teeth on edge:

“We’re here to delete ordinary. To go bold. To copy nothing.”

I hate to tell them this but if Jaguar was anything, it wasn’t “ordinary”.  And frankly, if anything was worth copying, it was Jaguar’s heritage of wonderful, sleek and bold designs.

I’d post pics of the suggested modern replacement for the above (as envisaged by the now-departed Gerry McGovern), but I don’t want to ruin anyone’s appetite.

I just wonder what Jag is going to do now?

Update:  OMFG

Playing Sherlock

Drive Time, Trades

Okay, as a longtime data geek and mechanical moron, this video had me enthralled.  What was it all about?  Some guys asking themselves “Why?”

This brand new L87 engine with ZERO miles never even made it into a vehicle before it was condemned by GM. It failed one of their quality control Pico tests and we want to know why. In this video, we tear it down, take some measurements, and run tests to uncover why it was tossed in the trash — and how this single engine design ended up costing GM over a billion dollars in recalls and warranty repairs.

I don’t have the faintest clue what any of the technical pieces or terms are all about, but the search is absolutely thrilling.  It’s when these mechanics start looking at the data gathered from analysis of the different engine components that my inner data geek gets excited,

It’s the kind of stuff I used to do at The Great Big Research Company in my initial job in the Stat department:  picking at the data, looking for stuff which shouldn’t be there and is, and/or stuff which should be there and isn’t.

My favorite quote:  “These are big numbers.  Are they big enough to ruin an engine?” (He’s talking about a hundred thousandths of an inch, which in the real world would scarcely matter except when you’re looking at precision-made machinery.)

I’m not going to post a spoiler, here, but it involves the level of chamfering around some holes.

What I truly love is the level of expertise shown by all the guys in the video — and when they bring in Dave himself, his explanation of the problem is absolutely brilliant.

Go and watch the video.  It’s half an hour out of your day, and I promise you that you won’t be disappointed.  Even if you’re not the slightest bit interested in the minutiae  of engines — which would make you similar to me — the journey is worth the time.

Stupid Money

Drive Time, Marketing / Advertising, The Gun Thing

Via Insty (again), I see that Overfinch has crafted a line of bespoke Range Rovers in Holland & Holland livery:

The 2025 Range Rover Holland & Holland Overfinch’s interior is much more overtly extravagant, though Range Rover’s minimalist form language still dominates. Most surfaces are wrapped in Bridge of Weir leather, and those that are not are instead covered with open-pore French walnut veneer or real metal. The stainless-steel inserts in the doors feature the same engraved scroll work as on the “Royal” shotguns, the engraved diamonds embedded in the veneers in the doors echo those on the guns’ stocks, and the Holland & Holland crest is inlaid on the front and rear center consoles, the latter housing a Champagne cooler and a pair of Champagne flutes.

The leather seats feature a unique quilting pattern that also echoes the Holland & Holland diamond motif and features illustrations of game birds stitched into the backrests. In the duo-tone colorway the front seats are trimmed mainly in Harris Green and the rears mainly in London Tan.

Sounds like something an Arab oil sheikh would want to putter around his Scottish estate in, playing a Laird.  Still, I like that interior.

Of course, from the outside the thing is 2025 Rolls-Royce-level Fugly:

…but not as ugly as its price of $650,000.

To put it into perspective, that’s just over the price of three new H&H Royal and a couple-three of their secondhand Royal shotguns.

Lovely as all get-out, but not even with a lottery winning would I be tempted.  And that’s by any of them:  the H&H Range Rover or the H&H shotguns, which taken as the package above would set you back about a million bucks.

Maybe the parvenu status-seekers of today’s ultra-wealthy set would be tempted by such blatant brand-harvesting… hence the title of this post.

As for myself (given a lottery winning as above), my choices are below the fold. Read more

Yee Hah

Business

“Come and do yer bidness in Texas” seems to be the current thing.

Coinbase followed other companies reincorporating in Texas after the state legislature in 2023 created the first-of-its-kind specialized trial court to oversee complex business-to-business litigation. It first convened last September. 

This year, the legislature passed SB 29 to create a series of corporate reforms governing certain business entities. It “enhances the predictability and efficiency of Texas entity law and governance while maintaining strong protections for entity owners and transparency,” The Center Square reported. They include codifying the business judgment rule to allow corporations to establish a minimum ownership threshold before a shareholder or group of shareholders can pursue a derivative claim, among other provisions.

The legislature also passed HB 40 to amend state law to enhance Texas Business Court operations statewide, expanding subject matter jurisdiction to include intellectual property, clarifying its supplemental jurisdiction, allowing companies to designate the court as the exclusive venue in their governing documents for dispute resolution, among other measures.

The new laws provide business decision makers “with certainty that sound business judgments made in the best interest of shareholders will not be second-guessed by courts. Absent acts of violent crime, business decisions are to be made by the elected officers and shareholders, not by unelected judges,” Abbott said when signing them into law. “It also eliminates rogue shareholders with just a handful of shares of stock in a company from being able to hold a company hostage from the ability to make sound business decisions.”

Just make sure that your employees become Texans, i.e. they have to leave all their East-Coast politics and -beliefs behind.  Especially that Woke/DEI bullshit and fondness for Big Gummint, because we don’t do that here.

And they need to buy some guns as soon as they can — just to establish their bona fides, so to speak.