McLaren has hired a Chief Creative Officer, and the org chart is the interesting part
McLaren Automotive has appointed David Woodhouse as Chief Creative Officer, adding him to the Executive Leadership Team with a remit that reads less like a design job and more like a brand-integrity mandate: vehicle and product design direction, brand identity, communications, retail environments, partnerships and licensed products.
Woodhouse is a serious hire. Most recently he ran Nissan Design America, where Nissan put him in charge of all Nissan and Infiniti design activity in North America and seated him on the global design management committee. Before that he was Lincoln design director at Ford. When Nissan hired him in 2019 it credited him with more than 25 years in the business. He is not a stylist parachuted in to sketch a silhouette; he’s a brand guy who happens to have spent a career in studios.
Which is exactly why the announcement is worth reading twice.
The bit that doesn’t quite add up
McLaren says Woodhouse will provide creative oversight across “vehicle and product design direction.” It also says Kemal Curic “continues to lead vehicle design,” and Henrik Wilhelmsmeyer “retains responsibility for brand and marketing execution.”
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Curic arrived as Chief Design Officer effective April 2026, and McLaren’s own announcement at the time said he would be responsible for shaping the design vision and creative direction of the McLaren Automotive portfolio, leading interiors, exteriors, CMF and digital design. That was four months ago.
So: one executive owns design vision and creative direction of the portfolio. Another now owns creative oversight of vehicle and product design direction. If you can draw a clean line between those two sentences, you’re doing better than I am. What McLaren is describing is a matrix, and matrices in design organisations tend to resolve one of two ways — either the senior creative voice becomes the de facto arbiter of taste and the design chief becomes an executor, or the arrangement quietly gets rewritten in eighteen months.
Worth noting the churn. McLaren appointed Tobias Sühlmann as Chief Design Officer in 2023, under the previous ownership and the previous “Future of Performance” strategy. Curic replaced him this April. Woodhouse arrives in August. That’s three senior creative leadership announcements in roughly three years at a company that builds a handful of model lines.
What the job actually is
Read the remit again and notice what’s in it that a design boss normally wouldn’t touch: retail environments, partnerships, licensed products.
That’s the tell. When Abu Dhabi’s CYVN Holdings completed its acquisition and folded McLaren Automotive together with the British start-up Forseven into McLaren Group Holdings, the new entity also took in a majority shareholding in McLaren Licensing — and the release stated flatly that the portfolio would be expanded into new product categories.
Look at what McLaren’s own newsroom is publishing right now and you can see the shape of the problem. The 788HS closing out the 720S-to-750S supercar lineage. The MCL-HY hypercar for the 2027 World Endurance Championship. And McLaren Golf, a new venture launching with its own irons.
A supercar company with a golf iron business, a licensing arm, a works endurance programme and an incoming range of vehicles in categories it has never sold into is a company at genuine risk of the brand meaning four different things in four different rooms. Somebody senior has to hold the line on what “McLaren” looks like when it’s a retail showroom, a set of clubs, a WEC livery and, eventually, something with four doors.
That’s Woodhouse’s actual job. The vehicle design oversight is almost the smaller half of it.
What this means for the cars — and when
Here’s the practical bit for anyone waiting to see a Woodhouse-influenced McLaren: you’ll be waiting a while.
Exterior surfacing on a low-volume car gets frozen well ahead of production — typically two to three years out, because the tooling, the aero validation and the crash structure all key off it. A creative executive arriving in August 2026 can shape brand identity, retail architecture and communications almost immediately, because those are decisions you can remake in months. He can shape programmes that haven’t passed their design gateway. He cannot meaningfully reshape a car that’s already in tooling.
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So expect the brand-side changes first: identity work, dealer environments, how the marketing looks. The metal comes later, and by then this will be at least the third design leadership regime with fingerprints on it — which is precisely the failure mode Woodhouse has presumably been hired to prevent.
Why owners should care
Brand consistency isn’t an abstraction when you own the car. Residual values on low-volume performance cars are heavily leveraged to how coherent and desirable the marque feels five years out, and coherence is the thing a rapidly expanding, newly owned, repeatedly restructured company loses first. A brand that goes broad and vague dilutes what your 750S is worth. A brand that goes broad and stays disciplined doesn’t.
Retail environments being in the remit also matters more than it sounds. Showroom overhauls tend to travel with network changes — franchise standards, investment requirements, sometimes consolidation. If your servicing dealer is a smaller operator, that’s the sort of programme that can quietly change where you take the car.
Woodhouse said the chance to shape how the brand is expressed across products, spaces, communications and experiences was compelling. It’s also enormous, and it comes attached to an executive structure that gives him authority over some of it and shared authority over the rest.
The hire is right. Whether the org chart around it survives contact with a product launch is the open question.
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