You know you’re winning the design game when your brand’s followers spend hours on YouTube guessing the color palette of your upcoming launches – and as videos like “ALL The RIVIAN COLORS Compared!!!” attest, the electric vehicles company has earned close and constant assessment of its most minute design elements. Irvine, California-based Rivian made its name with the launches of the R1T (a truck) and R1S (an SUV). They’ve expanded upon that vocabulary with the March reveals of the lower-priced R2, R3, and R3X – adventure vehicles that, Jeff Hammoud (Chief Design Officer at Rivian) says, were designed to get dirty. (And clean easily.) “We’re an EV brand that creates adventure vehicles – so when you think of what adventure means, adventure can mean many things,” he says. “We looked at the equipment and the gear that people use and really tried to incorporate that into our design language in terms of our form but also the color material usage. One of the things that’s great about lifestyle brands, especially within active lifestyle, is that you can get something that feels very premium, but still invites you to use it and get dirty. That’s really important for us at Rivian. It feels premium, but you’re not afraid to get dirty.” The adventure aesthetic pops up in other, unexpected ways – a carabiner featured on a color materials table, for palette inspiration, ended up influencing the design of a headlight.
Also in this week’s Milkshake, we asked Hammoud what it was like moving from Rivian’s debut vehicles to its new ones. “The R1 was our first vehicle – our handshake with the world, and number two is our second album,” he says. “For the second album, we have to build off of what everybody loved with the first album, but it has to have its own unique character and its own unique feeling.” Part of that was making adjustments influenced by the R2’s lower price point. “With the R1, because of its price point, we were able to get a lot of our cool features and design because we weren’t that restricted on price point as much as we are on R2,” he says. “We want R2 to reach a lot more customers – so we really have to think about what we’re going to say no to, without the car feeling cheaper or diluted, but still having the Rivian brand essence. How far do we push our second product? Do we want it to be completely different, or do we want it to be similar to and build off of what we have? With R2, we purposely made a conscious decision to make it feel like a smaller R1S, but when we showed R3, it showed how we can actually stretch the brand in a very different direction.” For more, tune in!
Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.
Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators, and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life, and passions.
