Cadillac House in New York
(Photo: General Motors)
General Motors’ luxury brand’s new boss will keep Cadillac’s headquarters in New York despite the ouster of the executive who led the move from Detroit.
Steve Carlisle will commute to Detroit or anywhere elsewhere in the world, as is needed to transform Cadillac into a top-selling luxury brand, GM said.
“It’s 100 percent that we’re staying here, that was never a question,” said Andrew Lipman, Cadillac spokesman in New York.
Steve Carlisle, GM senior vice president and president, Cadillac
(Photo: John F. Martin, General Motors)
The decision makes sense, analysts said, because Cadillac is not just a Detroit brand anymore. It is a global brand achieving big sales gains in China. Moving its New York headquarters would be costly and might result in a talent flight.
In a controversial move at the time, GM nearly four years ago moved Cadillac’s headquarters from Detroit to the 15th and 16th floors of a high-rise office building at 330 Hudson St. in the trendy lower Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo.
Then, in April this year, Cadillac abruptly replaced Johan de Nysschen as the brand’s boss with Carlisle. De Nysschen has been largely credited, or blamed depending on who’s asked, with the iconic Detroit brand’s departure to the Big Apple. But Lipman said GM leaders made that decision months before de Nysschen arrived.
“A luxury customer has different expectations from a volume brand customer, so Cadillac needed an organization that focused only on Cadillac,” Lipman said.
It also needed to attract talent that specialized in luxury branding. Cadillac employs about 140 to 150 full-time staff at its New York offices, said Lipman.
“New York made sense because it’s the epicenter of where luxury trends are made,” Lipman said.
To that end, Cadillac has retail space it calls Cadillac House in its New York office building. There, it displays cars, offers a coffee house and hold events. Cadillac has partnered with with the Council of Fashion Designers of America, for example. Every three months a different fashion designer curates Cadillac House space and host events there. It’s intended to draw new eyes to Cadillac, Lipman said.
“The amount of time people spend at Cadillac House has been increasing and it’s become a destination,” he said.
The New York location works for Cadillac too because it’s in the Eastern time zone and a brief flight to Detroit. That’s important because, he said, “We are still very much a part of GM and proudly so.”
Cadillac’s vehicles are designed and engineered in the Detroit suburb of Warren.
“Product is critical,” Lipman said. “Within Warren, we have a Cadillac-dedicated chief engineer and chief designer that have their own dedicated teams. So there is much alignment.”
Analysts agreed staying in New York makes sense for Cadillac at this time.
“One of their primary reasons for moving to New York was to attract cutting-edge talent,” said Jeremy Acevedo, analyst at Edmunds in Santa Monica, California. “People seeking employment in New York might not be willing to move to Detroit.”
Plus, Cadillac can still execute its upcoming product launches and continue working on brand transformation from anywhere, said Maryann Keller, principal of New York-area auto industry analyst firm Maryann Keller & Associates.
“It doesn’t matter where they’re located as long as they have leadership that directs them properly and can get their message heard when General Motors is allocating resources,” said Keller. “You can’t make Cadillac the No. 1 luxury brand if you don’t have the product to get you there.”
While Cadillac will launch the XT4 compact SUV in the fall and several more vehicles after that, at the moment, “Cadillac is still deficient” on product, said Keller, and must focus on that over any thought of relocating its operations.
Contact Jamie LaReau at jlareau@freepress.com or 313-222-2149.
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