Brand visit a new series where we will visit Porsche upgrade brands accross the country in order to learn a bit more about their products and story.

For the first rendition of this series, we visited our long-term brand partners Bilstein in Leicestershire. You can shop Bilstein products for your Porsche here.

Aaron: Hi, I’m Aaron from Billstein.

I’m in charge of sales for Bilstein UK and Northern Europe, and I’ve been with the product for 20 years. I’m only 27, so it’s been a hard life.

Everything we send here is now for the UK market. So we are sending sometimes anywhere between 120 boxes plus 30 a day.

Okay, well, when did it first meet Design911? Probably back in 2002. I was dealing or had some dealings with Karl back then, only on a smaller scale.

So I think then our relationship really started to grow and we really started to look to Design as really a very important strategic customer moving forward.

I think the acquisition of the sales team, especially like the fast road kind of trade side, was really a good addition.

If one customer is buying everything from one place, it really makes sense to make sure that this place is a good strategic partner, and I really think that the boys there do a very good job for it.

So we’re in the main workshop. This is the small production line here we can build about 500 dampers a week.

Everything really starts in a small production island and it works all the way down.

So on the side you [can] see we’ve got filling machines, we’ve got testers, the row rigs – so everything here is physically tested before it’s sent out.

David: Hi. My name’s David Masters. I’m the workshop manager here at Bilstein in the UK. This is a workshop where we do all the special builds.

We service and we support OE manufacturers and we help out anyone who needs help with the products and do what we can.

Okay, so a few of the projects we’ve got going on at the moment just today we’ve got some armoured dampers we’re doing for a Land Cruiser 300 B60 damper, a really chunky thing for a car that’s weighing around 4.7 tons, and we’re also doing some tuning work with a client with some camper vans and asking for something bespoke that our engineering team made and we’ve just been finishing with them now, and on the other side, going through today, we’ve also got some really other end of the spectrum [things], some very small dampers for actually a motor car that we’re working at the moment.

Aaron: So why would a design911 customer choose a Bilstein damper? It’s simple, it’s because Porsche do.

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Special thanks to Aaron, David and Bilstein for allowing this interview to happen.