Dyson Signs gets to grip with a commercial fit-out for the country’s biggest…

We don’t buy cars the way we used to. Despite the presence of many of the franchises’ shrines to brand and the experience that surrounds them, like other markets, the one that keeps the wheels turning under automobiles, has gravitated toward digital. 

The largest digital automotive marketplace in the UK and Ireland belongs to Autotrader. The company presides over about ten million transaction every year and operates on a scale sufficient to have changed how consumers shop for cars. Autotrader is powered by an intent to facilitate the process of buying a car from desire to decision. It’s platform offers consumers a selection of almost half a million vehicles with almost fifty-thousand being new. It’s come a long way since John Madejski launched the enterprise in the 70s as a small, regional magazine.

Despite its online presence, Autotrader needs to accommodate a workforce that’s growing. It had plans to build an entirely new facility but the pandemic delayed them. That said, progress waits for nobody and so the company decided, pending the delivery of its new home, to extend the size of its existing workplace and quickly got to grips with the project. That involve transforming an anonymous expanse of office space into something better reflecting its brand and better suited to housing its workforce. 

Quite a job.

Autotrader reached out to Wagstaff Interiors, the UK’s leading commercial office design and fit-out company and found its needs met in full. Office design and fit out is a deep specialisation that Wagstaff has made an art of its own. Its interiors are dramatic, memorable and above all efficient in terms of the measures applied to working environments.

Wander far enough into any deep specialisation and you’ll find others. Custom manufactured and installed ambient graphics and decor emerges in Autotrader’s fit out with printed and applied elements provisioned to walls and pillars and etch effect privacy measures  decorating glazed meeting room partitions. Sheffield based Dyson Sign was engaged by Wagstaff Interiors to produce these and other custom elements of the fit.

Dyson Signs work for Wagstaff Interiors and Autotrader amounts to a vibrant exemplar of how materials and technology are changing long established trades like commercial decor. Faced with a choice of having what’s on the shelf of a supplier of commercial wall coverings, or what’s on the minds of its designers, Wagstaff elected to work with Dyson Signs and so made its fit out for Autotrader very much the company’s own.

Dyson Sign used a variety of Metamark Materials in delivering its work for Wagstaff. Among them MD-WA from Metamark’s range of applied digital decor materials and a selection of Metamark Etch Effects from the Glazing Materials selection.

Working with an enterprise like Wagstaff Interiors requires an expertise in project management that Dyson Signs can claim. Every detail was managed down to the hour and place and, as a result, Autotrader now has space to expand and time to concentrate on the development of its new premises.