Gareth Jones
For nearly 10 years, Gareth Jones ran his own business specialising in high quality chocolates from around the world. A surprising background for the newly appointed Director of Trucks at Rightech.
But a deeper delve into Gareth’s impressive CV reveals almost two decades’ leadership experience in the automotive industry with leading names like General Motors, PSA Peugeot Citroen and GAZ, a leading Russian OEM.
“It’s very interesting to be back in the automotive world,” says Gareth. “I landed there rather by accident but it is a place where I’ve been happier than any other, because it is always new and evolving.”
As evidence of that, Gareth is now heading up Rightech’s Truck division, with the first product due to be launched in January.
“The first units should be available for demonstration purposes in March next year. We have already started the process of contacting major fleets and have been delighted by the interest we are getting.”
Gareth’s “accidental” move into the automotive world is far from a straight line. He studied languages and economics at Loughborough, including a year at a bank in Germany to “learn the language properly”.
“I got involved in a couple of discussions and people thought: ‘This guy seems to understand about advertising and marketing’. Of course, I knew nothing, but I thought I’d go and find it out. So I went to Bristol and studied it for a year.”
Gareth started working at Yorkshire Building Society before moving to an agency in London. The agency life didn’t suit him, and that is when his career took another unexpected turn.
“I was in my mid-20s, playing lots of rugby and squash, and very, very fit – not needing to lose a pound ever and went to an interview for what turned out to be with Weight Watchers. It was owned by Heinz at the time, and it was a very disciplined environment. I learned huge amounts about marketing and how to run a business.”
From there, Gareth joined Eurocamp, which was looking to “up its marketing game”.
“I was marketing director for a few years, and then got another phone call, implausibly, from the automotive business in the form of General Motors. Obviously my expertise was not automotive, it was service industry and brand marketing. But GM was looking for people to raise their game on brand marketing and understanding service businesses was a big advantage, because automotive is historically rather poor at service.”
From Brand Manager with Vauxhall, Gareth went on to become Marketing and Distribution Director for GM Netherlands and then heading up web development and marketing for GM Europe.
It was at GM Europe Gareth first met Jean-Marc Gales, now CEO of Wrightbus, who was looking for a European marketing director for GM’s commercial vehicles business.
Via a stint with GAZ in Russia, where he met his now wife, Gareth was reunited with Jean-Marc at Peugeot/Citroen where he was appointed Commercial Vehicles Director of Business Development. Gareth and his wife married in the UK (“Getting a Brit and a Russian married in France was going to be a lifetime of paperwork”) but he was living in Paris while his wife was still in Moscow. After a while he decided to move back to the UK and eventually the couple decided to turn their shared love of artisan chocolate into a business.
“We curated a range of the best, of the best – Belgium’s finest, France’s finest, Italy’s finest. etc. We had a store in Notting Hill, did a lot of ecommerce and started up quite a nice extra line on corporate sales. Selling welcome chocolates to top end hotels.”
But then the business was hit by the double whammy of Brexit (“overnight our costs rose 15%”) and the Covid-19 pandemic (“suddenly there were no artisan kitchens and no hotels”).
And now Gareth finds himself back in the automotive industry, looking forward to helping accelerate the decarbonisation of the transport industry.
“It’s very early stages but I’m very encouraged by the reaction we have had so far,” says Gareth. “People are happy to look at a completely new organisation and talk about a product they’ve not yet seen because they realise this could be a game changer for them.
“It will be interesting to see what happens when we get people behind the wheel and they can give it a go. Can we convert that interest into sales? That’s the interesting part for me.
“Our unique selling point is that our price point makes it very affordable – completely different from most BEV trucks and closer to diesel. It all comes down to total cost of ownership. With zero-emission zones in so many places, in some cases the TCO is better than an equivalent diesel truck.”
