If you’ve not heard of Discommon, prepare to have your mind blown. They are in the business of creating rare products — as the company’s name suggests — across myriad industries. Lucky for us, Discommon founder Neil Ferrier is here to provide a first-hand perspective.
Whether in automotive, tech, medical or fashion, Ferrier and Discommon pride themselves in producing only top-grade goods. Incidentally, their success, smarts and connections have allowed Neil to acquire one of Italy’s holy grail vehicles: the Dallara Stradale.
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Neil has ambitious plans for 2025. Follow along as this brilliant designer shares high-octane stories and experiences with PLAYBOY’s Gabriel Santiago.
PLAYBOY: Let’s start at the beginning—where are you originally from?
Neil Ferrier: I hail from Auchterarder, Scotland. It’s a small Scottish town of about 5,000 people, but it is famous because it has The Gleneagles Hotel, which is one of the more iconic hotels in the U.K. It was a wild little town to grow up in, because even though it’s not very populated, we had the G8 Summit (where every head of state was in town). Also, we’ve had the Ryder Cup and other major golf tournaments.
PLAYBOY: Can you remember your initial experience with PLAYBOY?
Neil Ferrier: Yes, I have a funny story that ties in my hometown.
So, my dad helped run golfing at Gleneagles forever. He was building a shooting school with Formula 1 driver Sir Jackie Stewart! I’m going to maybe forget the exact details, but at one point, PLAYBOY embedded an editor/writer with Sir Stewart to travel around with his team.
I remember Jackie telling my dad that the PLAYBOY Interview (June ’72) was the most in-depth interview he’d ever done. He said it was an incredible experience for him. That was one of my first interactions with the magazine—kind of random!
PLAYBOY: How awesome! Back in the present, tell me about Discommon and what you do there.
Neil Ferrier: Discommon is an interesting company because we’re basically all remote, but we’ve worked together for quite some time. Jeremy Hadden and I have worked together for close to 18 years, Kevin Coss and I are closing in on 10. On the surface, most people would assume that we are just a design firm, which means you solve problems for people who are creating something. “Hey, you guys are good at this. You have a lot of experience. Can you design it?” Our clients range from publicly traded medical companies, to Under Armour, to hotels, to whiskey companies. It’s a gamut of different categories.
The unique part is that we’ve always manufactured, as well. Currently, I would actually describe us as a design and manufacturing firm. More often, we are taking on something that we are going to end up making ourselves. That could be a collection for accessories for a large medical device firm, or much cooler, developing merchandise for a Formula 1 team. What keeps it interesting is be able to align our projects with our passions.
PLAYBOY: In that same vein, Blok Watches caught my eye. You have some sharp timepieces! What sets Blok apart from other watchmakers?
Neil Ferrier: It started as a kids company! I think that was the craziest part. I’m one of the founders, and I remember the first time we went for investment. A number of the people were like, “This is a sick watch, but why are you wasting it on kids?”
In reality, we wanted a smaller playing field because if we had just released an adult watch straight away, we would have been thrown into a minefield of a million other brands. I have two children, and we started Blok Watches when they were much younger. We designed a clear way to explain the passage of time. You and I have grown up with the concept of 15 minutes our whole life but children have no experience of that. It is a visual representation of “bloks” of time.
At Discommon, we like to say “f*ck mediocrity,” so we started to expand Blok. Eventually, we made adult watches and made them just as well as the kids watches: Sapphire-crystal lens, 10-year battery life, Swiss movement etc. We had to make it right, too. That’s a principle we stand by.
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PLAYBOY: Moving over to automotive, what inspired you to acquire the Italian beauty, Dallara Stradale?
Neil Ferrier: The Dallara Stradale has a pretty crazy story. Of course, Dallara is mostly known for producing some of the world’s finest chassis and carbon fiber work. There were many restrictions in place upon getting a Dallara Stradale from Italy to America. I initially put a deposit down on one before finding out that they wouldn’t sell it to me because I was in the U.S., where they hadn’t done crash testing. I was going to have to do a convoluted process of trying to buy it in the U.K., ship it over by myself etc.
Luckily, I have a friend in the car world who is nuts. He managed to have it imported into California, but couldn’t figure out how to get it registered. One day, I mischievously told him, “I want to take the Dallara from you. I can figure out how to get it plated!” It was a lot of work. There were a lot of steps, but it now has a registered plate on it. It was pretty wild. I was sitting there one day, just looking out my office thinking, “That’s the only one of these in America that’s able to be driven on the street!”
PLAYBOY: How did you initially fall in love with motorsports?
Neil Ferrier: Back to my earlier story—it was because of Jackie Stewart, for sure! Having my dad talk about him, a legendary F1 driver, with such fondness that went both ways, gave it a certain mystique.
I was raised around automotive and adored it properly. As they say, I have gas in my veins. Also, I grew up on a European magazine called Max Power. I don’t think it circulated in America, but that was our bible of car tuning. And for me, my first car was a 1.3 L pink Škoda Felicia, so I didn’t exactly start with a bang. It was a practical car that had low miles, so my parents were all for it.
PLAYBOY: Speaking of Formula 1, care to share what you have going on with the Scarbo SVF1?
Neil Ferrier: When I worked at Oakley in Orange County, there was this brilliant builder called Joe Scarbo. He had his finger in everything. Scarbo was building stuff for BBI Autosport, which does bespoke performance work on Porsches. He’s an engineer, but one of these savants that can really create anything that he sticks his mind to.
On this vehicle, Scarbo did a complete engineering of the chassis along with full finite element analysis for flex and stiffness. He engineered every component from the wheel upright being massive blocks of machined aluminum, to designing how the seat would sit in a vintage race car. Back then, he would let me drive it to Cars and Coffee in Irvine.
Since I live in South Carolina, where vehicular and traffic laws are more lenient, he helped me create my own build out here. To make the process even better, we at Discommon worked on the body shape with him. The body I wanted to mimic was Dan Gurney’s Eagle, which is one of the prettiest F1 cars ever created. Scarbo did all the engineering, though! The end result was an extremely lightweight machine with 520 horsepower and ultra-precise traction control. Hitting the apex and being able to literally see where you’re placing your tire is just the coolest experience.
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PLAYBOY: I hear you know Aimee Shackelford! Will you be attending her Super Bowl party in Las Vegas or any of her Monterey Car Week events?
Neil Ferrier: Yes, I will always see her in Monterey. I think I’ve done Pebble Beach about 15, 16 times. Others have religious pilgrimages and I have Monterey Car Week! It’s definitely a beautiful thing that Discommon is in the car industry, as well. It’s amazing to see friends from California, the U.K., Italy, China and more all descend on one place. It’s like this manic five days of catching up with humans that otherwise would take a global trip to complete.
PLAYBOY: What do you love most about living in the “Palmetto” State of South Carolina? How is life Upstate?
Neil Ferrier: I love that I am only a 20-minute drive from the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s so nice to go for a drive out here. I probably drove close to 400 miles this weekend and I don’t even really know where I went—I just drove. I can’t imagine a better weekend than that. To be able to check out and disappear is pretty fortunate!
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