The Founders showcases the inspiring journeys of visionary entrepreneurs who turned ideas into thriving businesses. Dive into captivating stories and insightful interviews with founders and CEOs, as they share their challenges, triumphs, and industry insights in this ongoing series.
Most people tend to enjoy their retirement for more than 48 hours, but Ian Callum was not one of those.
One of the founders of CALLUM, a cutting-edge design company, he spent 20 years as a designer for Jaguar where he gained a number of accolades and achievements before reaching retirement age.
However, as he tells Azzet, it didn’t seem to stick.
“I retired technically from Jaguar on Friday and on the Monday I started working [at CALLUM]” Callum says.
“Which is a bit daft, really, in retrospect I should have taken at least a month off, but I didn't.”
Despite his name being on the masthead, Ian was firm that this was a company borne from the hard work of multiple people.
“I was a little bit reluctant, because it's a bit like sticking your head above the parapets, you know, and I thought we would use all our initials or something and create some new name, but the other two decided to use my name.” Callum says.
"So that's not to say, it's just my business. There's the three of us [himself, David Fairbairn and Adam Donfranceso], I must make that quite clear.”
So, after his two-day retirement, what was it he was so eager to get started on?
'Regardless of what you're designing, the principles stay the same'
CALLUM doesn't let itself be pigeonholed when it comes to design, tackling everything from cocktail shakers and whisky, to chairs, and now its very own car, designed and built from the ground up in-house.
They have also collaborated externally with a wide spread of impressive brands including Aston Martin, Mulberry, Bremont, British Airways, McClaren and Lotus.
One of these projects stands out as a personal favourite to managing director, David Fairbairn, the martini shaker designed by CALLUM for British Airways.
The project, launched in 2023, saw the CALLUM team working with award-winning mixologist Ryan Chetiyawardana to deliver the “ultimate” martini mixer for British Airways and their first class lounge in Heathrow Airport.
“Obviously the testing was excellent, in terms of trying out all those Martinis,” Fairbairn quips. "It was a great collaboration between our engineering and design teams that worked together to develop a modern cylinder-shaped mixer inspired by British Airways' aircraft. When all the ingredients are added, its mixing paddles rotate at the optimum speed to create a perfectly blended Martini. That precision and balance between design and engineering is what we're all about."
“A lot of people think CALLUM, we're just a design team, but we've actually got a very strong engineering team as well and we pride ourselves on them all sitting together, talking together," he explains, with that pride still evident even now.
"That [collaboration] created this ultimate product which you know, wowed the various people in the first class lounge in T5 [Terminal 5] and Heathrow. So that was something really cool.”
'The automotive industry, product design, it's going through such a flux'
For Ian, it's a two-pronged response: the Callum lounge chair, saying he believes “every designer has to design a chair at some point in their life”, and the obvious choice of Skye, CALLUM's first completely in-house car project, announced back in November 2023.
It is a completely electric, all-wheel drive and has two model variants to offer: The Capable, which is offroad, all terrain, open two-door set up, and the Dynamic, which is smoother, and closed in, with prices ranging between £80,000 - £110,000.
Despite the joys of these projects and working with the CALLUM team, both David and Ian are forthright that starting and running a new design company, after decades in huge corporate automotive counterparts, has had its fair share of challenges.
“How long do you have Frankie?”, says Fairbairn when asked what some of those specific challenges are, and Callum immediately defers to the managing director to answer this one.
“I'd say probably one of the biggest challenges is, well we have two strands to our business, we want to do our own things and then we've obviously got our consulting and contract business where we work for other OEMs (original equipment manufacturers).”
“And the beauty of that is you get to learn well, you get to work with really cool brands, but you end up getting these unique challenges, which is great, right? The hardest bit is balancing the focus… balancing that's really, really tricky.”
'I'd like to see the world looking upon us as being one of the top players'
CALLUMS' home nation of the United Kingdom is undeniably a country with a focus on cars, but new electric vehicle sales in Australia have reached an all-time high, according to the Electric Vehicle Council,
Numbers from the EVC, combined with public data, showed that approximately 114,000 new battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles were sold nationwide in 2024.
This was an increase of more than 98,000 from the previous year.
This year, that number is expected to expand even further, driven along by new emissions caps that came into effect in Australia from 1 January.
“It’s not just Australians’ desire to purchase an EV that’s driving the rise in sales – the increase in charging infrastructure, wider range of models at more competitive prices, and the continuation of key purchase incentives have all played a crucial role in encouraging the next wave of EV owners to buy,” says the EVC.
Zooming out to the global market, Fortune Business Insights valued the 2023 market at US$500.48 billion, US$671.47 billion in 2024, with a prediction of US$1,891.08 billion by 2032.
The Asia Pacific region, including Australia, seems to be the top player in this market, with the an EV market share of 51.24% in 2023 and growing.
Revenue execution platform Invoca, reports that, as of 2025, there are over 100 EV manufacturers globally, with more and more jumping into the fray, including CALLUM.
In-house challenges and global competition certainly hasn't deterred CALLUM from growth, with big plans looking forward, seeking new investors, global expansion outside of the UK for the first time and of course the opportunity to design more cars, ideally of the sports variety.
“Well, the problem is we've got two or three projects I could mention, but I can't because there's client confidentiality and that,” Ian says, staying mum on the details.
"And we are looking at doing another car project within our own branding, looking at the idea of sports car. Of course, you know, it's just one of those natural things for us… we feel we can do it, we can do it well. So we're just starting to look at the implications of a sports car and how we can put one together and eventually how we can build one."
For Fairbairn, his sights are set on the United States and expanding CALLUM stateside in the immediate future.
“I think for me, America's the one. It's a huge country and so therefore it'll take a long time to get from east to west, but let's go there slowly. I'd love to be able to do that this time next year; to go out to America and tell everyone about all the stuff we do."
