Owner Spotlight: Oxted Classics
From dream to reality
Read about how Jack followed a crazy vision to buy a fleet of classics and create an exciting family-run business.
We started our classic car business back in 2018 and officially launched in early 2019 with our first outing as a business to a wedding fair at Mercedes Benz World in March 2019. Our business is entirely family run by myself and my Dad, Alec. It was a complete change of industry for us as Dad's background is in plumbing & heating (boring) and mine was in banking & sales.
After chatting over a couple of glasses of red, we came up with this bonkers idea that we could potentially buy a fleet of classics and hire them out for a sensible return all whilst hoping the cars maintain their value. We had this vision of 15 classics in our fleet but thought it would take a number of years before we hit that number. However, at the time of writing this, we have just added our 15th car to our fleet this weekend just gone. We purchased our second Jaguar S-Type!
Buying the cars is a huge part of Dad's remit and his favourite part. We tend to bounce ideas off each other when looking for a new addition to the fleet but, after a few years of trading, have definitely gotten better at knowing what works better than others. We've tried to have a real eclectic bunch of cars, all of which we love. We don't really bother with cars that don't make us tick and tend to steer towards cars that we love. We think this element really helps with the experience our customers seem to have as they can sense our passion and love for these beautiful classics.
We love how varied our customers are too. We see so many surprise gifts, bucket list moments, weddings etc. We really do get to see people at their happiest moments. Whether it's that they had no idea they were about to drive a Mustang or that they had a relative who used to own a Spitfire exactly like ours, it's amazing to see so many different but most importantly, happy reactions. Weddings are a huge part of our business and our team of drivers are truly incredible at ensuring that our happy couples have the best experience with Oxted Classics. We love nothing more than couples sending us photos of their day and seeing exactly what situations the car was in.
Another part of our business is the media hire side. We've done a number of music videos, film work and photoshoots. One of our most memorable media hires came through BookAclassic which was a KPop music video. It was filmed down on the coast by Beachy Head and the whole experience was amazing! They used our 1961 Corvette C1 (which is also our logo) and the language barrier made it even more of an amazing experience. The whole crew were incredibly friendly but we had to communicate using a lot of hand gestures as they're English was very limited and our Korean is non-existent. The hire went without a glitch and the clients were very happy with the end product!
