Wini's winning job

MANILA, Philippines - The next time you salivate at the sight of a Mercedes-Benz vehicle, consider that, chances are, a good portion of it was designed by a Filipino.

Winifredo “Wini” Camacho has arguably one of the coolest jobs one can think of. As Mercedes-Benz styling manager, he directly affects – and conjures up designs for this premium automaker that is stuff of people’s automotive nirvana and is the chosen toy of the affluent.

During a recent talk at the Ayala Museum, buried within fascinating anecdotes, Camacho projects a slide of what he says will be the next generation GLK. “I did a full size model before I left Germany,” Wini narrates. “A few weeks ago, it was chosen for production, so probably in two years you’ll see this car.”

Wow.

Camacho’s journey to the hallowed halls of the three-pointed star brand began much like most tales – with a kid absorbed in drawings. Plants, animals, guns, human figures, and even running shoes made up the portfolio of the young Wini. From these early years, Camacho was already “designing” as opposed to “copying” what he saw.

“When I was in middle grade school,” he narrates, “I started to become interested in industrial objects, especially (modes of) transportation… airplanes, spaceships, tanks, except – interestingly – cars. Cars didn’t interest me back then. I didn’t do my first car sketch until I was in the last year of high school.”

Wini set his sights on an architecture course in college, but “like any fickle-minded kid” changed his mind when he heard of the field of industrial design.

“The sketches I had been doing since I was little actually had a place in the design world,” he says.

So that’s exactly what he studied, finishing cum laude in 1986, at the University of Sto. Tomas. He pulls up a photo of his UST days, “You won’t probably recognize me with all my hair,” Camacho jests.

After college, Wini Camacho tried his hand on a variety of jobs that further stretched his design proficiency. At various times, he designed furniture, interior-decorated, set up a design consultancy that created packaging, and then hied off to Hong Kong to design giveaway items.

Camacho also tried his hand in, of all things, designing radio-controlled toy cars. “I did toy cars before I did real cars,” he declares, with much fascination.

But his stint in the former Crown Colony was also where Wini had an epiphany that would change his life course. “Hong Kong was a big eye opener for me. It was a world where I saw the best of East and West – and where I first got hold of a Japanese magazine called Car Styling. I was amazed with what I saw – flashy renderings of cars. I fell in love with car design,” he enthuses.

“It became more intense to the point that I told myself to do something about it,” Camacho continues. There were two obstacles to conquer, according to the designer: where to get money, and the question of whether he was good enough.

Wini put his head down and worked hard on his portfolio for a year and in 1995, he was accepted at the Art Center College of Design in Switzerland. “I was exposed to a world of super talented, motivated and competitive motivated bunch of students. There was competition like I never experienced before, and relentless hard work,” Camacho recalls. “There was no such thing as free time or weekends. It was like a military boot camp disguised as a design school.”

And he silenced naysayers who thought he was, at 30, too old to “change and improve as a designer.”

Shortly after graduating with honors from the design center (Camacho moved to its Pasadena, California campus after the Switzerland facility closed), Wini joined Mercedes-Benz as transportation designer for the automobile brand in Irvine. Since then, the Pinoy has been posted in various MB locations from Sindelfingen, Germany to his present office at the Mercedes-Benz Advanced Design Center of China where he is now styling manager. He supervises a team of modelers, transforming 2D sketches into 3D models.

Wini maintains he is a perfect fit with the German brand because of his personal preference for “clean, pure design.” He says the premium brand is marked by “understatement,” as opposed to “hard sell” efforts by some competitors – most notably the lower-echelon brands.

Mercedes-Benz also shirks the trendy in favor of “timeless” design.

Design, shares Camacho, is a deliberate process that involves the company’s engineering and marketing people as well.

Designers from the company’s design centers around the world lengthily compete for approval – with the final imprimatur coming from the Daimler board of directors. This final nod means the design will be realized. This is the kind of gauntlet that Wini is used to running – and running successfully.

Wini considers his involvement in the design of the Mercedes-Benz E-Class (which locally debuted in 2009) a “defining moment of his automotive design career.”

He continues: “Mercedes-Benz is really exciting. One day, you could be working on a two-and-a-half-meter long micro car like the Smart, the next day it could be on a five-meter-long CL coupe. It’s creatively challenging but really fun!”

Color us green with envy.