Yahoo Autos Come for the tea, leave with a car. How Genesis is building showrooms for 'honored guests'
CHERRY HILL, N.J. — Genesis has the cars, the tech, the sales and pampering service. It has Genesis House, a stunning, wood-ceilinged sanctuary in Manhattan – near the High Line and Little Island Park – where visitors can enjoy everything from a cozy library and traditional Korean tea service, to an ambitious restaurant and cocktail bar helmed by chefs trained at the Michelin-starred Onjium in Seoul. (Genesis House itself is a Michelin Guide addition for 2023). If you’re suitably impressed by the abalone, snow crab and poached egg dish on a tasting menu, perhaps you’ll hit the showroom for a new car.
Only one menu item has been missing for this fast-rising luxury brand: A network of stand-alone showrooms to give customers the full luxury experience, as Genesis guns hard for Mercedes, BMW and other establishment brands.
On a media drive from New York to Philadelphia in the full trio of Genesis EVs – the GV60 hatchback/SUV, Electrified G80 sedan and Alabama-built Electrified GV70 SUV – we roll past a prime example of the brand’s brick-and-mortar handicap. The Genesis of Cherry Hill store, in the New Jersey suburbs just over the Delaware River from Philly, might have managed to sell 1,010 Genesis cars last year, but it did so side-by-side with a Hyundai store that sold 1,500 cars of its own. It’s the auto equivalent of a combination Pizza Hut and Ruth’s Chris, and it’s unfortunately been the norm. Literally underlining the point, the Genesis name and winged logo sits below Hyundai’s, squashed together on an outdoor showroom sign.
Just down the road is the swankier luxury model: The new standalone Genesis of Cherry Hill, where owner Peter Lanzavecchia is joined by family, colleagues and longtime charity partners – including broadcaster and former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Ron “Jaws” Jaworski – for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The Cherry Hill operation marks the ninth stand-alone Genesis store in America, for a luxury brand that has now sold more than 1 million cars around the world since it became a separate marque in 2015.
After a slow start in America, with a two-sedan lineup in a nation besotted with SUVs, Genesis is gaining serious momentum with acclaimed models like its top-selling GV70. September saw Genesis mark a pair of U.S. sales records, with 6,453 sales for its best-ever month, and a quarterly record of 19,427 sales. Those are still modest numbers versus luxury leaders such as BMW, which found nearly 88,000 buyers in the second quarter of 2023. But Genesis has now moved nearly as many cars in three months as did in all of 2020, when it posted about 21,000 sales. Even with auto sales recovering across-the-board, Genesis is outpacing all luxury rivals with a 24% jump in 2023, and is on pace for nearly 70,000 sales this year. Those numbers are led by its award-winning GV70, with nearly 18,000 sales through September. The Electrified GV70, the brand’s first American-made product, has found 959 buyers since it went on sale earlier this year in a select number of states.
An appearance in Cherry Hill by José Muñoz, the global president and COO of Hyundai Motor Company (and president and CEO of Hyundai and Genesis Motor North America), underscored the importance the brand is placing on a massive showroom expansion. Genesis now plans to have about 50 independent showrooms open by early next year, with another 100 in planning and development. In recent years – especially when a starting-from-scratch Genesis lineup was producing a trickle of sales – several combined Hyundai-Genesis dealers had been hesitant to embrace a corporate “Keystone” program that offered them financial incentives to invest in expensive upgrades for stand-alone facilities. The pandemic threw another monkey wrench into some of those plans. But Muñoz said the brand is determined to support dealers and convince them of the long-term benefits of opening Genesis-only stores.
“We will help a dealer feel total confidence that they will see good return on investment,” Muñoz said, adding “the idea that dealers will be going away” in favor of direct sales “is nonsense.”
For his part, Lanzavecchia agreed the Genesis name remains a mystery to many consumers, but that a nation full of stand-alone stores “will probably be a 10-x impact for brand awareness.”
Lanzavecchia claimed his combined Hyundai-Genesis operation already has Genesis outselling the local Mercedes dealer. Competing brands “know Genesis is on the map, and they hear the footsteps,” said Lanzavecchia, who recalled being among Acura’s first U.S. dealers decades ago. “We know we can beat the Japanese and Germans in the luxury game.”
Lanzavecchia and brand executives said top-flight customer service is a critical part of the strategy. Lanzavecchia said about 80% of his customers already use a valet service they cite as one of their favorite parts of ownership. The “Uber-like experience” brings a dealership driver (equipped with digital tablet) to a home or office to swap keys with a service customer. The driver drops a loaner car, and later returns a serviced and fully detailed car with a full tank of gas – or a topped-off battery for EVs.
Genesis spokesman Jarred Pellat said that everything from showrooms to Genesis House is driven by a philosophy of “Son-nim,” which means “honored guest” in Korean. The approach aims to maximize hospitality “at every touch point” for the brand, including fostering a serene, welcoming environment in the cars themselves.
