Selig & Stretton: Fund Your Passion Podcast Episode 15

Creative and innovative, Tom Jaconelli has pioneered Romans International use of social media and video, setting the industry standard for modern automotive content.

Amanda Stretton and Darren Selig visited the new Romans international showroom on Episode 15 of the Fund Your Passion podcast to learn more about the Romans International business and hear about their plans. 

What does Romans International do and why Romans?

We are known as a supercar dealership, and so we buy and sell supercars, as well as performance cars and luxury SUVs. We are an independent dealership and so we sell anything from a Bugatti to a Tesla. We operate from this one site; it was initially founded in 1994 by my father.

How have you seen Romans grow as the Head of Marketing and buying

We initially had only a couple hundred Twitter and Instagram followers. I saw social media as a great way to reach customers and help build the brand digitally. Today, we see lots of cars sold through social media, as it’s a great way to show our stock of cars. We did a survey, and 90% of our customers follow us on at least one of our social media platforms. We have also recently started Tik-Tok, as it also has a massive reach. We put out a video of an AMG series and 4 million people saw it!

Tell us more about your expansion?

Yes, so we took over from Ford, as they shut during lockdown. The old showroom is also being renovated next door and will be ready in a couple of months. The old showroom will have hyper cars and this site will have more ‘supercars.’

What have been the most memorable cars you’ve sold?

There was a Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse, the spec was insane. My father and I went to Hong Kong to buy it, and it had fully exposed carbon fibre, but the customer had requested a tiffany green accent all over it. The customer also had a plaque of his sons’ feet in the car, very niche.  We left all these features on the car when we sold it on. We have also had a McLaren F1, Porsche GT1 and the Maserati MC12. We had two of them in the showroom at one time, and there was only 50 of them ever made. The rarest of them all was the CLK GTR, which is basically a race car but road legal.

Which upcoming car releases are you excited for?

The car I have personally got my eye on for stock is the Porsche Cayman GT4 RS.

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