UKAston Martin has agreed to hand 50.1% of its non-automotive branding rights to Authentic Brands, a US company that manages licensing for names like Reebok and Forever 21. The deal splits the Aston Martin name in two: road cars and the Formula 1 team stay entirely in-house, while lifestyle products, merchandise, and licensing pass majority control to an outside party for the first time in the company’s history.
The transfer is a condition of a GBP 550m ($738m) debt package led by HPS Investment Partners, structured as a GBP 450m secured term loan plus a further GBP 100m facility that only becomes available once the branding-rights sale closes. Aston Martin has burned through cash for years funding its road-car and F1 ambitions, and this financing keeps that going without diluting shareholders further.
Creditors owed roughly GBP 1.3bn have sent a letter before action, arguing that moving valuable intellectual property into a new structure to back the HPS deal shifts collateral out of their reach and may breach existing bond covenants - a claim, not yet a ruling. The arrangement is also unusually tangled: HPS is not only the lender arranging the package but also an investor in Authentic Brands, and HPS co-founder Scott French sits on both companies’ boards.
What it means for the cars themselves is limited in the short term - Aston Martin still designs, builds, and sells every Vantage, DB12, and DBX rolling out of Gaydon. What changes is who profits from the name on a watch, a jacket, or a hotel suite, and who has a say in how it is used going forward.
