For British luxury automaker Bentley (VOW.DE), 2022 may leave a strong 2021 in the dust.

Through the first nine months of 2022, Bentley reported record operating profit of €575 million ($577,129,608), more than double the amount from a year ago. The previous full-year record high for operating profit was €389 million ($383,651,250.00). Revenue through the first nine months came in at €2.490 billion ($2,455,762,500.00), a jump of 28% from a year ago.

For Bentley CEO Adrian Hallmark, the results are astonishing because the automaker only increased sales of cars by 3%, yet profitability soared.

“The exciting part for me is that we've doubled the profit year to date, with only a 3% increase in [sales], and that's all about quality of margin,” Hallmark says to Yahoo Finance. “It's all about these higher price cars with more personalization, order bank driven, not stock build driven; and we've got the right formula, and we're going to be ruthless about maintaining that [profit] pool.”

Hallmark and the Bentley team were finding that their well-healed clientele were more interested in customization, wanted to be a part of that process, and were willing to pay for it. Prospective and new clients can visit the Bentley factory in Crewe, England if they wish to go through the entire customization process, which can result in literally millions of different combinations.

The strong push for customization from Bentley clients is so strong that even a seasoned exec like Hallmark is blown away.

“I've been in this industry and in this sector for nearly 28 years. I've never seen spending patterns like it and not just in Bentley,” Hallmark says. “The diversity of what people are ordering, exterior and interior is just fundamentally changed. So there's more customers out there. And they're way more interested now in self expression. And in personalization.”

Hallmark says Bentley has optimized the factory and its processes, in order to add the custom work and myriad of options available for cars to the factory line itself or near it, in order streamline production. He says he and the team have “industrialized complexity.”