Brendon Vetuskey, Phil Riehlman
Background
Brendon Vetuskey — Brendon Vetuskey has worked at Mattel since 2007 and is a Staff Designer at Hot Wheels. Before Mattel, he was at Jakks Pacific; his involvement with Hot Wheels goes back to 1998, when he designed, for the company Kiddesigns, the Scream Machines (keychains with lights and sounds that replicated cars from the brand). He holds a BFA in Industrial and Product Design from the Cleveland Institute of Art.
He started in the Track and Playsets department, where he helped develop the Trick Tracks line and the Super Six Lane Raceway, was lead Monster Jam designer for a few years and managed the Entertainment team. He only moved to the car design department in 2016. Today he is lead designer for Red Line Club vehicles and co-lead for the mainline, alongside Fraser Campbell. Some of his personal cars inspired models from the brand, such as the Custom '67 Pontiac Firebird. According to an interview with the site CNCKing, he helped develop more than 25 1:64 models for collectors.
Phil Riehlman — Phil Riehlman has worked with the Mattel team in El Segundo since the early 1990s. He designed more than 200 castings through 2012 and, in recent years, has focused on the Premium 1:43 scale line (15 cars so far). His projects include the Volkswagen Drag Bus, Drag Truck, Dairy Delivery, Ford GT-40, Nissan Skyline GT-R (BNR34), Toyota Off-Road Truck and Fiat 500C; in the Elite 64 line he made nine castings, such as the Porsche 911 GT2 EVO 993.
