Ford has cracked open the doors of its brand-new Dearborn headquarters to the general public for the first time, unveiling a retail store and an immersive exhibit space where anyone can now shop for Bronco jackets or gawk at 125 years of racing history. The public areas opened yesterday, tucked into the Oakwood Boulevard side of the automaker's transformed World Headquarters campus.
The roughly 1,000-square-foot store sells Ford-branded merchandise spanning Bronco, Mustang, F-150 and Ford Racing lines, according to the Detroit Free Press, which reported that the shop was designed as a lifestyle destination featuring curated collections tied to each vehicle brand. Shoppers will find clothing, collectibles, gifts, Lego sets, drinkware and other lifestyle products, including collaborations with Filson, Carhartt and Oracle Red Bull Racing. Dan Barbossa told the outlet that prices range from $4.99 for a pen up to $198.50 for a Red Bull/Ford Racing jacket.
An Exhibit Space Built for Motorsports Fans
Attached to the store is a 3,000-square-foot immersive experience center and exhibit area showcasing Ford's heritage and racing history, per the same report. Inside, the Ford Racing exhibit highlights the company's 125-year motorsports legacy and details how technologies developed for competition eventually made their way into production vehicles. A Lincoln Heritage space nearby features rare artifacts and documents tracing that brand's history and transformation, while a Ford archives display covers the company's early electric vehicle efforts and the evolution of EV technology.
The Ford Racing exhibit is open to the public today, and the retail store keeps regular business hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Ford plans to rotate merchandise alongside seasonal vehicle launches, new collaborations and special product drops, the article notes. Ford executives described the store and exhibits as a public extension of the company's broader workplace transformation, serving both employees and outside visitors.
The Retail Space Sits Inside a $1.2 Billion Campus
The store and exhibit space occupy a small public-facing slice of a much larger project. Ford invested approximately $1.2 billion to build the 2.1-million-square-foot World Headquarters building, known internally as The Hub, designed by architecture firm Snøhetta alongside Arcadis and Ghafari Associates, according to officeinsight. The four-story facility features skylights and open-format studio layouts designed to maximize natural daylighting. Ford started moving employees into the new headquarters last fall, and the new building is twice the size of the former World Headquarters on Michigan Avenue.
That former headquarters, nicknamed the Glass House and designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, served as Ford's central offices from its 1956 dedication until late 2025 and is now slated for an 18-month sustainable demolition, per Bridge Michigan. The 12-story tower housed up to 2,000 corporate staff during its 69-year run. Despite the physical move three miles away to 2100 Carroll Shelby Way, Ford transferred its iconic 1 American Road address to the new building, a move the PBS News says reflects the company's effort to preserve brand identity while modernizing its physical footprint.
A Walkable Campus Meant to Cut Down Drive Time
The new headquarters seats roughly 4,000 workers directly while clustering up to 16,000 total employees within a 15-minute walk across adjacent campus facilities, Forbes reports, noting that previous arrangements required employees to drive up to 30 minutes between separate buildings just for internal meetings. Ford has said it expects more than 90% of its 75,000 global office employees to work in new or renovated spaces by the end of 2027, and the company built the new headquarters to attract talent, foster innovation, encourage collaboration and integrate software, AI and vehicle development.
The campus is still growing. In April, Ford announced plans to renovate its 73-year-old former Product Development Center into World Headquarters South, expanding the total campus footprint to 3.3 million square feet to accommodate up to 11,000 employees once complete in 2029. That renovation will add a 30,000-square-foot fitness center and a dedicated R&D wing for Ford Racing, according to WardsAuto, and construction there will continue even as the main headquarters building is already active.
Part of a Decade-Long Overhaul, and a Region-Wide Shift
The current campus push traces back to a 10-year master plan Ford announced in April 2016, aimed at consolidating roughly 30,000 employees previously scattered across 70 facilities into two primary walkable hubs, according to ClickOnDetroit. That original plan targeted rebuilding more than 7.5 million square feet of workspace in Dearborn, making this week's store opening one visible milestone in a strategy nearly a decade in the making.
Ford's Dearborn buildout isn't happening in isolation. The automaker also completed a six-year, $940 million restoration of the historic Michigan Central Station in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood, reopening the landmark in 2024 as a mobility innovation hub housing over 1,000 tech employees, per Crain's Detroit Business. The timing also lines up with crosstown rival General Motors leaving its longtime Renaissance Center headquarters along the Detroit River for a smaller leased footprint at the new Hudson's site downtown in early 2026, a shift Forbes frames as part of a broader downsizing trend in corporate real estate across Southeast Michigan.
Nearby, Ford family history is getting its own refresh. Henry and Clara Ford's 56-room Fair Lane Estate, a short distance from the new headquarters, is undergoing a $15 million to $18 million restoration managed by Henry Ford Estate Inc., with a public reopening for tours and events targeted for 2027, as Hoodline has reported. And on the racing side, Ford began public track testing this month of its new Le Mans hypercar prototype, powered by an in-house 5.4-liter Coyote-derived V-8 hybrid engine developed in Dearborn ahead of a planned 2027 return to the 24 Hours of Le Mans — the kind of motorsports engineering now on display for the public just steps from the new store's shelves of Bronco jackets and Lego sets.
-4.webp?w=160&h=400&fit=crop&crop=edges)