Building $300,000 custom-made sport cars for the super rich may not seem like a promising endeavour in the Netherlands, where flouting wealth is widely considered a social gaffe.
But Dutch entrepreneur and car enthusiast Victor Muller proved local doomsayers wrong when he set up Spyker cars in 2000 in the tiny town of Zeewolde, east of Amsterdam, and he now expects it to have positive cash flow this year.
"People said five years ago that Spyker will go bust, and we're still here," Mr Muller said in an interview with Reuters.
"The Dutch are a strange people, we want to make everything and everyone equal, but making a super sports car is not equal," Mr Muller said, sitting a few feet away from where workers were building a racing model, the Spyker Squadron.
The tailor-made two-seaters, powered by Audi engines, sell from around £170,000 and have found fans such as rapper Busta Rhymes and singer Jennifer Lopez, who gave her husband a Spyker C8 for Christmas.
Mr Muller, who is chief executive officer, marketing chief and head designer all in one, sees a trend emerging among extremely wealthy auto buyers that recalls car manufacturing before World War I, when builders produced made-to-measure coachwork.
"There are again customers that are willing to pay serious money for coach-built cars," he said noting that the tradition of building individual coaches was cut off by the war.
"We have had a lot of inquiries from people that want a coach-built Spyker, so buy a 12-cylinder Spyker chassis and take it to a coach builder and he will build something really beautiful but still a Spyker," Mr Muller said.
Italian car maker Ferrari teamed up with engineering designers Zagato and Pinifarina recently to produce individual coachwork at the request of customers.
"I think there is a huge trend coming... it's pure haute couture," Mr Muller said, adding that it is, however, a small market.
The automaker, which has five models including the C8 Spyder and C8 Laviolette, has yet to make a profit but some analysts expect it to do so by 2009.
Mr Muller - who drives a C8 himself - declined to comment on that but said Spyker was cash-flow positive in the first quarter of 2006 and intends to stay that way this year.
Despite its short, loss-making history, Spyker has been kept largely solvent through equity investment, mainly from its wealthiest clients, but that is changing as banks become more willing to extend credit to keep it going, Mr Muller said. "I am very optimistic that we will be able to create banking lines rather than making new issues," he added although he did not rule out going to the market for another cash injection in the mid term.
The company went public in 2004 and is listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Shares in Spyker have more than doubled in the past year and are now at 20.21 euros.
The order backlog has risen to 286 cars from 191 cars at the end of 2005, driven by demand for Spyker C models and its newest model, the D12 Peking to Paris - a mixture between a sports car and an SUV, which is named after a historic cross-continent race in which Spyker participated.
Mr Muller said there will be more new models in the future but not until the new SUV is up and running, expected by 2007.
A lawyer by training, Mr Muller said gearing up for SUV production will be financed by cash Spyker took in through new share issues last year.
Spyker's roots reach back more than 100 years to a family business that once built the Golden State Coach for the Dutch royal family, still in use today.
Reborn in 2000 and targeting the super-car market niche, Spyker competes with top-end sports cars such as Bugatti, Lotus, Lamborghini, Aston Martin and Ferrari.