Dear Reader,

This evolved out of a letter to a younger boat builder worried specifically about his chances of success specifically in wooden boat building. However most of the lessons in here apply to building, managing or marketing regardless of material. As someone who has been involved all my life with boats of all materials, including designing in most, I thought you might like my perspective.

The Past

When I was a boy boats were wood and that was about it. Sure there was the occasional steel boat but they were an oddity. The industry was characterized by a large number of small businesses, most often as part of boat yard operations. These shops tended to build a modest number of small and medium sized boats per year per shop. There were a few really big shops like Nevins or Hinckleys but they built no more than five to ten boats per year, just in larger sizes.

At that time people got into the boating world because their parents were in it or their friends were in it and it was their major recreation. People were not, generally, buying boats as status symbols or "one more toy". They learned about boats largely from people who had been sailing for many years. Cheap, ugly, unsound, unseaworthy boats were quickly ridiculed. Further, magazines in the field were usually run by sailors who actually spent a good deal of their time on the water and did not hesitate to praise good boats and disparage poor ones.

Even after the advent of fiberglass the majority of custom boats were wood for a long time. Somewhere around the mid-seventies designers finally began to do more fiberglass custom designs than wood. However this was short lived, for us at least, and by the eighties the majority of our custom design customers and stock plans sales were for wooden boats again. Now virtually all our design work is in modem wood construction or steel. We rarely even get an inquiry about glass.

In the fiberglass era most of the smaller wooden boat shops refused to switch to glass or steel and by the mid-seventies many of the older builders had died or retired. However at the same time a new generation of shops was opening.

Now we seem to be approaching the number of wooden boat builders that there were when I was a boy.

The wooden boat industry faltered for awhile when cheap oil made glass boats less expensive. Today a glass boat has to be built much less strong than its wooden counterpart to compete on price with a custom modem wood boat.

In the early days of fiberglass the resin was inexpensive, the country was booming, the population was growing rapidly and a continual stream of new people was coming into the market. Boats could, for the first time since the early days of this century, be seen as a growth industry.

In this new and growing market people ceased to be learning from parents or friends who had sailed for many years and were now learning from people who had been sailing for six months.

It is easy to sell bad boats to inexperienced customers. As resin prices rose with oil prices it got more expensive to build the boats. The builders found that to keep the prices down to where there wasn't too strong an advantage for wood or steel they had to cheapen the product until now, instead of 1-1/2" thick 36 rooters we now have 3/16" thick 36 footers!

More and more the builders looked for a "model" that would show them how to make more money and sell more boats in what they assumed was a forever growth market. Such ridiculous phrases as "mass production" started to be thrown around. This enormously clouded thinking. Plants were built capable of turning out enough boats to entirely satisfy the United States market with one line of boats, yet there were many competitors doing the same thing. In truth there has always been a very small market for boats in relation to the size of the population. The post World War II population boom disguised this.

You cannot "mass-produce" boats of any size. There is not enough market. You can perhaps mass-produce cleats or even engines. But there just isn't enough market for a medium sized family yacht of a given model to allow mass production. What people were actually doing was series production of a given design. The only cost savings were in a few jigs and molds. By the time you've built three boats of a given model you can't build them any faster in series production. Yet people tried to "mass market" a big ticket item that could not be mass-produced and for which no mass market was available. The increasing advertising bills necessary to keep selling the same hull over and over drove many into bankruptcy and drove prices up to or above the level of comparably built custom boats.

All this "sort of" worked for a long time. You had new sailors. You had companies eating up venture capital left and right trying to chase a mass production dream that proved to be a fantasy. But for a time there was new capital, etc.

Today the people who got into the market learning from the inexperienced are looking for their third boat at least. By now they have the experience to be horrified by what they bought in the past. The choices they are prepared to make are all oriented around a search for quality. Some are still searching for quality in the glass market, many are going to steel, but a great many are wondering if they should go to wood. After all there are a lot of really old wooden boats around, but it is hard to find a fiberglass boat with much age on it unless it is one of the very earliest ones which were built really thick.

Many have now learned that fiberglass boats cost just as much to maintain over the long run as even the most traditionally built wooden boats if each are kept in good all the time. People who want quality are very receptive to wood now. A great many shops like ours, in Maine and elsewhere in the world, are restoring and/or building boats at the same pace as decades ago. A few yards are now even refusing to haul boats to better differentiate themselves from the fiberglass market, although we would not do this.

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