How do you help a small boatyard producing fishing boats on the southern tip of Ireland expand their market? The basic fishing boat that they were producing did not generate much profit or sales as the local community was saturated and these rugged boats do not need replacing often. It was clear that a new target market and boat type would be required. Finding skilled craftsmen on the southern tip of Ireland would be difficult and the boat needed to be built on the expensive double hulled fishing boat molds the boatyard already had. Clearly, a sleek cigarette type cruiser was not going to work.
Why do all cruisers look like racing boats? Not all cars look like Ferrari’s! Not all boats need to go super fast and many are used for adventures and in places other than the harbor of Monaco or San Tropez. With that thought in mind I designed a new type of cabin cruiser with a different, more rugged appeal on their existing stable double hull.
The easy route would have been to design a sleek looking cabin cruiser targeted at the existing market. However, what chance would this company have to compete in a market saturated with hundreds of boatyards producing essentially the same concept? We set out to understand the context in which this boat would be used, to understand the market that it would be sold into and the particular constraints of the shipyard.
The Irish seas are not the mediterranean or a canal or lake in rural England. A cabin cruiser designed for this region needed to be tough, stable and able to instill confidence in its users in rough seas and big waves. It needs to be the Range Rover of the Seas.
In addition the shipyard was small and would not be able to produce hundreds of boats a year, so the design needed to have a strong appeal in the local market and sufficient margin potential in order to give them a solid marketing platform to compete with low volumes against all the larger shipyards and boat builders. In other words a strongly differentiated product was needed to fulfill this brief.
There were serious limitations in terms of the types of skilled labor that would be available to craft a high quality product in this region of Ireland. One of the biggest challenges in the project was to try to integrate as many components as possible into molds to reduce the amount of skilled labor needed. With this in mind a third fibreglass molding was designed to take care of a lot of the basic furniture and storage needs, such as the kitchen, bathroom, main bed, etc. raceways for wiring harnesses, water pipes and lighting fixtures were all to be part of this third molded element. Finally and perhaps most importantly, the third moulding would form the floors and thus create a complete sealed, buoyancy chamber for the vessel, greatly improving its seaworthiness and safety.
Aesthetically, this concept was crying out for a new look and feel. With the notion that it would be spacious (it sports a full queen size bed, unheard of in the this size vessel), tough, stable and highly maneuverable came the idea that it should feel more like the Range Rover of the Seas than another Ferrari for San Tropez. This idea is evident in the design of the wheel house with its correctly sloping windows to keep rain and spray clear, improving vision in rough seas. The inclusion of on deck storage for buoys, proper height hand rails to manoeuver from the wheel house to the bow all help this cruiser to support work in rough seas and instill greater confident in its users.