My Clients
I learn from my clients every single day. The range and diversity of their business and yachting experiences; the knowledge and insights they generously share with me – it all contributes greatly towards why I love my job so much. That, and getting to be on the water 200 days a year…..
Today I have a case in point for you – a valuable learning moment for me courtesy of a great and generous client. Maybe this story can serve as your springboard into my fall boat show season? It all starts eight weeks ago today with the arrival of Natalia, our J Craft Torpedo 42 to the Hamptons….
Over these past 56 days – without a single break – we put on almost 300 effortless engine hours (mostly at 42 knots). And we didn’t lose a single day to bad weather (it helps to have a yacht designed for, and built in, Nordic seas).
Reviewing my calendar I see that we took an incredible 71 clients out for sea trials just like this gleeful example:
It has been a dizzying cycle of touch-and-go pickups throughout the Hamptons, leisurely swims in Coecles Harbor, lunchtime stops at Salt and Sunset Beach restaurants, plus some quick runs to meet clients in Nantucket, the Vineyard and Newport. And, of course, parties and barbeques at our Shelter Island summer HQ:
As I say, dizzying. And I loved every single minute of it. Not surprising, I guess. When I was a kid (that’s me, with the whistle) …
…. I drove a ski boat at a performing arts camp in upstate New York. Six days a week, nine hours a day, round and round and round a small lake in a summer of endless circles. And I got bored …. never! Time on the water, my friends, time on the water.
Anyway, a few weeks ago this knowledgeable client gave me a new and challenging perspective on biz (broadly) and on J Craft (specifically). He’s a well known tech veteran, a guy who cut his teeth fueling Apple’s growth at the tail end of the Steve Jobs era. When we got back to our Shelter Island dock, he shared with me his take on how to stand out in a crowded marketplace:
“People buy special things not because of the ‘what’s’. What’s are just the things people toss into their shopping carts. That could be boat A, B, or C. The global market doesn’t reward real differentiation anymore – It’s just not that profitable. Most yachts have become commodities, lined up one after another at boat shows. The thing to remember, Dave, is that when it comes to really special things, people are not buying your ‘WHAT’. They are buying your WHY.”
People are buying your why? What the hell?
It took me a few days to translate this over to my worldview. I thought about Apple’s success a lot, given that my charging stations are occupied by two Macbooks, plus an Ipad, Iphone, Apple Watch and Earpods.
Apple didn’t market the first product in any of these categories. They still don’t necessarily make the best (I’ve got lots of friends who swear by Androids, and I know for a fact that Bose’s noise-cancelling headphones are the best-in-class). So why then am I a member of the Apple cult?
The best I could come up with is that I choose Apple’s offerings for how they make me feel. There is a sense of specialness, I suppose, born of Steve Jobs “never compromise on core principles” approach. To put it in my client’s orbit, what is Apple’s great unifying “WHY”?
Maybe it makes its owners feel as special as their products.
From there I turned to J Craft. Their “why’s” are many, and by browsing through the last year or two of Fog Warning Blog postings I quickly came up with these:
- Why design a yacht with a certain Italian look (a Riva on steroids, people say) by designers sitting closer to the Arctic Circle than to Portofino?
- Why build a true luxury yacht in semi-socialist Sweden, of all places?
- Why build it on a tiny island in the Baltic Sea, closer to Estonia than Stockholm?
- Why rationally choose to build just a single model, a virtually unheard of choice in the yachting world?
- Why scrap any thought of an assembly line…..
…. and build them by hand, investing more than 8,000 incredible Viking man-hours per build?
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=217604426840718
Why be so quality-driven, that however deep their pockets, J Craft consciously chooses to build just three or four a year?
Why stubbornly insist upon a supply chain that is 98% Swedish in origin (from their stainless steel castings to it’s Volvo engines)?
Why design a hull from scratch, expressly for Volvo IPS drives, rather than (as almost all other builders do) just adapt an existing hull? And then use the same hull to hang some outboards on??
Why defy the industry standard and put the steering wheel on the port (um, I mean left-hand side, as shown by Jude Law, above)?
Question by question, loyal clients, why indeed? And then the biggest questions of all:
What is the single, unifying”why” of J Craft?
What brings the most refined and knowledgeable yachtsmen and women to our luxury dayboat?
These clients – as well as those who may be new to yachting but are connoisseurs of true luxury goods in all other aspects of their lives – they don’t lack for choices, the great and not-so-great. Plenty of yachts to just toss into their shopping carts, no? And many of them are more expensive than a J Craft (have you priced out quadruple-outboard center consoles lately?).
But in the end all of this brought me back to my Apple reasonings:
It is J Craft’s uncompromising specialness. A specialness borne of Viking shipbuilding history, Scandinavian aesthetic values and a culture that prizes quality without regard to cost. And it’s all held tightly together by a disciplined, consistent vision of what a true “no-compromise” luxury yacht should be:
What can I say but that it works for me. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years now, and I’m far from done yet. Because I’ve never seen anything quite this special. And apparently, as I have heard seventy-one times this summer, neither have my sea trialing clients!
That’s the deal, one and all.
You’ve got ….
Questions?
Comments?
Well, you know how I close all these Fog Warning musings –
Just launch a flare!
\
Big Wave Dave
