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I'm sure you have been asked this before, but I'll ask it anyway. How does a boat tickle your fancy enough to make a design? I figure people must ask you frequently...can you design this or that? I'm sure a part of it is ultimate sale-ability (maybe sail-ability too) for CLC, but I'd love to hear what else drives you to design and ultimately get to a kit.
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We went through a phase, between 10 and 15 years ago, when we tried to be scientific about what we put in the catalog. Literally focus-group type stuff, a lot of outside input and testing. This tended to produce very polished designs, which is great, although they could be polished to the point of seeming facile. The real problem with this approach was that no link emerged between designs that scored really well in formalized market testing, and subsequent sales performance of the new design. So much for science!
With 55 kayaks in the catalog at the moment, it's going to have to be something new and very special to inspire me to invest in another kayak design. The Petrel SG and Petrel Play, recent additions, are pretty good examples. 'Struth that we've already got several genuinely excellent kayaks that fill the same niche, but Nick Schade has done some things with those two that make them singularly cool, and we're lucky to have them. (We've been eyeing the Crowhurst designs with increasing interest.)
To answer your question directly, starting about ten years ago, what gets turned into plans and kits is simply whatever I find fun and interesting. This strategy has correlated much more strongly with market success than the focus-groupy, BETA-testy approach. I've written fairly extensively about this.
Thus we get designs ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. To the extent I have any theory at all about what works, I think it has to do with the fact that we are living in the Golden Age of build-it-yourself boat design. The build-it-yourself thing has been a sizeable cottage industry for a hundred years, but the proliferation of designs for amateur builders over the last 20 years is simply astonishing. I can rattle off 30 truly great designs out there that just don't get built much because there are 200 others on the internet that are almost as good. So there has to be something uniquely appealing about a design to attract builders.
There's no giddiness about the possibilities, however. Economics is known as "The Dismal Science" for a reason. A kayak like the Petrel Play costs $20,000 to bring to market. 80 to 90% of that is the documentation, the dreaded instruction manual. Ne'er was a crueler, more thankless task undertaken than the writing of an instruction manual, and ultimately that's the bottleneck on bringing out new designs. The people have spoken, emphatically: Give us awesome instruction manuals, or sod right off.
And there you have it. I can draw something cool in the morning and cut it on the CNC machine in the afternoon, and have a floating prototype in a week. But an instruction manual? 100, 150, 200 pages without a single overlooked detail, not a word out of order, every step adapted to the meanest understanding? This takes ages; 18 months is not uncommon. (The Outrigger Junior, despite much positive buzz, continues to hang fire while I linger over its sprawling instruction book and ponder feedback from several BETA builders.)
There's also the cost. If I had a dollar for every request for a larger version of PocketShip, I'd have several hundred dollars. Which would not make a dent in the budget required to bring such a thing to market. The PocketShip prototype, its 280-page manual, and a very small-scale marketing campaign cost around $50,000 in 2008. Hull volume varies as the cube of length, so an 18-foot version is going to be hysterically expensive. It would really require an outside party commissioning the design to help defray the development cost. The Faering Cruiser, PocketShip, and Madness were examples of complex designs funded by paying clients. (I was the paying client for the latter two. CLC could never have amortized the development of those two larks otherwise.)
So there you have it. Whatever I'm fooling around with, and whatever gets a solid instruction manual pieced together, is what makes the catalog.