Dutch yacht designer Vripack has launched an ambitious plan to cut the time it takes to build a custom superyacht by up to 25 per cent by 2019.
Vripack wants to build ‘better boats in less time’ and believes it will become possible to construct a fully custom 85m in as little as 18 months. ‘We won’t achieve this with improving, we’ll achieve this with a revolution,’ Bart Bouwhuis, a director at the company, said. The firm, which was established in 1961 and is responsible for more than 7,000 designs, says it has two patents running that will speed up the interior build of a superyacht.
Vripack directors Bart Bouwhuis and Marnix J. Hoekstra revealed their ambition for an expedited build process during a ‘trend walk’ of Amsterdam with journalists. The company believes that only by going outside the yachting industry and spotting trends and ideas out in the community will it be able to harness a new way of thinking about superyacht design and production. It conducts these walks all over the world, taking photos of new designs – a flyer or piece of street art, for example. The only rule is no photos are allowed of something the company has already seen before. Up to 10,000 photos are taken ever year like this and all are loaded into a database to give an overview of what the designers on the 'rough edge' of the community are doing.
During the Global Financial Crisis, Hoekstra said, it was all base colours, but now the company had noticed a shift to the use of much brighter shades. By spotting these emerging trends before they become mainstream, Vripack believes it can create genuinely revolutionary thinking about yacht design.
'One of the major revolutionary goals we set and wholeheartedly believe, is to be able to shorten the building process of a yacht by 25 per cent at the end of 2019,' the directors said. 'This is a leap but…we are working on a number of revolutionary research projects that will cut a big chunk of time.
'We believe this might be a win-win situation, which could be very rewarding for all parties involved, especially our owners; the ones who actually sail our boats.'