Shipshape

  • By Bryan Corliss / Herald Writer
  • Sunday, January 9, 2005 9:00pm
  • Business

MONROE – In 2004, his company’s revenues grew 40 percent.

In 2005, he’s adding 28,000 square feet of factory space and about 50 employees.

By 2006, Larry Graf expects things really will be busy at Glacier Bay Catamarans.

“There’s a whole other giant leap coming,” said Graf, founder and president of the Monroe boat-building company.

Glacier Bay is running with a rising tide.

Graf started the company in 1987, building boats alongside his house. Over the years, he developed a solid reputation in a niche market: high-performance, motor-driven catamarans for ocean-going sport fishermen.

Glacier Bay grew steadily selling 22- and 26-foot boats, which range in price from $34,000 to $87,000 – not including outboard motors or options.

But in 2003, Graf took a gamble and jumped into a new market segment with a 34-foot boat. These giants – with twin staterooms, a galley and a head with standing headroom – list for between $275,000 and $400,000 each, depending on the model and power plant.

But the demand was there, and now Glacier Bay sells three a month.

The big boat was a risk, Graf said.

New products can swamp a small boat-building company, he said. Bigger boats are more complex to build.

“It’s almost exponential how much time and energy it takes to build a bigger boat,” he said. “Just the cash that’s used up, to have three or four of these larger boats in inventory.”

The risk is underestimating the difficulty in producing the new, bigger boat, running over budget, or behind schedule, and then getting stuck in a cash crunch, with bills coming due before boats are sold.

Graf said he got around that by hiring people with boat industry experience who were able to navigate the new-product launch while still increasing production on the company’s core line of 22- and 26-foot boats.

“We did it,” he said. “We’re doing it.”

Glacier Bay made a big splash in 2004, delivering a record number of 22- and 26-foot boats and reaching an important milestone – delivery of the 2,000th boat, which was shipped to a dealer in Naples, Fla.

Graf’s work force nearly doubled over the year, going from 90 people to 170.

The company expanded its dealer network nationwide and started selling in Canada, New Zealand and Puerto Rico. Overall, revenues increased 40 percent.

Everything came together at once for Glacier Bay, said Chris Kelly, a licensed U.S. Merchant Marine captain who is publisher of boatTEST.com.

Graf’s company has been building top-of-the-line boats for years, Kelly said. They’re well designed, they perform well – particularly in rough open water – and Glacier Bay doesn’t skimp on the details.

But “the concept of a power (catamaran) is still relatively new,” Kelly said. “It’s kind of a freaky thing. … It takes years for the boating public to accept this radical thing.”

Glacier Bay, however, has good word-of-mouth among owners and a good reputation with the boat industry press, Kelly said.

And boaters are starting to notice some of the advantages of catamarans – the twin-hulled boats have more deck space, a more stable ride and are more fuel-efficient because they ride higher in the water than traditional monohulls.

All that is starting to pay off, in a big way, for Graf and Glacier Bay, Kelly said. “He’s one of the great, modern American boat-building success stories.”

In the next few months, Graf said he’ll expand Glacier Bay’s 62,000 square feet of Monroe factory space by another 28,000 feet. The company in February will launch the first of three new products under development, the first Glacier Bay cat powered by inboard motors – twin diesels that should push the 34-foot hull along at around 36 mph.

Glacier Bay also is aiming to launch a line of 29-foot boats, filling in the gap between the 26- and 34-footers. And Graf’s designers are working on a new design for an “energy-efficient, eco-friendly kind of boat” that will be “not what anybody expects,” he said.

The goal is to have those in production by 2006, and to have another 50 workers on board and trained to meet the expected surge in orders. If all goes to plan, Graf said, “we’ll see sales go up another 50 percent.”

“There’s no reason not to dream big,” said Graf. “It’s more fun, a lot more fun, than just doing the same old thing.”

Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.

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