According to representatives from Crescent Custom Yachts, the company has ceased manufacturing yachts, but will be completing existing work in the yard. Sales and marketing issues were cited as reasons for discontinuing their production. Crescent has been building yachts for over a decade, utilizing hulls manufactured by Westport Yachts until a couple of years ago, when they brought manufacturing in-house with an innovative Janicki mold designed by Jack Sarin. The expandable mold allowed Crescent to build yachts from 110 feet to 130 feet in length. "Dakota" is one of their more memorable launches. Here it seen flanked by the many skilled craftsmen, engineers and employees that had made Jack Charles's company a recognized name in the yachting community.
Sad to hear, and it would be interesting to get a deaper look into what has gone wrong in general when shipyards are closing down, such as Queenship and now Crescent. It can of course be a number of reasons, like high investments, hard to find qualified workers, price competition, maybe miscalculations. But it can also be too much looking at other designs and diluted individuality, I have to say that many shipyards have produced yachts that are hard to distinguish from each other? Whatever the reasons are, I think the yachting community benefits from having it analysed to maybe be able to prevent such events in the future.
OK; I see you added that marketing was one weak point. I looked into their website to see how they presented their products and to my surprise I couldn´t find that they are producing in GRP, eventhough you can find the text on an expandable mold as you cited as well. How many people will understand the meaning of that, as opposed to say you are producing fibreglass boats? I was 100% sure that Crescent were building in aluminium. So, if marketing is communication, which it is, somebody has forgotten to mention one of the USP:s that might be critical to some buyers... Nevertheless, I hope they will come back on their feet soon enough. With that workforce at hand, someone has to do something about it!
