Sightlines
Once a goliath in the industry, Sea Ray appears vulnerable.
My introduction to Sea Ray came through Gene Whipp, who was one of its largest dealers at the time. Gene sat on the dealer advisory board for Sea Ray and had recommended me for some design work. Brunswick had bought Sea Ray a couple of years before, and by this time, was the largest production boatbuilder in the world. Jerry Michlack had been there from the beginning of the company with its founder C.N. Ray and had been V.P. of product development and engineering (PD&E) for many years when I first met him. Jerry was a super nice guy and was responsible for the look and feel of all the Sea Ray boats; he also spoke in a severe monotone.
I am a type A personality, so I had a bit of a problem with Jerry’s monotone—not with him personally. It just seemed to suck the enthusiasm out of our discussions. It also seemed to flow downhill from him to the rest of the PD&E staff. As a group, they all loved Sea Ray, but I never met a bunch of guys that showed less emotion. I can remember a number of visits where I felt more like a cheerleader than a designer as I tried to convince them to do various things.
However large and successful the Sea Ray brand was, I always thought of it as the boating version of Cadillac. It was made for middle America as a non-showy statement of success, a brand no one could get too excited about, but no one could object to either. All the boats were the same color and had a strong family resemblance that any boater could recognize. They were a safe choice with a huge following, albeit a bit boring. A boat with a monotone.
As much as the company and its products exuded conservatism, Sea Ray harbored a hidden desire to break free from its wallflower persona and dance with the stars. This came in the form of its secret envy of Sunseeker. There was hardly a meeting where this jealous rivalry didn’t come up. Even though Sea Ray was much larger, Sunseeker was considered much sexier and got all the accolades, having cameos in James Bond films and sucking up all the press. Sea Ray badly wanted to go after them.
By this time Jerry Michlack had retired and Bruce Thompson had taken over PD&E. We had worked for several years as naval architecture consultants on the larger boats with Bruce when he asked me to take a trip over to Merritt Island. From PD&E, we took a short drive to the new Sykes Creek Plant to discuss the future of the huge, unutilized production facility. Sea Ray had decided to go after Sunseeker with a line of bigger boats, and my office was being asked to take the responsibility for design and pre-production prototyping. This was going to be huge! This was September 7, 2001. Four days later the world suddenly changed.
Sea Ray shifted strategy and decided to go after the big boat business by acquiring Hatteras, but didn’t fare well after the great recession. As we all know by now, Brunswick has put Sea Ray up for sale after several years of operating at a loss; boating trends have changed with the rising popularity of large outboards, while the stern-drive and inboard-powered cruiser segment is in steady decline. As a result, the Goliath of the boatbuilding industry was hit right between the eyes with a pebble from Brunswick’s own backyard.