Dufour, the new-old boatbuilder from France
Sailing Magazine September 1998
Looking to hook on to a wave to America
by Micca Hutchins
He's a workaholic at the helm: picking up every good wave under his hull and working it for every tenth of an extra knot of boat speed that he can get.
Putting in nine-hour days, seven days a week, flying down the highway balancing a cell phone cradled at his ear (he's been known to have one at each ear), drawing in trump-card talents from across the boatbuilding industry, expanding production capacity by buying struggling companies and firing up moth balled production lines, quadrupling the model line and doubling output from 363 to 775 boats over the past two years.
An American boatbuilding entrepreneur? No. He is a Frenchman of savoir-faire who has the nose for a good Godet (La Rochelle-produced) cognac, knows day's catch fresh Rochelle oysters when he tastes them, and is the skipper of a new-old player, Dufour Yachts, now returning to American shores.
Dufour president Olivier Poncin, 44, speaks English with an American accent as does, by the way, all of Dufour's management, because he has lived here (as have his managers), working in the U.S. boat building industry. He has this enigmatic bit of advice he likes to repeat: "Never go into boat building out of sailing passion . . . that would be dumb." Not that Poncin, 'who was born and raised on a river boat on the Seine in Paris, doesn't enjoy sailing, He just likes to keep it in a separate 'file,'' on his cruiser berthed near Toulon where he tries to spend his summer vacations with his family sailing the Mediterranean.
Was that the lesson out of the lean boat-building years of the 1980s when there was suddenly less demand for boats and founder Michael Dufour, whose company had produced hundreds of the popular little Arpege sloops, was forced into bankruptcy (among other boat building companies at the time) ? That was about when Poncin, who wandered into the sailing business at the age of 18 when he signed up to work the Kirie booth at the Paris Boat Show, had become a top Kirie dealer (then in his early 20s), going on to become general manager by the age of 28. When in 1988 he took over Dufour, a then pale representation of a once-mighty builder that had seen success with its imports to America he knew it would take a full turnaround to bring the company back. To this day he says they ''are building a kind of new company from scratch.'' For Dufour, now France's second largest sailboat boat builder, Poncin has joined what he calls "a patch-work of ideas'' from talent he has attracted from competitors and other marine companies to his recession proof plan.
Poncin has come up with multiple broad niches, like small to large size cruising boats, medium to large cruising Catamarans, and shoal draft and center cockpit models as wall as purpose-designed charter boats that will be entering the charter trade at the end of this year.
Obviously enjoying analyzing the market with the close counsel of his director general Alexis Lepoutre, Poncin doesn't toy with nuances when he flatly says. "I design boats for women. They hold the key.'' He adds, ''A man cannot buy a boat without a wife's approval." So if it's that simple ...?
''It's really in the translation of the product," says export sales manager Florian Foglietti, who commutes between the five production sailboat assembly lines (one is the old GibSea plant, another the Dynamique plant, both of which Dufour bought). It's got to be the "right product at the right price," Foglietti says. And competitive price has been an approach that Dufour has opted to use in trying to break into the crowded American sailboat market.
But industry foul-weather insurance against potential recession comes from diversification, including the IGU (internal glass unit) business, the models for the bath, lavatory and head that are used at their chain of Geo hotels. These hotels were conceived for the traveling salesman as expense saving one-night stops, which have proven so popular in France that numerous knock-offs have arisen since the Geo success. Other businesses include the marina in Port Pin Rolland, Dufour Power and real estate. The Dufour marine business accounts for 77 percent of the revenue.
But for the savvy Poncin, looking to find the right wave to surf in to American shores, that wave may be building now.
This article was written by Micca Hutchins and published in the September 1998 edition of Sailing Magazine. Pictures from the article have not been reproduced in the reading room.
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