P&H have scooped up a lot of the BCU guys in the USA. So, the coaches are now often in P&H boats and bring spares for people to try. Years ago there were only a handful of P&H dealers. I traveled 200+ miles to demo P&H boats. Now they seem nearly ubiquitous in the Northeastern US. The combination as been effective in having many more paddlers I see in P&H boats.
Personally I still prefer a number of Valley boats and plan to never give up my Romany.
I am one of those folks who has bought boats only after paddling them. Heck, Tom Bergh wouldn't sell me my first Valley boat until I had paddled it alot. He wouldn't let me buy my Romany until after he had loaned me one to paddle for a couple of weeks.
Wise words "Buy from people you trust and respect. Companies that share your values. Beware the “lip” service of an MBA…always! As a consumer, the MBA is NOT your friend in the “value” game…trust me."
Having once worked at a brokerage for 16 years, I can confirm that statement 1000%. The only thing the MBA knows that you don’t is how to get people to buy anything.
and P&H these days It’s a clever marketing strategy - cornering the best coaches by giving away (or very deeply discounting) boats that will generate future exposure at events, during coaching lessons and in print. The initial capital investment is relatively cheap compared to the costless advertising that will be generated over many years – and then volume will come.
For it to succeed in the long run though, the boats will have to perform both in design and build quality. It worked well for NDK (because of great designs) but it also helped expose weaknesses. Will it work as well for P&H?
As I love many of the Valley designs, I wish they could generate as much exposure. But they, and others like Rockpool, Tiderace and other quality small shops, seem to stick to a lower key approach. Their challenge, as noted, will remain distribution and still enough exposure (NDK seems to have a good balance there, with their Nigel Dennis Kayaking Centres). But all these designer-led firms do not seem to be at all interested in joining the big corporate volume game that P&H seems to want to be joining now.
It makes sense for small designer-led firms to prefer to focus on quality designs and lesser volumes, as the volume/market share game in the end has a high price for specialty products. It drives you inevitably to a completely different mindset, from the artisan to the bean counter. Not only more capital is required (production facilities, inventory, marketing, head office personnel), but also the additional cost of running a bigger corporate structure is not cheap. So the primary focus becomes revenues and profitability. To maximize them one has to sell more boats, and lower their unit cost. The cost lowering required is “always more” given that small reductions can have a large impact given the volume.
In bean-counter logic, the most economically efficient scenario would be if one boat could satisfy everyone. That being not possible, the next best thing is to have boats that appeal to the maximum number of people. So the handling characteristics of the boats offered have to cover a much wider range of preferences. With capital at stake, the marketing department inevitably ends up having a heavy hand in establishing the specifications: more stability, easier to maneuver, less potential for surprises, for as wide as possible a range of body weights… but boring boats in the end? Given the constraints of boat design, being good everywhere means nothing will really shine…
Hopefully there will always be small shops, with designers with a lot of flair and gusto, offering boats maybe more specialized but with how much more challenging and exciting designs, for us to keep interested on the water…
It seemed the takeover of P&H by Pyranha was central to the change in approach. Pyranha was already a well established and distributed ww range of boats. That network was employed to increase the distribution for P&H boats. The Adventure line of boats was also developed and broadly distributed.
This coupled with recruiting well respected paddlers and coaches has had a notable result.
Fortunately, P&H boats are still very well designed and manufactured.
A plus of the Pyranha takeover of P&H was Peter Orton's departure to run Valley where Frank Goodman was ready to retire and Orton's energy was key to revitializing a time honored brand.
Other makers like Eddyline & Impex …are out there and make decent boats. It must be local geography because I haven’t seen them mentioned a lot, nor Point 65 North. Lots of folks I seakayak with on Ches Bay paddle those boats, Eddylines in particular. Everyone seems well pleased. Too bad they no longer make their Modulus construction boats, the best of both worlds of thermoformed and composite. Wilderness Systems seems to be well represented for mass made poly plastic boats and most folks seem pleased with them. We are fortunate that there are lots of choices out there these days…well, unless you are a big guy then the options are quite limited from anyone.
Valley not Bomb Proof I like Valley Boats but I have also seen two Valley surf kayaks totaled by large waves. Only brand of composite surf kayak I have seen that occur.
Do you think P&H is fitting into this categorization? I think their last two designs are the Cetus and the Bahiya. The Bahiya is anything but a one-size-fits-all boat or an attempt to fit the mass market. It was never even marketed as such. I’m not sure about the Cetus? Their lineup isn’t a bunch of particularly forgiving designs…seem more lively and specialized than not when lined up with what’s available as competition?
There are now two sizes of the Cetus and two of the Scorpio - both new designs which are gaining favor. The Quest LV is fairly recent and has seduced some paddlers. The recent versions of the Capella are also garnering paddlers. The Cetus, Scorprio, and Capella are all more forgiving and less specialized than most Valley boats. The Cetus and Scorpio are particularly confidence inspiring and not narrow in their appeal.
As recently as four years ago when I attended training sessions and/or symposiums there would be more NDK boats than any other with Valley boats being the next most common. There might be one or two P&H boats. They were less common than Impex boats or Necky Chathams. You could just about be certain that the coaches with whom you worked were going to be paddling Explorers or Romanys. These days, many of those coaches are paddling P&H boats. The paddlers themselves are still mostly in NDK and Valley boats, but I imagine that will be changing as people buy new boats.
them. Gear whores of sorts, they advocate for their sponsors and typically go with the highest bidder. So long as the gear is adequate they are happy. And yeah, it's mass smart marketing to get great paddlers endorsing your products! These very paddlers would not paddle a shitty boat no matter, so what this alludes is that most of the respected brands are good.
P&H is a good company with good stuff run by a great guy with a great team. Same of Valley and NDK.
would not paddle a shitty boat Very true. Some of the same top coaches wo were in NDK boats a few years ago are now in P&H. One L4 who has been paddling around Scandinavia was in a Valley the first time I met him is now always seen in an Impex boat.
In my experience, none of them say “This is the only good boat.” or “This is the boat you should have.” The closest was one year at Sullivans Falls when Leon Somme looked longingly at my Romany and said “That is THE boat for these conditions. That boat was designed exactly for this.” I won’t mention what boat he was given for the day. He never said anything negative about the boat he was paddling. And he did just fine in it.
It does carry weight when a paddler you respect is paddling a boat in conditions you respect.
It also carries a lot of weight when the designer of a boat is an accomplished active paddler. Part of NDK’s success, beyond the quality of design and giving boats for expeditions, is that Nigel is always out there paddling AND he is actively coaching. I think it is also one of the very attractive aspects of the TideRace boats.
Reputations rely on the quality of past products. One should be careful about how they apply to new products. When there are major changes, especially absorption within a larger structure, continuity cannot be assumed any more (what happened to Dagger, Current Designs, and so many others after they were bought is illustration enough).
How P&H will really evolve given the changes of the last few years is unknown. The good thing is that they were not bought by one of the very big ones. But anyone who has lived through a merger knows that, whatever the best intentions of the participants, they are messy.
It seems to me that what they have mostly done since the changes at the top is focusing (successfully) on distribution and marketing while on the product side initially focusing on variants of past designs (the Bahiya was described elsewhere as like a big Vela). Now their first truly post-merger design (the Cetus, plus its plastic (Scorpio) and LV variants) seems like it was designed (and marketed) to do as many things as possible well enough to appeal to as many people as possible. A marketer-specified boat, more than an artisan-designed boat.
So I just wonder what will come next, which direction they will truly take. Back to boats with more character, like a Quest, or the early Capella? Or toward blander boats, made to appeal and sell in large numbers? Only time will tell.
would not paddle a shitty boat Seems that the best outcomes come when a great paddler is the designer AND the decision maker - then the focus is truly on producing that ever elusive “best boat”…
Good way to go broke fast. As much as we like to bash the marketing and MBA types, the great paddlers and the great designers (and the rare birds that are both) aren’t always the best business people.
That perfect kayak may also have have a perfect market of one paddler. Game over (or back to the drawing board to do some rec boats that will sell, if there’s any capital left…).
It’s a very rare thing to successfully market such “art” and make a living at it. Nearly impossible to do build a company on it, and keep it alive in the context of a even a very small manufacturing operation.
At best some of that magic can be brought into the process and can survive into the product mix in some form/on some level. There’s some in most of our kayaks. Sometimes it’s enough (and beats the other option of not having that kayak at all), more than that is mostly dreaming, but it’s a beautiful dream.
Greyak, the MBA types havent made a penny in kayaking since they bought all the small brands! Seems the paddler, designers are ahead in the profit arena.
I just caught up with this thread. As to P&H old versus newer designs, I am not sure I agree that the newer designs sacrifice anything that a paddler cares about. If anything, the earlier P&H designs tended towards being too much of niche boats. Fun and admirable in the right hands, but there's a point where you just want to go paddle without having to think about what the boat is. I don't think that makes someone less of a paddler, in fact it frees you to take on more in the way of conditions.
The Capella series is a nice example of the progression. I think the Capella 161 is a much more fun boat than the original, partly because you can take the boat into messy situations and not think about adjusting for some squirreliness.
Granted that the NDK Romany and Explorer may have taken this further than many paddlers want. The Explorer is totally capable but won't make anyone's lists of most exciting rides unless you take it into exciting conditions. But somewhere between the Sirius and the Explorer is a sweet spot, and I think that P&H is really trying to find that.
Rockpool Kayaks We are producing the ALAW Bach here in the US under license from Rockpool in Wales. Our plan was to take advantage of the high quality manufacturing capabilities of US builders and avoid the shipping cost and delays of importation. We have spent our money building the best kayak possible and sell direct to the public to offset the price of US labor vs Asian labor. As Salty has said repeatedly there is a great deal of difference between some composite manufacturing and others. We will continue to make the Bach here but will be bring some of the other models over from Wales.
And while we believe we are making the best boat you can buy,we do not have the financial resources to beat consumers over the head with it.
From my long involvement, in paddlesports, I have seen the shift from independent manufacturers making boats for people, to corporations making boats for consumers. And like other commodities they are pushing them through the biggest consumer interfaces they can find. The irony of all this is that while unit sales have increased, profits have not and brands that were well thought of only a few years ago have been degraded by the corporate touch and no longer appeal to discerning paddlers. Of course, we would not have this discussion forum without the advertisers that support Pnet.