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Tucked away in a quiet corner behind Matakana’s Home Fresh lettuce farm and Charlie’s Gelato, one of the world’s leading high performance sailmakers has quietly set up its global HQ and manufacturing base.
Evolution Sails has moved out of the city to a giant 2700 square metre purpose-built sail loft and sailcloth-making facility that employs 24 people, mainly because business founder and owner Rodney Keenan lives just up the road at Sandspit, but also for practical reasons.
“Around 90% of our business is export and we can be anywhere these days,” he says. “More and more people are being forced out of Westhaven. To run a marine business there is almost impossible – the land is so valuable, the rents are ridiculous.”
To put that in context, Keenan says the mortgage on the property at 726 Matakana Road would only pay the rent on a building 20% of the size of Evolution’s new 100-metre long super-shed in the city.
While the new sail loft and sailcloth manufacturing room is a pretty basic building from the outside, inside it’s about as high-tech as you can get. Keenan reckons it’s probably the first custom-built sail loft in NZ since the 1970s.
“Sailmakers usually rent a shed and make modifications, but by owning this land and building this,we’ve done a lot of things that will speed up production and make us more efficient,” he says.
Innovations include a sunken work trench in the sail loft, meaning that sailmakers can go down a few steps and work on sails spread out on the floor while they are standing up – a massive improvement from historically having to crawl around on their hands and knees.
Evolution makes sails for everything from a nine-metre boat up to 500 square metre mainsails for 42-metre superyachts, producing around 2000 square metres of finished sails every week.
The company’s offshoot, EM2, is also one of the world’s leading producers of membrane sailcloth, supplying fabric for 60 sail brands around the globe. Hi-tech loom-like machines move across a perfectly flat floor – one that took five weeks to pour – laying thousands of strands of fibres that are then heat-sealed and laminated.
“We couldn’t find a good source of materials, so decided to do it ourselves,” Keenan says.
“I found out who the best guy in the world was and hired him; if you’re going to do something, just do it, the same as with this building.”
This international reach does mean that no overt loyalty to a particular team or country is on display.
“Because we produce for so many other sailmakers, we try not to get too involved – we’re like Switzerland. We do stuff all over the place,” he says. “We’re number three in the world in superyachts in terms of number of sails built.”
Of course, the move to Matakana has not been without its challenges – not only has it taken most of last year and a multi-million dollar investment, but half of Evolution’s Auckland-based staff resigned when they heard about the move.
“The manager had a bit of a panic attack, but we’ve found people in Snells, out at Tawharanui, from Waiwera and Orewa and we’ve ended up with the same number of staff.
“We’ve even had people knocking on the door looking for work, which we never had in the city.”
Keenan says the competition for staff in Auckland was tough, with three companies vying for a limited pool of sailmakers.
“Being a bit separate, the advantage of being out of the city is that it’s not so easy for staff to be poached. It’s harder to get them, but when we do, it’s more likely that they’ll be with us for a while,” he says.
“We’re very competitive at the high end. There are not many people in the world who can do what we do. And we’ve got so much space here now. We’ve never had the luxury of space before.”
