Company name: Escape Sailboat Company, LLC
Owner: Peter Johnstone
Employees: 14
Type of business: user-friendly sailboats
Location: Portsmouth
Year founded: 1997
1998 sales : Approximately $2.6 million
Peter Johnstone is what you might call a modern-day revolutionary. As president and founder of Escape Sailboat Company, he dreamed of transforming the expensive, highly skilled and somewhat exclusive sport of sailing into an affordable, intuitive pastime for people of all ages and wallet sizes.
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And, like most revolutionaries, he was scorned by some for his vision.
“In the very beginning, we were definitely pooh-poohed and made fun of,” Johnstone said. “What’s funny is that people think it’s really insulting to say those boats are just toys; when, really, that’s the best compliment we can get because that makes sailing user-friendly and fun.”
“But I’m really not concerned about what they think,” Johnstone added.
Why would he be?
The Escape line of tip-resistant boats featuring a bright-yellow polyethylene hull and transparent sail last year grossed Johnstone’s Portsmouth company about $2.6 million in revenues. And Johnstone expects sales to increase by another $2 million, or more, this year.
Johnstone was just 25 years old in 1991 when he plucked the renowned Sunfish/Laser division of the failing Pearson Yachts company of Portsmouth from bankruptcy, paving the way to his larger success.
“I had sold my race boat business about six months earlier and was really struggling with what to do next.” Sunfish/Laser “really seemed like the perfect fit,” Johnstone explained. “I had sailed all my life and felt pretty passionately that the small boats needed help.”
Sailboat production was in fact at an all-time low for the period between 1988 and 1999, according to a study by The Sailing Company of Newport, publishers of Cruising World and Sailing World magazines. The country made only 8,672 boats in 1991. That’s a whopping 118 percent less than last year’s figure of 18,933 – 14,516 of which were in the 19 feet or smaller category.
Johnstone was heading into a fourth year of better than expected sales at Sunfish/Laser in the summer of 1994 when he reached a crossroads.
“It was an original goal to bring people back into sailing by restoring the brands that had been the entry point in the past,” Johnstone said. “What happened is we restored the brands, but we didn’t get people back into sailing.”
Consumers continued to view the “two keystone brands of sailing” as unstable, fragile, complex and expensive, Johnstone explained.
It was then that Johnstone determined to design a boat that defied each and every one of those perceptions. At the time, Johnstone had more than an equal-distribution-of-sailboats philosophy working in his favor. He had innovation and expertise. As head of Johnstone One Design in Newport, Johnstone co-developed the retractable bowsprit that helped set in motion today’s sport boat market. Escape’s founding partners, Tom Whidden and Gary Jobson, both were America’s Cup winners.
The company marketed its new product under the Sunfish/Laser name for about a year. However, the association with “traditional sailing culture” turned out to be a hindrance, rather than a help, Johnstone said.
In spring 1997, the company changed its name to Escape and sold its remaining inventory of racing class sailboats to Bristol-based Vanguard.
Today Escape sells six boats ranging in length from 7 feet to 13 feet and in price from $699 to $2,399. On the water, the broad, Stableform hull makes the vessels extremely difficult to tip. A pair of color-coordinated pie charts at the base of the mast allow first-time users to teach themselves to sail in less than an hour. A 20-minute video, a short instruction book and a laminated cue card show users how to set up the rigging, which is similar to a kite.
Escape sold 3,500 boats in 1998 and expects to sell between 5,000 and 6,000 this year, Johnstone said.
Sally Helme, publisher for The Sailing Company, credited companies like Escape with doing “one of the most important things that anyone can do for the sailing industry.” Namely, “breaking down” the most significant barriers to the sport: money and know-how.
Escape had its first profitable month last March. But Johnstone had plenty of insecure moments along the way.
“When you set out to define a new category, you’re filled with doubts everyday,” he said. “It’s a terrifying, terrifying experience.”
Developing a distribution system was one of Johnstone’s major concerns. But not for long.
Last month, Escape was purchased by Johnson World Wide Associates, an outdoor recreational products company which includes Old Town canoes and Ocean Kayak. Based in Racine, Wis., the publicly held company had sales of $328.5 million for fiscal 1998 and net income of $5.2 million.
Helme predicted that the deal will “really help Escape go to the next level.” Moreover, she said it bodes well for the entire industry.
“In 1998, there was the single largest increase in sailboat production in North America that we’ve seen in 10 years,” Helme said. “I believe that quite a lot of that increase is due to companies like Escape coming into the market.”
Helme said it is too soon to predict if the growing popularity of small boats will result in the purchase of larger, more sophisticated models. But she was hopeful.
“Sailing is a cradle-to-grave sport,” she said. What’s more, “once you get involved, it gets addictive.”
