Princess Yachts revealed a major move during the recent Monaco Yacht Show. It’s returning to the 30-meter-plus (98-foot-plus) market, a segment where it delivered more than three dozen yachts. Already, the Princess Yachts superyachts will include the Princess 106 Odyssey yacht series. Larger projects are in the works, too. For details, Megayacht News editor Diane M. Byrne sat down with Princess CEO Will Green.
Diane M. Byrne: Currently you have the 95 in both the X and Y Class ranges. But is this your biggest boat?
Will Green: No, we built 38 boats to LY2. We started with a 32-meter in 2010, and that was reasonably successful, so we developed a three-boat M Class range to add to it. We had a 30-meter, a 35-meter, and a 40-meter, but we delivered our last 40-meter back in 2018. Since then, we’ve filled our somewhat sizable capacity with boats under 24 meters. Economically it made more sense, but sadly, it meant that temporarily we exited the big-boat world. Now, we’re back. In 2028, we’ll be launching the first of our new Odyssey series, which is a range of boats over 24-meter loadline complying with LY3 regulations. It gives Princess customers who have built boats over 80 feet somewhere to go, some of whom want to go bigger. We know because we’ve not been able to offer bigger boats when they’ve wanted them.
Diane M. Byrne: It’s great to keep people in the family, but you also need to look at the rest of the opportunities. Some builders are simply looking at their feeder market, so to say. So, do you see an opportunity to grow their customers into your brand?
Will Green: Yes, that’s right. Brand loyalty is quite strong in our industry, because it’s not just about the product. It’s also about the way you’re looked after and the customer experience. And whilst we’re really proud of the level of customer retention we have, there’s an appetite to win customers from other brands and show them that life is better at Princess, in terms of products, quality of build, seakeeping, and performance. Princess is so vertically integrated. We’re really proud of the level of quality we’ve been able to produce in the UK. We have over 2,000 boat builders in Plymouth just building Princess Yachts. So, we’re really happy that we’re coming back into superyachts.
I also think Princess is considered quite a safe place by a lot of boat buyers and owners, particularly through challenging markets. Certainly, back in the global financial crisis, a lot of customers retreated to the safe brands. We did particularly well in growing our market share. Since Covid, the market’s been quite challenging, and I think we’ve capitalized on that because again, we’re considered to be a relatively safe place. So being that conservative brand with that conservative DNA, it’s quite exciting for us to do some more challenging things.
Diane M. Byrne: Will the Odyssey 106 design be semi-custom?
Will Green: It’s going to be more semi-custom than we’ve been in the past. We’re a production yard, so, structural bulkheads will be fixed. But every 106 we expect to be different to the next. That level of personalization is something that the customers will demand. What we’ve tried to do with the Y 95 and our other big boat projects is to come up with as many alternative layouts as we can as part of the configurable spec. We’re forever optimizing the space onboard and trying to give every customer what they want in terms of personalization without starting from a fresh piece of paper. So, we’re trying to lean on our experience of all those big boats that we built before, to offer the best of both worlds.
It’s also going to be big volume, 254 gross tons, a big boat for 106 feet, and quite an interesting evolution of the Princess hull design. Our customers frequently operate at displacement speeds, but like the opportunity to run quicker. So we’ve developed with our naval architecture partners Olesinski, who we’ve worked with since the mid-1980s, a new hybrid fast displacement hull. It has a very fine point of entry and twin chines forward and transitions into round bilges. The transom immersion is much reduced, so it’s not going to have a lot of drag. It gives us that ability to be very efficient at 10 knots. We’re talking 2,500 nautical miles with a relatively similar fuel capacity to the Y 95. A customer can genuinely cruise close to 20 knots if they want to, but she’ll be super efficient at 10, 12 knots.
Diane M. Byrne: If you were sitting with one of your clients, for example, and telling them about the new Princess Yachts superyachts, what is the essence? What’s going to tick the boxes for them, other than stepping up to the larger yacht they’ve wanted?
Will Green: The two things that draw a Princess client to Princess are hand-built British craftsmanship and then seakeeping and performance They really understand, particularly once they’ve been to Plymouth and seen we’ve got a million square feet of production facilities. We like to joke we’re the UK’s biggest furniture manufacturer. The craftsmanship is deep rooted, and you can see it when you walk around the facility by the amount of gray hair. As for seakeeping and performance, perhaps we don’t shout about it as much as we should. We have a very deep V hull. Every boat is tested in the English Channel. We have six meters of tide, and frequently, our seas are pretty horrific. So those two things keep customers coming back.
And, we’re not afraid of inviting customers to major boat shows when all of our competitors are there. We’re a brand with humility. When I first joined Princess, David King, who’s still my mentor, would say, “Go on your competitor’s boats and ignore all the things you think are done badly. Look at the things that are done well. See if there’s something we can learn from, how others do things better. Then go on your own products and ignore all the things you do well and look at the things that we could do better. If you focus on those two things, then tomorrow you’ll build a better boat.” That’s all been our design philosophy, to respect and recognize all of that knowledge and how we can continually improve ourselves, to offer a better customer experience.
We also recognize the fact that our customers live on these things. So, who better to help us develop the next generation of new Princesses? You can imagine some of them don’t hold back in telling us how they think things should improve. That’s been invaluable to us over the years, and we’re really fortunate that we’ve got a really nice customer base. They’re real boaters. They spend time onboard with their families, and they’re passage makers. That level of experience has been a key element of our design evolution and product evolution.
Diane M. Byrne: Do you have a size threshold you’re looking at for the new Princess Yachts superyachts?
Will Green: To be honest, not really. We’re very open-minded. When we built our 40-meter trideck, we were conscious that we were starting to tread on the toes of builders who were building in metal. That’s alien to Princess. But I could see us going back into the 40-meter territory. We know what it takes to be successful, but who knows? We’ll start with our 106 and see where it takes us.
Diane M. Byrne: Clearly, things can always change, but you have a certain number of models in mind for the range?
Will Green: No, to be honest, not yet. We’ve got two in mind currently. We’ve got to build the molds, the plugs, et cetera. We haven’t any ambition to be the world’s biggest boatbuilder. We primarily want to be a company that’s sustainable, has sustainable levels of revenue and profitability that can allow us to keep investing in new and exciting products for our customers. Wherever that takes us. It’s whatever makes sense to us and to, to our customers.
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