Boston Whaler
Founder: Dick Fisher
Founded: 1958
position: Edgewater, Florida
Representative products: Like an “unsinkable” ship 150 Montauk, 130 Super Sportand the 220 Dauntless.
At a glance:
- We offer fishing boats, cruising boats and tender boats as well as runabouts, cruisers and center console boats.
- Trusted by navies around the world, including the Navy SEALs and the U.S. Coast Guard.
- We have been building ships for over 60 years.
- After graduating from Harvard University, founder Dick Fisher revolutionized the boat hull manufacturing process with his polyurethane foam injection molding method.
- Boat sizes range from 13 feet to 42 feet.
- In 1996 it was acquired by Brunswick Corporation, a major marine manufacturing company.
- Two Boston Whaler Conquest models won Innovation Awards at the 2024 Miami International Boat Show.
- It has also won the NMMA Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) Award for Best Fiberglass Outboard Engine for 16 consecutive years.
Quotes from Ron Berman, Vice President of Product Development and Engineering
We are very focused on what is important to our customers. There is a lot of information you can get from surveys, but you learn by actually spending time with boat owners. Then you will find the answers. People want to feel like they are on a big, spacious boat. Maximize comfort. Every seat has to have a good view and be comfortable. And they need to feel safe. Customers want boats with predictable performance and maneuverability. They want boats that maintain visibility – boats that don’t lose visibility when they are on the water. They want boats that don’t move erratically in rough seas.
Making people feel safer and more comfortable when they’re on the boat is something we’ve done through technology. For example, Dynamic Running Surface is an automatic trim adjustment system that makes steering the boat more predictable. We also have Quiet Ride, which is great at reducing noise on board. And if you have a twin engine boat, you can control everything with a joystick: inboard, outboard, I/O. And we’ve also introduced something called a Command View camera system on our yachts, which gives you a full view all around the boat, so you can see the side and the stern in one picture, which makes docking more confident. All of this is aimed at making people feel safer and more confident when they’re on the boat.
I love to reinvent things. A new boat shouldn’t be a rehashed version of the previous boat. I like being able to take an idea and make something that’s never been done before, or reinvent an existing boat and find a way to make it new and fresh and really excite people. I like to understand what boaters want and then figure out how to produce it and use it in a boat.
