PhilUK said..mark62 said..
We only have Fhot fins left.
After all the trading complications with Europe that Brexit brought us, Mathew from Demon Sails moved his sail making company to France.
As far as I'm aware, that's it, pretty poor show from us Brits...
Tushingham was the last major brand, but they moved production to China so I didnt really consider them as a UK brand so much.
When Roger Tushingham retired he decided to end the brand as he didnt want to sell the name on to become a 'name' passed around for money, like so many brands are these days.
There arent many boards/sails built outside Thailand, China, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Not the brands who sell higher volumes anyway. AHD boards are made in Tunisia, although I got the impression they might be moving to France with the higher end kit. Their foils are made in France, like Phantom.
That's not quite how I remember it.
There were three or four windsurf sail brands in the UK, and originally windsurf boards were also made in the UK using custom processes. But it became increasingly uneconomic for those brands* to survive when competing with world-wide brands that had huge production factories in the days when windsurf boards were made in vaste numbers.
As labour costs rose in Europe almost all sails and boards were later made in China, Sri Lanka - or famously in Thailand, at the Cobra factory.
Roger Tushingham went into mass-produced sails in the 1980s and these for a while were made at Chris Bowler's factory - and Chris had originally made Laser (dinghy) sails, under the one-design license.
When Roger wanted to do an Olympic campaign in the Flying Dutchman class he sold the Tushingham brand to Chris Bowler.
Chris was a engineering genius and truly believed in UK manufacturing, plus he ran his own village-based production line, situated about as far from the sea as you could get.
But eventually Chris wanted to retire (to follow his hobby of breeding pedigree sheep) , and Roger Tushingham bought the sail brand name back off him.
Roger then took some new windsurf sail designs (from Ken Black) to China, where they could be made in greater numbers, and much cheaper, and Ken was paid a royalty for each sail sold. The new pricing was very competitive, and Tushingham sails then became the biggest selling brand in the UK and also had significant sales in Holland.
But Tushingham as a company also branched out into other brands and they were the importers of Starboard designs, and later Severne, plus they started the SUP boom with Red Paddle designs, and quickly cornered that expanding market.
The company, by now called Tushingham Sales, was later sold on, and it was the accountants from the new owners who felt the original Tushingham sails brand was now uneconomic compared to what else the company was selling.
Basically, all the different sizes of windsurf sail were taking up a lot of storage space in the Tushingham warehouses - and the cost of storing stock is quite a thing in countries where land is expensive.
As you say, most brands we hear of now, be that boards or sails, or masts and booms etc, are not made in their native country.
*The original UK windsurfing brands are hard to remember now:
Lightwave boards were pretty big, and later we had MK customs and K-Bay boards.
With sails we had Tushingham, Bugler, Ken Black designs, and there were a couple of other sail lofts based in Cornwall, if I remember correctly.
Five Oceans sails originally started as Demon sails, specialising in the Div I and Div II racing classes.
Foil boards are now being made in the UK, so the custom market is not dead. The rising prices of imported good here, has meant it's now economic once again to make stuff in the UK, if in small numbers.
