MYS: A Focus on the Future with Feadship
To be truly custom takes initiative. With a world of interpretations surrounding the term, building unique yachts driven by the vision of an owner is just a core ethos. We speak to Farouk Nefzi, Marketing & Brand Director of Feadship about the changing boundaries of both custom and the global yachting image.
Feadship uses innovative initiatives to transform the spark of an idea into a revolution, bringing the superyacht experience to both drawing board and shipyard before the owner even steps on board.
Speaking about how to stand out in a crowded market, Farouk begins, “Custom is a very generic world nowadays, everybody is claiming custom or customisation, or similar words that try to describe what custom is, but we are literally starting from a blank page, to make them really truly and unique.”
The shipyard’s custom craftsmanship is reflected in Aquarius - the flagship of all four Feadships in the Monaco Yacht Show this year - and with 15 projects underway and and a full order book (9 of which are over 70-metres), the examples just seem to keep coming.
But aside from the yard’s current success story, we wanted to talk trends. One resonating message of this year’s show is how the industry is finally taking to new technologies; from brokerages creating 360 virtual tours for their listings to owner’s accepting payment in bitcoin and yacht connectivity becoming faster at sea than on land, but what is it that Feadship doing to keep ahead of the game?
“We call it the Miracle Room,” explains Farouk Nefzi, “that enables us to interact both the owner’s themes and our themes, in the same room at the same time, simultaneously, and interacting R&D topics or engineering topics making changes implementing the thought process into engineering solution and immediately responding to it…
"And out of that become bright new ideas and immediate creative input to make the yachts that we proclaim to be perfect!”
Speaking on even further developments for Feadship, The Superyacht Life Campaign initiative was a subject we were excited to hear about.
“Every movie has a bad villain as an owner of the yacht… if you look at The Wolf of Wall Street, who owns the yacht? It’s the bad guy,” but a collaboration of the founding fathers and big names of the industry, Farouk explained the beauty of an industry often tainted mis-conception of the industry; something the movement hopes to change.
So in a bid to shake the stuffiness of an archaic industry, Feadship have used Space Science to develop their so-called Miracle Room, created The Superyacht Life Campaign and are here on the final day of the MYS with four ‘perfect’ superyachts and a book full of orders. We can’t wait to see what’s up next.
"Custom is a very generic world nowadays, everybody is claiming custom or customisation, or similar words that try to describe what custom is, but we are literally starting from a blank page, to make them really truly and unique."