Who we are
Sailmakers who sail.
Doyle Sails designs and builds custom sails for every kind of programme, from a club racer chasing silverware to a Superyacht crossing an ocean. We work across Cruise, Performance Cruise, Race, Performance Race, Grand Prix, One Design and Superyacht, and the same design team supports all of them.
What connects those markets is how we approach the problem. Our people are professional sailors as well as designers, engineers and sailmakers, so the questions asked in the loft are the ones that matter on the water. That is what we mean by sailors, for sailors.
Where it started
Sails are still finished by hand on the loft floor, as they were in 1982.
Better engineered sails.
Robbie Doyle came to sailmaking from applied physics at Harvard, where he studied fluid flow, and from a decade at Hood Sailmakers learning the craft under Ted Hood. In between he trimmed mainsail aboard Courageous when she swept the 1977 America’s Cup.
When Hood was sold in 1982, he hung the first Doyle Sailmakers sign on Front Street in Marblehead, Massachusetts, on the fourth of July. He was 31. The loft was six thousand square feet and the tagline was Better Engineered Sails, which at the time meant taking computerised sail design seriously while much of the industry still treated sailmaking as an art rather than a science.
More than four decades on, the method has not changed. Every sail is engineered before it is built, and the people doing the engineering are the people out racing.
By sailors, for sailors.
It is not a slogan we inherited. It is the reason the sails work, and the reason our customers keep calling the same people season after season.
Our people
The people behind your sails.
Designers, engineers, sailmakers and professional sailors, many of whom you will have seen on the racecourse. Meet the team who will take your call, measure your rig and hand over the finished sail.