Chris-Craft, one of America’s oldest and best-known boat builders, celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. Stephen F. Heese has served as the company’s president for more than 23 years. We asked Heese to share his insights on the company’s trajectory from wooden boat builder to modern legacy brand.
Soundings: Can you take us through the highlights of the Chris-Craft origin story?
Stephen Heese: In 1874, a young man, Christopher Columbus Smith, started making wooden duck boats. This was in Algonac, Michigan, a waterfront suburb of Detroit. The first evidence of incorporation of the company was in 1910, and it was called the Smith Ryan Boat Company. [The name was changed to Chris-Craft in 1924.] Chris got to know Henry Ford and started marinizing car engines in the ’20s.
Chris Smith died in 1939. World War II soon began taking all of the yard’s production. They called them “Higgins boats” because they were designed at a New Orleans shipyard called Higgins. If you go to the World War II Museum in New Orleans, there is a whole section on the Higgins boats. They were built by a lot of companies, including Chris-Craft. They were wooden, single-engine, straight-shaft landing craft.
Harsen Smith, the grandson of the founder, is the guy who expanded the company. After the war, he built multiple plants, with railroad lines full of mahogany going to them. Harsen was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1959. He was an industrialist. He had the know-how and a manufacturing workforce in Michigan.
SO: Did many famous people own Chris-Crafts?
SH: You need money and water for a marine industry to prosper, and that money didn’t really come to the U.S. until after the war. I mean, boats were a very esoteric thing—the province of the Kennedys. We have pictures of Roosevelt; he owned a Chris-Craft, and so did Brigitte Bardot.
SO: How did Chris-Craft help get more people out on the water?
SH: For a while boating was kind of an elite sport. Even in the ’60s when I was a kid, only the richest people in town had boats. But then there came a time when more people were able to afford it. Chris-Craft had nine plants, which were strategically spread, and they had the first dealer network. They also offered a kit boat that a father and son could put together and outfit with an outboard motor.
SO: Did you grow up boating?
SH: I grew up in Tampa, Florida, and spent my youth on boats, fishing, water-skiing and racing sailboats. I never had a plan to enter the marine industry, but I was totally addicted in high school to the freedom of it. Get away from your parents. Go fishing, come back late. Back then, boats broke a lot. So, if you owned a boat, you had to know how to work on it. I was from the take-it-apart generation; we didn’t have video games. We just took stuff apart and put it back together for entertainment.
SO: How did you get your start in the boating industry?
SH: I met Stephen Julius at Harvard Business School. We both took a class taught by Bill Sahlman called Entrepreneurial Finance. That had a profound impact on Stephen and me. Stephen is brilliant. He is Italian. He grew up on the water at his family home in Santa Margarita on the Italian Riviera, where there are amazing destinations. You could go on your boat to an abandoned monastery on an island.
Stephen’s mother’s family originally was from Ferrara, which is near the Riva plant in Sarnico. In the late 1990s, Riva was owned by Rolls Royce. He knew that it was a painful mistake for Rolls-Royce to own this company. So, he called them repeatedly and said, “Hey, if you ever want to sell, I want to buy it.” In 1997, he got a phone call and they said, “If you can close Friday, we’ll sell it to you for X.”
Stephen needed operating help with Riva, so he called me. We developed one model, the Aquariva, and took it to a show. When Norberto Ferretti [co-founder of the Ferretti Group] saw it, he said, “I have to have it.” The company wasn’t for sale, but we sold it to him two years later. And missed it. It was like a lost opportunity to build a business.
SO: When did you and Julius purchase Chris-Craft?
SH: In 2000, I moved back to my hometown of Tampa. I had three kids in diapers, and I expected to take a year or two and figure it out. But I am not the retiring type. A few months later, I read in the newspaper that Outboard Marine Company had gone bankrupt. We wound up buying the assets [of Chris-Craft] at a bankruptcy auction in 2001. It was kind of a crazy deal because the trademarks had been separated from the company, and without them, we weren’t going to develop the company. We wound up buying the trademarks in a separate transaction from [Rupert Murdoch’s] News Limited group.
It was like this juggling act for six months. We were constantly weighing things up. We could have sold the trademarks and liquidated the whole thing, but we said, “You know what, let’s do this. Let’s develop this company.” And we literally made the decision one night sitting in my car in the parking lot of the Chris-Craft plant in Sarasota, Florida, which had been shut by that point for almost a year.
We had a dealer meeting in 2002. We developed three boats and repositioned them much higher in the marketplace than where Chris-Craft had been competing before. We took a middle-market brand and stuck it at the top half. And it all worked. There’s a Harvard Business School case study on it. The Riva business plan became the Chris-Craft business plan: Basically, take an iconic brand that had fallen on hard times and figure out what the promise of the brand is or was way back when. Develop a product that fulfills that promise, market it correctly, and brand equity comes roaring back.
SO: You sold Chris-Craft, to Winnebago in 2018. How did that come about?
SH: Stephen and I designed a luxury RV using Chris-Craft designers. We called Mike Happe, president and CEO of Winnebago, and said, “We’ve developed this RV, and we’d like to talk to you about building it for us.”
We met with Mike at the 2017 Florida RV Super Show in Tampa. He asked for a place where we could meet confidentially. We wound up in my kitchen for eight hours and had a discussion that went everywhere. We got to know them really well. The culture of their company was very similar to ours. Mike asked if we’d ever consider selling Chris-Craft. And even though it wasn’t for sale, our conclusion was these are really great people who are passionate about the same things that we are in terms of employees. When you own something for that long, it’s your baby and the people who have worked there, you want what’s best for them more than you want to sell to the highest bidder. We felt that the Winnebago team would be great stewards for our employees, dealers and customers.
At that point, Stephen exited, and I signed a two-year employment agreement. I never expected to still be here today. I told them I’d stay as long as I was having fun and I’m having fun. We now have a new plant [and] we’ve increased the production capacity of the company by 50 percent.
SO: In the 24 years you have been with Chris-Craft, how have the boat buyers changed?
SH: The market that came out of the Great Recession of 2008-2009 was different than the one that went into the crash. Before the crash, there were 80,000 sterndrive boats sold. Last year there were 8,000. There were 10,000 cabin boats sold in 2005 or 2006. Last year there were 900. The pontoon market went from about 10,000 to 50,000. The other trend is the rise of the outboard boat. We still sell a lot of sterndrive boats on lakes, but the saltwater markets have gone 100 percent outboard. Today, I think people don’t have a weekend to spend on their boat. They got tired of running a bed-and-breakfast for their friends.
SO: What are you doing to protect Chris-Craft as a legacy brand?
SH: We are keeping the design language the same but evolving the product to meet the current consumer’s needs. The nice thing about this business is you can develop new models relatively quickly. As long as we stay in our lane of serving the needs of the premium buyer, we’re going to be just fine.
SO: Are you looking at electric propulsion?
SH: We built and launched an all-electric concept boat last summer, the Launch 25 GTe with EVOA propulsion. We will not likely offer that model exactly, but for sure we will offer electric boats.
SO: Looking forward, what is the future of Chris-Craft?
SH: New product development; going smaller and going bigger. Next year, we are going to add a 22 and a 40 to broaden the product line. And we will have a new 24 later this year.
SO: Many people are still passionate about vintage Chris-Craft boats. Is there a club?
SH: There’s the Chris-Craft Antique Boat Club. They publish a magazine called the Brass Bell every quarter. There are people who make parts for the old boats and they advertise in there. They also have a trading post where you can get just about anything, including instrument panels. If you have an old Chris-Craft and you want to restore it, there’s a lot of help in that club.
SO: When you bought Chris-Craft, did you inherit all the plans for all the old models?
SH: We did, and we donated them to the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia. The hull files are at the Mariners’ Museum, as is the company’s photo archive with about 300,000 pictures.
SO: Are the people who own wooden Chris-Craft boats today a different group than the owners of your new fiberglass models?
SH: I just think there are different buyers for everything. If you go up to Lake Geneva, you’ll see our fiberglass and wooden boats on the same docks. Same thing on Lake Winnipesaukee. There are people who buy a wooden boat for 30 grand and fix it up and have 50 grand worth of labor in it. That’s not our buyer, but our customers do like the nostalgic look and the classic elegance. All our boats are painted, and the lines are similar to the old Chris-Craft boats, including the tumblehome. The Barrel Backs had tumblehome, and we took the curves from them.
SO: Are you an antique Chris-Craft fan?
SH: How could I not be? I think everybody in our company loves this brand. It’s historical, it’s iconic. It’s the history of America.
This article was originally published in the May 2024 issue.
