In this month’s Marine Matters, Gallagher gets to meet the Directors, Pete King and Andy Wooding of Bournemouth-based Ocean Marine Upholstery Limited and learn about the business.

Q. Tell us about yourselves and when the business started

Pete: I’m Poole-based, married to Nicoline and we have 3 boys. I was brought up in Verwood and attended school locally.

My dad was in the same line of business and I joined his business straight from school at the age of 17 and attended an upholstery course at college. I initially thought that I’d do it as a stop gap but 9 years later I was still there!

At that time dad was talking about retiring, he wanted me to take over his half of the business but his business partner wasn’t so keen so I made the decision to set up on my own in 2003.

It was in 2006 that I spoke to Andy regarding going into business together. We’d been mates since school and had played football together from a very early age. The partnership was born on a drunken night out in Bournemouth!

I knew that we had a good skills mix, complementing each other well and felt we would make a good team. Andy said to me “if you can remember tomorrow what you’ve just asked me, give me a call and we’ll talk more about it!”… and the rest (as they say) is history.

Andy: I grew up in West Parley, but now live in Verwood. I’m married to Jenna (a nurse) with 2 boys.

My background is in product design. I completed A Levels in Art & PE and an advanced GNVQ in Art & Design, before studying Product Design at Bournemouth & Poole College of Art & Design and then progressing on to Bournemouth University to study Product Design Visualisation.

Before joining in partnership with Pete I worked for Barclays Bank and in IT for a time in sales and purchasing roles. I never really had a direction or career path in mind and when Pete asked me if I wanted to go into business with him, Jenna was pregnant with Charlie our eldest son, we’d just bought a new house and were mortgaged up to our eyeballs.

It was a huge decision to leave everything I knew behind and start from scratch sharing one person’s wage, but despite the financial worries Jenna was behind me 100%. Pete and I both had to put everything we had into making this work with extremely little business knowledge and no financial backing. It was sink or swim and luckily we swam!

Q. Let us know about Ocean Marine Upholstery and what you do

We are a hand-built manufacturer of upholstery and protective covers, specialising in bespoke projects for Superyachts, Superyacht Tenders and Owners Limousines.

Credit: Compass Tenders

We pride ourselves on our quality of workmanship, service levels and the ability to deliver tailored solutions for the most challenging niche projects and demanding deadlines.

The reputation that we’ve achieved has enabled us to form long standing relationships with some of the most luxurious and highly respected boat manufacturers in Europe.

Many of our clients are UK based but our products are shipped all over the world. The majority of clients are tender manufacturers for the worlds largest superyachts, but we also have a few superyachts that we look after for individual yacht owners via their crew.

We’ve had an incredible and positively crazy journey over the years building the business to where it is now. Some of the world’s richest billionaires are our end users.

Our clients include prestigious international names such as Falcon Tenders, Pascoe International, Compass Tenders, Ribeye Boats, Scorpion Ribs and Cockwells Modern & Classic, amongst many others.

The design which won the BOAT International Design & Innovation Award. Credit: ‘Compass Tenders’ and ‘Kirsten Schwalgien Design’

We are very proud to have played our part for many BOAT International Design & Innovation Awards winners over the years, the most recent being 2023 Tender Of The Year “Shadow Kitten” built by Compass Tenders and Designed by Kirsten Schwalgien Design.

Q. Where are you based, what capacity do you have and how big is your team?

We moved to our increased sized premises at Aviation Park at Hurn Airport in 2019.

Our large 14,000 SQ ft workspace enables us to tackle much larger projects than others have the capacity for. Boats can be delivered to our premises and stored in a warm, dry and secure environment whilst work is undertaken.

The majority of our boat building clients provide us with mouldings of individual seating areas which are stored inside, allowing for a more precise production from us.

This also minimises downtime on their build schedule, as with extremely minimal or zero trips to the customers site by us during its manufacturing process, our customers are free from interruptions and left alone to do what they do best.

Credit: Falcon Tenders

We employ 12 staff, across the 2 sides of the business: Covers and Upholstery. The skills sets cross over between Covers and Upholstery but staff on each side have specialist skills, they really need to know what they’re doing.

Our workforce are absolutely fantastic, some started with apprenticeships in Traditional & Modern Upholstery at Brockenhurst College, whilst working here and others joining us from different businesses once they were trained up.

All our staff support our philosophy of ‘always willing to try something new’ which we feel is a major factor in why we have such long standing relationships with our clients.

We are always looking for new ways to develop and progress our products alongside theirs. Our team consists of highly skilled individuals with design or creative backgrounds.

We pride ourselves immensely on attention to detail and the quality of products that leave our workshop.

We also have an A level student from St Peters School who currently volunteers a few hours each week for us, but we’re looking forward to him joining us at the end of the academic year and have offered him a job after his A Levels.

If he feels it is right for him, we will support him through the apprenticeship course once it relaunches at Brockenhurst College.

Q. What machinery do you have and what ambitions do you have for the business?

The Ocean Marine workshop is equipped throughout with Durkopp Adler Sewing machines, ensuring continuity of high-quality manufacturing throughout. Inhouse hydraulic stainless steel canopy tube bending, gives us more control on frame design.

We are also the proud owners of a state-of-the-art CNC Quilting and Perforating Machine, allowing us to get really creative with stitching designs of the highest quality and accuracy

As a business we feel that we are in a good place. We’ve had slow but steady growth over the years and feel that we’ve done it in the right way.

In the future, we are keen to continue to invest in the business and purchase some new machinery and are looking to make the business a lot more automated.

We want to make sure that we’re always positively moving forward and not getting left behind.

Q. How do you like to get involved in your local community?

We are keen to support initiatives in the local community. Our most recent has been the Hamble Life Boat, where we provided a free set of upholstery for one of their life boats.

It was a rewarding feeling and something we were pleased to be able to get involved in.

Anyone interested in learning more about our services is urged to contact [email protected] Tel. 01202 574888

• https://www.covermakers.co.uk/