Exciting working day: From the roll of cloth to the finished sail at the sailmaker's
Nils Leiterholt
· 02.10.2024
Tak, tak, tak, tak, tak ... The unmistakable sound of the sewing machine echoes through the loft. Lennard Peilicke is sitting at it. The 26-year-old master sailmaker is sewing the hem of a genoa. Piece by piece, he pushes the black cloth along the needle with both hands. He operates the machine with his foot. Peilicke is sitting, if you like, under the hall floor. This is because his sewing machine is embedded in the huge work surface.
We are in the hall of the Stade sailing workshop. Morten Nickel proudly shows us the business that he and Klaas Simon took over from his parents, Britta and Jens Nickel, in the Hanseatic city in 2022. The Nickel couple founded Segelwerkstatt Stade in 1985, when Britta Nickel was the first and only female master sailmaker in Germany. Next year, the Lower Saxony-based company will be celebrating its 40th anniversary.
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His son Morten had originally chosen a different path with his training as a shipping agent in Hamburg, followed by a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in business administration. "But I've always sailed a lot and of course also helped out here in the hall," says the 32-year-old. In 2021, he quit his job at Airbus in Hamburg and became Managing Director of his parents' company. "Since mid-2022, my parents have effectively been out of the company on paper," says the Stade native.
Customers are mainly cruising sailors
Back in 2015, long-time employee Klaas Simon was given the opportunity to join the Nickels' company and took it. Today, Morten Nickel and Klaas Simon share the work in the management. While Nickel deals with business administration, purchasing and preparing quotations, Simon is primarily responsible for the design and final approval of the individual sails. The master sailmaker also provides support in the preparation of quotations and other tasks.
Lennard Peilicke, the youngest member of the management team, is responsible for the operational business in the hall, the realisation of the sail designs and the development of the trainees. He will also be given the opportunity to become a partner in the GmbH in the future. "Lennard is young, but has already completed his master's degree and is super good at what he does," Nickel enthuses.
The customers of the Stade sailing workshop are mainly ambitious cruising sailors, "we have specialised in them a little," says Nickel. "Our customers sail on the Elbe, in the Weser triangle and on the North and Baltic Seas," says Nickel. Nevertheless, he has noticed in recent years that more and more long-distance sailors are becoming part of their customer base. "Of course, these are also attractive customers for us, who buy a high-quality cloth that sails really well and lasts a long time. And we can deliver that," says Nickel.
When asked what particularly characterises the Stade sailmakers, Nickel replies: "That is certainly our service. If the customer thinks something doesn't fit, we go there and take care of it."
Made in Germany
Klaas Simon is responsible for the design of the sails. "Even when I'm out on the water in my free time, my first glance is at other people's sails," he says with a laugh. "Now I can often tell who designed it by the cut, everyone has their own style." For complex orders, Simon often spends many hours in front of the computer until he is satisfied and the manual work can begin. He first enters all the values measured by the customer or the sailmakers into his programme. This enables him to adjust the various parameters of the sail. The intended use and the customer's expectations of the sail are also important for its design.
However, the production of every sail follows a basic principle: the lightest cloth is used towards the luff, while the material becomes heavier and stronger towards the leech. "From a certain size, we use a medium-weight cloth in the centre to even out the difference. Otherwise the transition would be too hard," explains Simon.
Next week, he will once again be travelling on business. It will take him to Greece, where he will have to measure the rig and the special features of the ship, such as the positioning of the hoisting points for the headsail. "It's standard practice for us that the customer only pays for the flights and the working time is not charged," says Simon. "However, some customers also measure themselves."
Anyone buying products from Segelwerkstatt Stade can be sure that they were manufactured in the Hanseatic city. It is also important to the sailmakers that their suppliers, such as the cloth manufacturer Dimension-Polyant, come from Germany. This means that delivery routes can be kept short. "Of course, this is why we tend to be in the higher price segment," says Managing Director Morten Nickel. However, the coronavirus crisis has shown just how valuable it is to produce in Germany and not in Asia.
Cooperation between man and machine
For Morten Nickel, this also goes hand in hand with the working conditions of the employees. "The standards under which our sails are made are significantly higher than those in Asia," says Nickel. For him, it is equally important to pay employees a fair wage, which also contributes to the working atmosphere and is also reflected in the quality of the work. "Our workforce has become much younger in recent years," says Morten Nickel. Two trainees are currently part of the team. With Wadi, only one employee has been working here since the company was founded. His real name is Sven Rausching and he knows his trade and the company inside out. "Wadi is basically the walking company chronicle, you can ask him anything and he usually has the right answer," says Nickel about the longest-serving employee in the sail workshop. "He just really enjoys what he does, but is also positive about change, which is great."
While Lennard Peilicke sets off during the day for a fitting appointment at the jetty of the Stade Sailing Club (SVS), Morten Nickel moves from his office chair to the machine that cuts the sailcloth. "It's a good balance to my everyday life, which tends to consist of customer contact and office work," says the company owner.
Before the fabric is sewn on the approximately 11.60 metre long table, it is sucked in from below so that the machine does not produce any creases as it passes over it. First, the numbers of each strip are automatically painted onto the material. The cloth is then cut by machine into the pieces calculated by the computer. Software is used to arrange the pieces of cloth in such a way that as little waste as possible is produced during cutting. "With horizontal sails, we usually utilise 95 to 97 per cent of the sailcloth. There's not much left over," says Klaas Simon and explains that customers regularly ask if they can still get leftover pieces of cloth. "But these are usually only small pieces. With the sail we now have a utilisation rate of 86 per cent, which means 13.5 per cent waste. However, the widest strip is only 8 millimetres high, which means we can't do anything with it," says Simon.
"Of course, my parents haven't done much renovation work here in recent years," says Nickel. His father no longer invested in the company because he didn't realise for a long time that he would have a successor. "My father never actually asked me if I wanted to take over the company, he always wanted us to decide for ourselves, so to speak," reports Morten Nickel.
Three weeks reserved for repairs in autumn
Her company is still in a state of flux. The website was recently redesigned. The managing directors have also invested in marketing measures and modernised the corporate identity. The room in front of the hall, where there is a table with chairs and various pieces of sailcloth on display, will also be modernised in the near future. "We currently have two trainees. There used to be three, but one finished this summer," reports Peilicke, the master sailmaker responsible for training.
During the journeyman's examination, the apprentices have to make a sail, and the design is supported by Simon, who designs the sail together with the apprentice. "We allow the apprentices to make a sail for their own boat, which is what all of the last ones did," says Peilicke. If an apprentice doesn't have their own boat and doesn't know anyone in their circle of friends for whom they can make one, a sail is usually made for one of the SVS's youth boats. "The SVS then only pays for the material for the cloth and gets the sail at a very good price," says Peilicke.
In autumn, production at the Stade sail workshop is shut down for around three weeks. During this time, repairs are carried out on sails and tarpaulins. "The new sailing season basically starts for us at the turn of the year. We then have to produce properly in the hall and get a lot done in order to meet the delivery deadlines in April," explains Peilicke. Klaas Simon's preparatory work on the computer must have been completed by then. "That's why I always try to have everything designed on the computer by Christmas that we can build by May. But of course we have to have the data already," explains Simon.
The construction of the sail, which is currently undergoing final approval, took about 40 to 50 hours of labour. It was ordered for a Feeling 39 and has, among other things, two rows of reefs. Reinforcing them, as well as hemming the batten pockets, takes a lot of labour. "It's for a customer who has ordered three sails at once so that he can sail in the Mediterranean," says Nickel, while his colleague Simon is in the process of carrying out the inspection. He also checks whether all of the customer's special requests have been taken into account. "For example, he wanted elasticated straps instead of the usual webbing for the mast slides," says Simon.
Every sail is unique
Klaas Simon has now designed around 600 sails. "I usually sit at home at my PC to do this. I have peace and quiet there and am not constantly disturbed by the ringing phone or customers dropping by," he says. He describes his beginnings as a sail designer as a gradual process. "The Spanish and Italians don't call their lofts workshops, they call them studios. They see themselves as real artists," says Simon of his experiences with his foreign colleagues. He doesn't see it quite so narrowly, but designing the sails is still an important creative phase for him, during which he doesn't want to be disturbed.
Meanwhile, Morten Nickel is already back at the machine cutting the fragments to make the sails. This time, the cloth is to be turned into a 63 square metre code zero for a Pogo 10.50. And so the production in the Stade sail workshop with its young makers continues steadily - despite the high quantities of around 400 sails per year, each one is unique.
This article first appeared in YACHT issue 21/2024.
