“People are either very rich, or not rich enough to buy a boat,” says Alberto Osculati. That’s the first reason he puts behind a decrease in small boat sales experienced by manufacturers worldwide which is putting pressure on many in the industry.
Added to this, expectations around how people spend their free time is changing. “They [people] now want to have experiences. Boats are one of the experiences they may have. And, currently, that’s a problem – boating is an experience that costs a lot of money.”
Osculati notes that this is an extremely difficult time, but as the executive director for a company that covers both the first installation, the OEM market and the aftermarket (with a primary target of boats around 50 feet) he’s feeling confident that systems and changes already in place will steer the Italian firm – based in the Lombardy region – through whatever is coming next.
“We came out of a very high growth during and after covid. But our reference is on a standard growth from 2018, 19, and 20. If you take the average of the growth that we had between 2018 and 2024, at the end you can see we are on a standard upwards movement. We are below the peak, but we are far above what it was in 2019. The point is always … do not oversize yourself. Which is our approach.”
Since 2006 the company’s been accelerating the growth and building its own brand for export sales. Recently the marketing office focused its attention on packaging and adding logos onto wide range of products normally installed by OEMs, so that the end user sees Osculati’s name onboard. There’s also a retail outlet on site, which sells to both private individual and boatbuilders (the former enables valuable feedback from final users and the latter aids local production to continue with no delay).
Now Osculati-branded items are around 30 per cent of the company’s turnover – €106m in 2024.
Support for end users and OEMs comes via an in-house team, and a lot of AI
For Osculati, AI is “a new industrial revolution.” AEmilio, the company’s homegrown version, is named after the founder of the company, Alberto’s grandfather (pictured left).
“It’s trained on our catalogue and technical information, to answer customer queries 24/7. It’s like a fifth team member on our after-sales and pre-sales team.”
AEmilio will also be available via WhatsApp – probably released in time for next season’s sailing.
“Normal workers work 40 hours a week, and we sell in 100 countries in the world of any time zone,” explains Osculati. He wants AI to give the first answer any hour of the day, of any day so customers aren’t left waiting. But the system has a lot of product to learn.
Relentless production of marine accessories
Osculati constantly produces product. It’s got over 20,000 items in its catalogue and custom makes a hefty chunk of those in the 21,000 square metre facility (spanning two sites – Milan and Lucca).
“We will grow that number more and more because we keep on investing in our own designing and in our own research and product engineering.”
Interestingly, one of the keys to growth is in not making super-technological products.
“Products are designed around the user, instead of around the technology.
“We aim to improve, to make simple but smart products. That’s our goal. I don’t think that a certain ladder made in a certain way is something that will change the world.
“But we’ll try to make it more comfortable, more easy to use with little things like increasing the step wide width, for example.”
He cites other examples such as new lights using wireless power – these are sealed, making them more water resistant. He’s excited about an electrical plug, with a retractable cable. “It is not totally new in the market but it’s something that we are trying to make more accessible and more practical.
“Our goal is not to reach the peak of technology, but the peak of comfort and usability, the maximum possible of comfort and usability.”
And while the company’s building its product line, it’s also adding manufacturing capacity with more storage towers that stand alongside the classic (traditional) picking from the warehouse. The towers add speed and capacity to the pick-up of smaller items.
There are currently eight automated towers, with eleven more coming in August 2025. The current towers hold around 5,000 products (the capacity will be doubled next year) and deliver parts to pickers, who then batch them in orders for distribution. Four people work the towers, using handheld devices, but those will soon be replaced by watch-like wristband controls, freeing-up hands as storage capacity is doubled.
(The mural (left) is in the company’s entranceway.)
Challenges of switching between OEMs and aftermarket
This year the company’s hyper-focused on sorting out its logistical challenges. Previously it employed an external subcontractor to pick and pack outbound orders.
“For a set of reasons, we decided to internalise all those people. So we hired all those people of the subcontractor. And this worked worse than we expected.”
The problem came with hiring a large number of people who operated in a fundamentally different way (to existing staff).
“In a year where markets switched from OEM to aftermarket, and we needed to be more responsive, we have been not as responsive as we normally are.
“This is our main goal to solve to get solved for the end of the year.”
Thus, he says, the plan is to produce more in the winter and “ship and logistic more in the summer.”
“We will organize and hire more people. we’ll switch to produce more in the wintertime and use a switch some of the production people in the production area to the shipping area for the summertime.”
The team – numbering 150+ on site – exports to 100 plus countries. On average 400 orders go out per day. Two or three trucks are sent daily to Italian customers, with another two servicing wider Europe.
The post Boating dreams and budget realities: Osculati’s strategy amid market shifts appeared first on Marine Industry News.
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