This Sydney to Hobart competitor couldn’t afford sails – so she started her own company

2 months ago 15

When you Google Christie Hamilton’s name, two LinkedIn profiles come up. One says she is the director of Kraken Sails, the sail manufacturing company she co-founded in 2023. The other that she is “disrupting the global sail making industry”.

It’s more an ambition than a job title, but disrupting an industry dominated by legacy institutions is precisely what Hamilton is out to do.

Christie Hamilton with one of her sails in Kraken’s Melbourne loft.

“I’m not doing this for anything less than being a global player,” she said.

Hamilton, like many people in sailing, followed her parents into the sport. But it wasn’t until Jessica Watson attempted to circumnavigate the world alone at the age of 16 that Hamilton returned to the sport with purpose.

“I was in my 20s when Jess Watson went to sail around the world and there was so much talk that was absolutely horrible about how she shouldn’t be doing it and her parents are negligent and all the rest of it, but all I could think of was, why didn’t I think of that?” Hamilton said.

“You see Jess Watson do something like that [and] you’re like, oh, so the daughters can do it as well. It’s not just the sons of the sailors that get to go and do these cool things’.”

Hamilton bought her own boat and sailed it from New Zealand to Melbourne, but she soon realised she could not afford to replace the sails.

“It’s interesting because technology has moved on but most [woven] sail materials are fundamentally the same as they have been for 40 years and sails are really, really expensive [they can cost up to tens of thousands of dollars],” she said, adding that this is the case despite modern materials being widely accessible. “I started digging into it and realised that there’s this quite huge [profit] margin.”

Hamilton’s solution was to go directly to offshore factories used by the large sail manufacturers but cut the premiums that come with brand names.

“What if we took two of these mega-loft factories in South-East Asia that everyone was using and then went and found world-class designers and just folded together a business process where we empower a boat owner to use their own measurements,” she said.

She started her business in 2023 in Geelong with her partner and the customers came sooner than expected.

“The joke was, in the first year if we sell six sails to our friends, how good would that be?” Hamilton said. “But that then turned into, hang on, this is really resonating with people. I’m not the only person that can’t afford to maintain a boat.”

Like they did last year on Dark and Stormy, Hamilton’s sails will be used on Kraken Sails Toecutter for the Sydney to Hobart race. It ticks off a personal bucket list item for Hamilton, who grew up sailing on Sydney Harbour, but also a professional bucket list item for her and her business.

“I’ve been asked to navigate on one of the best boats in the fleet, and the boat’s using my sails to race to Hobart,” she said. “That’s incredible. It’s not something that I thought I’d ever do.”

News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport are sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.