SEASONS
Our development for sails for 2018 will start before the 2017 sails are even released. Whilst our first batch of 2017 production sails was travelling across the world towards Italy in a container, I was already testing 17 prototype sails for the 2018 range!! I normally use the early part of the season to be quite radical with the changes I do. If I want to try something really different and radical this is the moment. It is kind of playtime when we either make a big jump forward or maybe not at all. Not all new ideas and concepts work of course, but often you can learn as much from a failed project as from a successful one. It is great here in the Canaries as we have the whole summer to play with ideas and loads of wind around. Once all the events are finished I have all of August to sail and try everything. The next set of sails with be around October time and that is when I start to bring the range much closer to what I think the final production sails will be. Then we normally try to have all of our sails finalized by the beginning of December ready for our photo shoot, which we do early in Cape Town, South Africa in January. In Cape Town we test everything again, shoot everything and make any final adjustments that need to be made to the design. We also study the graphics in real life, on the beach, on the water and in photos, and then decide if they need tweaking a bit, or a colour needs to change. Roberto is a big part of this process and his input is always really insightful.