For nearly three decades, C-Quip has built its reputation as a distributor of marine equipment for the recreational boating sector. But as the leisure marine market has become increasingly challenging, the Hampshire-based company has launched a dedicated commercial division, broadening its reach while remaining committed to its traditional customer base.
CEO Ian Cooke says the move has been years in the making, but recent changes in the recreational marine industry, combined with significant investment in new technology, have finally made it possible.
“We’ve tried this in the past and didn’t do a proper job of it, really,” he says. “But essentially, the recreational industry has changed so dramatically over the past 20 years. The industry itself is under a lot of pressure. It’s not been a happy place for some time.”
Cooke believes the downturn has been driven by a succession of global events rather than any single factor.
“It’s been a succession of things since Covid really,” he says. “Obviously Covid didn’t help the industry, but then we had this massive boom afterwards when we couldn’t build boats fast enough, nor get the equipment to build boats fast enough. So it was a couple of years of interesting turmoil: if you had it, you could sell it – but you couldn’t get it to sell.
“The inevitable result was inflation. Then the world went a bit nuts. We had a lot of political turmoil going on, and that has an effect, especially in our industry, because we’re what people with disposable income spend their money on – and they stop spending.”
Although Cooke believes the recreational market will recover, he says the prolonged downturn prompted C-Quip to accelerate its commercial ambitions.
“It’s cyclical and it will come back when world confidence comes back, when you don’t have so much global defence turmoil,” he says. “That’s when global financial confidence returns. People will then buy boats and cars and they’ll move house and go on holidays – they will come back.
“But I’ve never known it last this long, this prolonged disturbance.”
Commercial marine platform
The launch of C-Quip Commercial follows around 18 months of investment in new software and cloud-based systems that now allow the company to operate multiple specialist websites from a single database.
“It turned out that we needed to invest quite a bit in software, new websites and various other bits and pieces,” says Cooke. “It’s allowed us to have this multi-site system. We can pull up websites really quite easily, all operating off one database. We can just say we want that product to appear on C-Quip and on a retail site and on commercial, or we just want it to appear on commercial. We can adjust pricing. We can do whatever we like. It all comes off one place.”
The company’s established wholesale operation remains unchanged, while its retail activities continue under the Onward Marine brand.
The new commercial website has been designed specifically for commercial operators, removing the leisure-focused imagery that Cooke believes distracted potential customers.
“The plan for this time was to build a sort of mirror image of the C-Quip site with a different look and feel, and then take out all the shiny yachty stuff and just keep it all the heavy-duty commercial stuff,” he says.
Open to all
Unlike many commercial suppliers, the new platform is open to businesses of all sizes.
“There are the big companies that we all know, but there are also a whole lot of fishing boat operators and ferry boat operators and inter-islanders in the Highlands,” Cooke says.
“There are wind farm operators, there are inland waterways, there are coastal supply vessels, there are all sorts of different things. A lot of them are relatively small operations. They just want to be able to go online and place an order.”
The website allows both account holders and one-off customers to buy products online, while giving manufacturers access to a much broader customer base.
The commercial launch has attracted strong interest from manufacturers, enabling C-Quip to add a growing list of specialist brands covering safety equipment, spill response, commercial ropes, batteries, protective products and engineering hardware.
“The level of interest from manufacturers is unbelievable,” says Cooke. “We’ve actually got more than we’d ever anticipated, which is absolutely fantastic. I just need to recreate that level of interest with people wanting to buy it.”
The commercial marine exhibition Seawork, held every June in Southampton, is one way of achieving this, Cooke says. The company has had a stand there intermittently for the last 27 years and looks forward to a larger stand next year.
Safety in commercial
Cooke sees the commercial sector offering a more predictable business environment than the recreational market.
“It operates under legislation,” he says. “You can’t just turn around and say, ‘Well, I’m going to not service those engines this month or this year.’ You have to. There’s legislation that dictates what they can and can’t do and the standards that they have to operate to. And that’s appealing in this market.”
Looking ahead, C-Quip intends to continue expanding its commercial offering while maintaining its long-established leisure business.
“We’re certainly not going to walk away from recreational,” Cooke says. “We’re going to continue doing what we’ve always done. But we’ve had a desire to operate more in the commercial side for a long time.”
With the technology now in place, Cooke believes the company is well positioned for the next stage of its growth.
“It took 18 months, two years of internal legwork to make that whole system available to us. And now that’s up and running. Now it’s bringing those products and making that platform link between manufacturers and the customers that need to access it easily.
“We certainly seem to have found a niche that has attracted the interest of manufacturers.”
