Why are boats expensive?

It’s a common complaint, the price of boats, and indeed gear in general are considered by many to be too pricey. But are the grumbles justified?

£1000 for a piece of plastic?! It’s easy to see why some paddlers might balk at the price of a new boat. Some of those same people will happily pay £3000 for a new mountain bike, but the problem with a kayak is that it is effectively a big piece of rotomoulded plastic. When you compare the machined engineering of MTB components, some of which look like works of art, to a piece of, effectively, Tupperware, it might seem on the face of it that the complaints are justified.

The same goes for dry gear. Why can’t the manufacturer make this or that colour, or combination of colours and patterns? Why is a cagdeck nearly £300?

Okay, there’s a few counters to all of this, including one great big elephant in the room.

The elephant

It comes down to economies of scale. To design and make the tooling to produce one single size of kayak, for example a Pyranha Burn or a Dagger Mamba, costs a few 10’s of thousands of pounds. One single mould will cost at least £20,000 to have produced. Then you have the design process, prototype testing etc, cost of electricity to produce the boat, upkeep of the ovens, cost of employment etc. These all need to be factored in.

Now, if you have three sizes of boat, those costs will effectively triple. Making a small or a large Mamba for instance when you have just made a medium one isn’t just a case of taking the existing boat and enlarging it or shrinking it. What a lot of kayakers don’t realise is that producing the different sizes of boat needs very careful redesign. It might not be noticeable, but volume distribution needs to be looked at, widths and length proportions have to be managed. If you simply scaled up or scaled down, you wouldn’t have a boat that performed correctly for its size. An inch or even less either way in kayak design makes a huge difference on the water.

And there’s a big problem with this because certain sizes just aren’t as popular. Most of the time the medium size of a boat is the biggest seller, for obvious reasons. Although I am told by one shop that by far the most popular size order for the Pyranha Ripper is the small. But what this means is that despite the other sizes costing the same all over again to have the moulds and tooling produced etc, they will often not make the money back anywhere near as easily. There’s a very real risk of dead money if the manufacturer gets it wrong or misjudges demand. And the margins in white water kayaking are very slim indeed.

Niche sport

The fact of the matter is that white water kayaking is very niche. The number of boats for the sport sold world wide each year is in the low tens of thousands for all the manufacturers put together. I don’t have any specific figures to hand, but this would indicate that it would take a few years at least for a single boat to break even, let alone move into profit.

The majority of companies that make white water kayaks have to diversify into producing plastic goods for other industries such as bottle makers, or Fisher Price toys. Take Jackson Kayak for example. Despite the marketing prominence from a white water kayaking perspective, the company really only produces white water boats out of passion from EJ and his family. In other words white water kayak production is in fact merely a sideline from the plastic products the company makes real profit from, such as cooler boxes, or even fishing kayaks.

More elephants

The really big elephant in the room is that far from costing less, white water kayaks should in fact cost much more. The same applies to gear such as cagdecks and drysuits. Luckily for those companies though, that with the popularity of SUP on the increase, a drysuit for white water kayaking works just as well for a person wanting to go flat water paddling in the winter on a SUP. But still the economies of scale are low compared with something like mountain biking or walking and hiking.

The white water kayak industry has another problem, too, that plays into the hands of notoriously tight kayakers. Plastic kayaks generally last a long time, and that means that the used market is big. The unwritten rule is that generally once you use a new white water boat its value depreciates 50%. Look at any sale post for a boat and it is generally around £450-500 give or take. Even for boats 10 years or more old!

Why would you buy a new boat when you could get a used one from someone who has tried and then given up kayaking for half the price of a new one? I’m guilty of this myself. My Dagger Jitsu was £500 on the used market, but in fact it had never been used and all the outfitting accessories were still in their sealed bags! Why on earth would I buy a new one when this presented itself?

But even well used boats are good for a number of years paddling. Once you buy a new boat and use it a couple of times, the bottom of the hull will look like any other used boat.

Boats should cost more

I shouldn’t really say this, and I could be very unpopular for doing so, but if new boats cost more, owners would likely hold onto them longer, take more care of them, and the used market may lose some of it’s lustre as more recent models of boat take longer to appear for sale. There would still be a high number of perfectly good boats for sale used for beginners or for those on limited incomes. But the new market might stand a chance of making some money back on investment.

It could be argued that less people will then buy a boat if the price was increased a lot. This could be the case. But a lot of kayakers who like to have the latest and greatest new kit are often professional people with good jobs and disposable income anyway. A look at any club will tell you this. Sometimes having something that other know cost a lot is a badge of honour for some. Look at the Sweet dry gear for instance. If you love kayaking, and are happy to pay £3000 or more for a mountain bike, why not £2000 for a premium model of kayak?

Hand made surfboards

I know of another argument that says that even a hand made surfboard costs less than a mass produced plastic white water kayak. But the two are not comparable in any way. For one thing the material and tooling costs for making a surfboard are nowhere near comparable. Your average surf board maker doesn’t have to spend over £20,000 for a single mould before he or she can even think of starting to build the board for example. All they need is a garage and some space to jig up the parts.

For a better comparison you’d need to look at what it costs to buy a hand made wooden sea kayak compared to a wooden surfboard. There’s a lot more time and work involved in the sea kayak, and the price reflects that.

If we want the kayaking industry to flourish, and we want new innovation in the way that other sports have, then we must accept that the reality is that our boats, even at £1000 odd, are in fact bargains given the time, cost, and return potential involved in producing them.

Title image – Dagger.com