🔒Milford company has wind in its sails

Good sailors can make great business people. At least that’s what the founder of North Technology Group, Lowell North, believed.

Turning a summer job into a lifelong career, Tom Whidden today is part-owner and CEO of North Technology Group in Milford, parent company of North Sails, Southern Spars, Future Fibres, Edgewater Boats, North Thin Ply Technology (NTPT) and North Sails Collection.

“Sailing takes leadership,” explains the 71-year-old Whidden. “Whoever is the leader on a boat has to be a strong-minded and confident. Someone who not only has to instill discipline but also be a leader who people will want to work hard for.

“And that’s identical in business.”

Founded in 1957 in San Diego by Lowell North, North Technology Group has grown from a small northern California shop into a leading international sailmaker operating with some 3,000 employees worldwide and an annual revenue pushing $400 million.

North Sails moved to the East Coast in the 1970s to Mamaroneck, N.Y. before landing in its headquarters in Milford in the late ‘80s under Whidden’s direction.

Whidden’s love affair with sailing was launched at age nine on the Long Island Sound shoreline in Westport, where he learned to sail in at Cedar Point Yacht Club.

“I loved racing — the independence, trying to figure out the wind,” he says.

By age 15, Whidden knew he wanted to be a sailmaker.

“I had lofty goals,” he says. “I wanted to be a sailmaker, I wanted to be in the America’s Cup, and I wanted to try for the Olympics.”

A day on the water is a good day for Whidden — and he has had plenty of good days in his career.

After graduating from Colby College in Maine, Whidden went to work for the Alcort Co. in Waterbury making Sunfish and Sailfish sailboats.

In 1976, “I had a boat called a Finn dinghy (a single-handed Olympic-class sailboat) and I decided to try for the Olympics,” Whidden recounts. “I had to qualify in the top three in the Northeast region [to advance]. There were a lot of guys and it was difficult, but I went to the qualifying race on the western end of Long Island Sound and finished first.”

Whidden did not survive the second round of Olympic trials in Buzzards Bay, but he still accomplished a key life goal: making a go at the Olympics.

Post-Olympic trials, Whidden started his own sailmaking firm, Sobstad Sailmakers International in Old Saybrook. He also began racing larger boats. He found himself in the Southern Ocean Racing Conference during the 1979 season, where he would meet the man who would change the course of his life.

“Dennis Conner was getting ready to start a campaign for the 1980 America’s Cup and he asked me to join him [on the crew],” Whidden says. “That was my big break.”

Crewing on Connor’s Stars & Stripes in one of the most storied America’s Cup regattas, Whidden later competed in a total of eight America’s Cup campaigns, beginning in 1979 as practice skipper and later as tactician.

He was part of the 1987 America’s Cup in Perth, Australia that was aired live on ESPN in the middle of the night and watched by millions around the globe.

Overall, Whidden was on winning Cup teams three times: 1980, 1987 and 1988. He earned induction into the America’s Cup Hall of Fame in 2004.

Team Connor to Team Whidden

Whidden became a leader in the sailmaking industry swiftly, first as president of Sobstad Sails and later as president of North Sails Group.

For five millenia, sailmaking has flourished as both an art and a science. From the Spanish Armada to the America’s Cup, harnessing the wind for speed and endurance has changed the course of history. And today, one local sailmaker has pioneered some major advances in sailmaking and made some industry history, too.

The days of engineering paneled sails in a vast edifice of sail lofts has evolved into a streamlined technologically-driven manufacturing system, Whidden explains.

When Whidden joined the company in 1987, North Sails worked with multiple independently owned sail lofts around the world, generating annual revenues of about $20 million.

Today North Sails operates with seven wholly owned manufacturing facilities in six countries supported by more than 150 sales and service outlets worldwide.

Here at home, North Technology Group occupies some 65,000 square feet of space in the former U.S. Motors facility in Milford, The company employs some 80 workers, including about 45 skilled engineers and 25 designers.

While the company manufactures carbon masts, boons, spars and rigging for sailboats, its core business is sailmaking. This includes crafting sails for many of the most sophisticated racing yachts in the world, including for America’s Cup competitors — the most sophisticated wind-powered craft on the planet. “We make virtually every kind of sail in the world,” Whidden says.

But while the technology is decidedly 21st century, the physics that underlies it is nearly as old as...well, as the wind itself.

“The art of sailmaking is thousands of years old,” Whidden says. “The Nordic, the Venetians — everyone that sailed thousands of years ago did it the same way.”

Today North Sails produces about 45,000 sails annually, ranging from an eight-foot Optimus to vessels spanning 350 feet. And about 20,000 of those are still hand-stitched.

Beginning about 30 years ago, North also pioneered an innovative process of crafting sails all in one piece.

“The Swiss had the idea but couldn’t quite put it all together, but we did,” Whidden explains. “[Lowell] North innovated that process and we own the patent for it.”

One of the most significant transformations in the company’s approach to sailmaking has been technological innovations that incorporate the entire aerodynamic profile of a wind-powered vessel, rather than just the sails alone. This has led to an integrated package of spar making in New Zealand and Amsterdam, and designed and assembling rigging in Spain and Sri Lanka.

Over the last three decades, North Sails has evolved from a loose confederation of locally owned and -operated companies to a wholly owned global brand through the development of laminated sailcloth, 3D sailmaking and string sail technology.

“It’s amazingly technical,” Whidden says. “Not only do we have a technologically driven manufacturing system, but we have patents around the way we make the sail, [fabricated] of pretty exotic materials that are aerospace and aircraft-quality.

“The business of sailmaking is highly technical,” he adds, unnecessarily.