Big Pimpin’
A designer’s dream and a builder’s vision seem to have recently coalesced rather nicely to create the Agile 42, a brand new high-performance, all-carbon luxury cruiser from the Netherlands.
Successful entrepreneurs are hard to please. They’re demanding, uncompromising and don’t easily settle for second best. They’re also the market that Tim van Daal, CEO of VMG Yachtbuilders, and designer Maarten Voogd decided to target with a new brand, Agile Yachts, of which the Agile 42 was the first example to be launched last winter.
Voogd is one half of the design partnership Simonis Voogd, formed with Cape Town-based Alexander Simonis in 1991. Voogd and van Daal have been friends for over 20 years and both are based in the town of Enkhuizen on the Ijsselmeer, which is where they hatched the initial plans for Agile Yachts.
Agile: adj, able to move quickly and easily. The name is a promising start but how would they go about satisfying this exacting clientele?
‘We were thinking about what kind of boat we should build to target a new generation of successful professionals between 40 and 50 years old,’ says van Daal. ‘What kind of boat would they want? It was quite an organic process, starting with talking about what we like ourselves…’
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