Nicks Boats was the company my father and I started around a boat we had just found: the Hermes Speedster, built by hand in Greece by Seven Seas Yachts and styled on the 1959 Porsche 356.
We became its representatives in the Netherlands, working out of a boathouse on the water at Harderwijk. I was co-owner and the all-round creative, which meant everything anyone ever saw of the brand - the first photograph, the film, the website, the last printed page - came out of our own hands.
The boat was extraordinary and completely unknown. Outside a small circle nobody had heard of the Hermes Speedster, and there was nothing to show them: no brand, no photography, no film, no website, no printed material.
Everything a buyer might use to make up their mind had to be built before the conversation could start. It also had to hold its own against the object it was describing. This is a hull finished by hand, sold to people who look closely, and anything half-made around it would have said more about the boat than we wanted it to.
We made all of it ourselves. The brand, the photography on the water at Como and Monaco, drone and film work from above, the website, and a run of print built around the boat and the way it’s put together.
Then we took it to the people most likely to fall for it. Monaco, Amsterdam, the concours circuit - places where the Speedster could sit beside the 356 that inspired it and make its own argument, without anyone having to explain it first.
A head-turning, sea-faring homage to the iconic 356.
Porsche
The work earned its own coverage. The Speedster was picked up across several titles, and one shoot aboard ran in Playboy.
From a boat almost nobody had heard of, it went on to sell worldwide.
