The Sunrise Yacht Products Story

The Beginning

Sunrise Yacht Products was founded in 1987 by Richard & Eloise L. sewing beach cat trampolines in their garage to help out a local sail loft. Richard, being an engineer in personality, was constantly driven to optimize and found numerous ways to improve existing design & to develop fully new material options. By using a constant customer feedback loop Richard & Eloise soon became well-known for providing a premium netting product and demand started to come in from larger sailing catamarans & trimarans and Sunrise started growing.

Richard in is back yard with a webbing net

The Early Years

As Sunrise's name became more widely known they started taking orders from around the country and from the garage they expanded to every free room in the house & even the backyard. As the net sizes grew new techniques & processes were developed to support the larger formats with Richard & Eloise constantly trying to improve. Every time a net failed they would analyze it to understand what the weakest link was and then they'd fix that link.

Ok is NOT Ok

Being good was never good enough for Sunrise, and more and more customers started to come in. In only a few years customer demand pushed Sunrise out of the house & into a small industrial building. The process of continually refining & improving continued (which you'll find as a theme for Sunrise) and soon even the new building was filled to capacity.

pic in warehouse with giant webbing net being folded

pic in warehouse of giant webbing net almost 1/2 folded

Little Big Time

In the late 1990s Sunrise moved into it's current location in order to try to keep up with demand. Multihulls were getting more popular and we were finding new markets as our name spread around the world. About this time Richard embarked on a more detailed study of how our netting materials fared & failed under UV exposure as it was clear that UV damage was the weakest netting link by that time. It soon became clear that the most important area to improve was netting durability under UV as our borders were outlasting the nets themselves. This drove Richard to begin creating a new way to protect nets & developed the vinyl coating we still use to protect nets to this day and we can now show that the coating triples (or more) the life of the nets it protects.

Always. Better.

By the early 2000s Sunrise really started to come into its own as a business. Our coated nets created a name for themselves and we were soon the go to net for Farrier (and then Corsair) trimarans. We started to become the OEM net because we simply had the best quality netting available for these boats. Day charter catamarans were becoming more & more popular at this time also and our proprietary 3 ply welded & coated webbing net line quickly became known as the ONLY stable & long-term durable solution for these extreme duty commercial catamarans and remain so to this day. Around this time Richard developed & released our website multihullnets.com creating the dichotomy seen to this day. Are we Sunrise Yacht Products or Multihullnets.com?? Yes. We Are. Branding experts hate us for this but as Lady Gaga would paraphrase, We were born this way.

Rise of The Cruising Cats

As we get to the late 2000s cruising catamarans started to become more popular (for very good reasons) and we were here to fill a need for those that wanted durable nets. Around this time the great debate started...should nets be cheap or should nets be nice? We have always believed that long term quality trumps cheap and particularly so when it comes to netting as it is a safety issue as well as half the living space on your boat although we did create our line of Coated 1-1/4" Ultra-Pro Nets with a DyneemaCore Perimeter about this time to offer netting of much higher quality than came on the mass produced boats at similar to OEM prices. We think it's crazy, but to this day we find many mass produced cats being made with nets that only last 2-4 years in the tropics...luckily we are here for those customers when they want to upgrade :)

Architectural Nets / Overwater Hammocks

Fortuitous: /fôrˈto͞oədəs/ happening by a lucky chance; fortunate. Half of this word applies to our growth in architectural netting. In the mid-2000s high end resorts (eg Maldives) started putting nets over the water for their guest to relax in & enjoy the space. These nets were really, really comfortable because they were super breathable and had evaporative cooling under them. However, there was a problem. They were using the type of nets used on mass produced catamarans and they were falling apart & requiring replacement every year or two. One of the resort owners happened to own a catamaran on which he'd put our nets and this just didn't make sense to him. Our nets were lasting 10+ years, why were the nets on his $5,000/night resort in tatters? He instructed his team to source their overwater nets from us and the rest is history. We quickly became THE go-to supplier for quality resort netting throughout the world.

Maldives Resort with Sunrise Overwater Netting

& Into Your Backyard

As tends to happen when people love something on vacation, these resort customers realized they loved the netting feel & experience and they brought that home with them. Several years after our resort netting line took off we were fielding call in customers wanting to create overwater nets in their backyard docks & decks. We accomodated & expanded our engineer & design team in order to help with these. Today we partner with residential homeowners directly as well as with dock builder partners that can handle the install from start to finish for these customers.

& Home

Around the same time our customers came to us with a desire to put netting into their house in the form of Loft Nets or similar. These nets feel like a personal nest in your house and are offer a unique look & great place to relax or for kids to play so we understand why our customers want them. Our design team is now in place to help you or your builder integrate loft netting into your home design in a safe & durable manner.

A Segue

After over 30 years in the business Richard & Eloise decided to retire & Richard has since dedicated his passion for making amazing things to woodworking. A drive to make only the best never goes away :) Matthew Brunnig took over the company in 2018 and I strive to continue the legacy Richard started by Always Improving. We have grown since and added several complimentary product lines including our SHADE & Sailor's Pillow. We have kept all(!!) of our skilled net makers here and offer by far the most tensioned net experience you can find under one roof. We take great pride in designing & manufacturing only the best here in St Pete, FL.

Growth

With such a solid technical base having been built by Richard L, Sunrise was primed to grow. We started attending the Annapolis Sail Show for the first time and actively marketing a bit...we even started a Youtube channel so we could share information via video to improve our customer's installation experience. We found that many potential customers thought of trampoline nets as a commodity rather than the very technically differentiated products that they were. Once customers understood the differences in netting and how much better their nets could be when buying from us growth naturally occurred with our biggest challenge being our need to properly onboard & train new employees to our standards. Over these years we added many of the world's semi-custom & high-end catamaran companies to our customer list as they realized the value it added for their customers.

& Beyond

The future is yet to be written, but we have created guidelines on how we will write it. We have immense pride in what we make & how we make it and manufacturing at our own factory allows us to have full ownership of this so this will remain a core of how we bring products to you. We will always strive to serve & help you our customer, our employees, & our vendors in the interest of creating and maintaining a highly durable business that brings value for the indefinite future. We value your business in 10 years as much as we value your business today and that drives us to design & create things that you will love for as long as you have them.