Bente sailboats: an unconventional German cruiser-racer builder with a survival story
Bente pairs judel/vrolijk naval architecture with a lightweight, cored build out of a Polish yard, and its short history already includes both a scrappy startup phase and a company rescue. The Bente 24 and Bente 28 carry the same judel/vrolijk design credit, all three models were built at the same Baltic-adjacent yard, and the brand was sold from the start to an unusually engaged owner community that the builder leaned on directly.
Origins and ownership
Bente's story starts with people rather than a company. Designer Alexander Vrolijk and advertising professional Stephan Boden began bringing new ideas to the sailing scene in 2014. The brand and its debut boat took their name from Bente, the girlfriend of one of the people involved in the project, and that boat — later described by the English-language press as the brand's 2015 inception — became the Bente 24. The corporate entity followed only in February 2017, when Bente GmbH was incorporated as a UG — the German mini-GmbH company form — converting to a full GmbH a year after that. Vrolijk served as the small yard's managing director throughout, up until the company's 2020 insolvency.
Sailor involvement shaped Bente as much as its founders did. Rather than the usual blazers-and-brass-buttons boat-show presence, the young crew set up rough beer benches at their stand, where prospective owners, fans, and show visitors gathered — participation float Magazin credited as essential to the young design's early success.
By early 2020, the Bente 24 had sold more than 120 boats, but years of high development and manufacturing costs caught up with the business. Insolvency proceedings against both Bente GmbH and Bente Yachts GmbH opened on 3 February 2020; Vrolijk said the costs needed to be optimized and the company reorganized onto a professional footing. The rescue came from Ultramarin Meichle + Mohr, a Lake Constance-based boat dealer and marina operator that had been part of the Bente dealer network since launch. Ultramarin bought the rights and production equipment for the entire range, moved the company's headquarters to the Lake Constance region, and kept production running at the existing Polish yard. Alexander Vrolijk did not join the new company as a shareholder, but stayed connected to the brand through his continuing role at judel/vrolijk & co.
The designers
judel/vrolijk & co, the German naval architecture firm that has also drawn production boats for Hanse, Baltic, and Dehler, is credited with both the Bente 24 and the Bente 28. Alexander Vrolijk — Bente's co-founder and, until 2020, its managing director — is the son of Rolf Vrolijk, the firm's name partner, and is credited individually with the Bente 24's aggressive chines and hull bevels as well as the boat's overall design. That first hull actually began outside any studio, growing out of a university design project and Facebook discussion threads among sailors, before judel/vrolijk & co turned the input into a finished boat. When Ultramarin took the brand over in 2020, the new owners reached a partnership agreement with judel/vrolijk & co to keep drawing the range, and Vrolijk himself stayed on at the design firm as designer and idea-giver even though he no longer held a stake in Bente.
Construction through the eras
Every hull, across both ownership eras, has come out of Yacht Service Poland in Szczecin — a yard Yachting World noted also builds hulls for X-Yachts. The Bente 24 set the construction template: a lightweight, fully-cored hull built from CNC-cut, ready-laminated panels stitched and glued into a single monocoque, a process quick enough to join hull to deck in three hours, engineered, the boat's builders said, to last at least 30 years — and, in Vrolijk's own words, "the only fully cored small cruiser in the world." Its fixed dodger, chosen because sailors don't put sprayhoods down, became a running Bente design cue, shaped to keep the cockpit dry in a chop.
The Bente 39 pushed the cored construction further, with fully cored hulls and decks in vacuum-infused vinylester and a carbon doghouse frame whose polycarbonate windows were pressure-tested to 3.5 tonnes per square metre; Yachting World credited the boat's delta hull shape, large cockpit, and glass-roofed pilothouse for the industry praise it drew. The 39 also carried Bente's "Green Bente" sustainability showcase into production, using recycled-PET worktops, plant-based epoxy and hemp mouldings, and cork insulation that Green Boats had first adapted for the concept boat.
The Bente 28 kept the judel/vrolijk design language but reworked the platform around a wide, flat stern and a twin-rudder system, built in GRP sandwich with E-glass and a foam core.
Who Bente is for
Bente has always pitched itself past traditional boat-show formality, toward sailors willing to debate rig details over a beer bench rather than admire brightwork. The lineup carries that instinct across three sizes: the Bente 24 as the brand's affordable, lightweight cruiser-racer debut; the Bente 39 as its flagship design statement, built around a glazed pilothouse and delta hull shape; and the Bente 28, which added a standard swing keel and an 8-10kW electric motor option for shoal-draft cruising. Buyers drawn to unconventional engineering — cored hulls, twin rudders, judel/vrolijk pedigree — over conventional production-boat tradition are Bente's natural audience.
