Decision sailboats: a fabricator's name on a single commissioned class
Anyone who lands on a page for "Decision sailboats" expecting a builder's catalogue of cruising models is looking for the wrong kind of company. Décision S.A. is a Swiss composite-structures fabricator, not a sailboat marque: it builds one-off prototypes and structures to order, across sail, power, and eventually aerospace, and the Decision 35 catamaran carries its name because a group of owners commissioned the yard to build one racing class, not because the yard designed and sold a lineup of boats. The distinction matters for how the rest of this page should be read: there is no second Decision model to compare the 35 against, and no product range to trace across decades — only a fabricator whose client list, once, included a fleet of Lake Geneva racers.
Origins and ownership
Décision was founded in 1984 to build innovative structures exploiting the properties of composite materials. Its stated founding vision, articulated in January 1984, was to give clients the capacity to develop and build innovative composite structures by working closely with suppliers' R&D departments and research institutes such as the EPFL — a research-partnership approach rather than a product-catalogue one. Bertrand Cardis founded the company. From the start, naval construction was the core activity: prototypes for offshore racing, the America's Cup for Alinghi, regattas on Lake Geneva, motor yachts, and professional rescue and transport craft. From the 2000s, the company expanded into aeronautics, becoming the main builder of the carbon structures for the Solar Impulse solar-airplane project — one more sign that the business was fabricating composite structures on commission, sail, power, or otherwise, rather than marketing its own boats. It also built a new element for the restoration of the historic Lake Geneva steamship Rhône, working with the Compagnie Générale de Navigation.
On 20 December 2013, the French company Multiplast SAS and the Swiss Décision S.A. merged to form Groupe Carboman S.A., chaired by Dominique Dubois; the two companies, both founded in the early 1980s, described themselves as sharing overlapping expertise. By the merged group's own account, Groupe Carboman became the European leader in competition-boat construction and large-scale industrial composite parts. On 1 September 2016, after more than thirty years leading the company, Cardis stepped down from operational management, and the board hired Grégoire Metz, experienced in composite materials, as Director General effective the same date. Cardis remained a board member of Décision and a shareholder and board member of Groupe Carboman, which owns the company.
The Decision 35
The company's one sailing class began in the early 2000s, when a group of owners racing on the Swiss lakes commissioned naval architect Sébastien Schmidt to design an affordable, high-performance multihull. The result, the Decision 35, is a one-design racing catamaran raced on Lake Geneva, active since at least 2005. The class drew tight, competitive fleets: the 2017 circuit comprised eight events contested by eight teams, and at the May 2017 season opener hosted by the Société Nautique de Genève, thirteen heats were run over three days, with seven of the eight competitors winning at least one heat. Ernesto Bertarelli, a two-time America's Cup winner, has raced in the class aboard the boat named Alinghi.
Who Decision is for
A Decision 35 is not a cruising boat with model years to compare; it is a share in a small, tightly matched one-design fleet built by a composite-structures shop that otherwise builds one-off racing and aerospace hardware. It suits sailors drawn to Lake Geneva one-design fleet racing and to the unusual story behind the hull — a contract fabricator's name on a boat, rather than a boatbuilder's own product — not buyers looking for a builder's cruising range. The company that built it passed through a merger and a change of leadership, but the class itself is a self-contained story: one commission, one designer, one fleet, raced to a single rule on a single lake.
