RS sailboats: a London dinghy chandlery that built an outsourced racing and training fleet
RS Sailing's founding idea, the company recounts, took shape when a small group of sailors sat on a Cornish sea-wall and talked through how better design and technology might move the sport forward. The British brand that grew out of that conversation launched in the 1990s and made its name in light one-design sailing before later expanding into powerboats — a trajectory that eventually folded RS Sailing into a wider marine group alongside an electric-boat maker and a catamaran builder.
Origins and ownership
The brand's roots predate RS itself. H.Taylor & Son (Brockley) Ltd began trading as LDC — the London Dinghy Centre — in 1973, when Howard Taylor opened a chandlery selling dinghies, parts and clothing. Two decades later, with Martin Wadhams and Nick Peters at LDC's helm, the pair had the idea of building a sailboat brand of their own. Wadhams later recalled the decision as a leap of faith: nurtured by Taylor, he and Peters weighed whether they could sell forty boats to justify the investment before committing. The gamble became RS Racing — soon simply RS — in 1994, when the RS400 and RS600 launched together at the London Boat Show, bringing modern, high-performance dinghy designs to a wider market. Wadhams has said that organizing joint events for the classes from the outset played a bigger part in the brand's growth than the founders anticipated.
In 2003, RS Racing became RS Sailing with the launch of the RS Feva, the first polyethylene boat in the range and a design aimed at training and recreational sailors as well as racers — broadening the brand beyond pure racing dinghies. By 2015, long-serving employees Jon Partridge and Alex Newton-Southon had stepped up as joint CEOs with plans to expand the business; over the following three years the RS Aero, Quest, Zest and RS21 all launched. In August 2018, the pair completed a management buyout, becoming RS's new owners — by then Newton-Southon had been with the company since its earliest days and Partridge was in his twentieth year, together representing 45 years of combined RS experience. Wadhams said the goal from day one had been a structure that allowed evolution while retaining the company's ethos and heritage. RS marked the same month with a 25th-anniversary RS Games at the Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy, drawing roughly 1,300 sailors in 900 boats — the largest one-design event held in the UK.
The ownership story kept expanding after the buyout. RS Electric Boats was born in 2018 with the unveiling of the Pulse 58, an electric RIB, part of a planned expansion well beyond the dinghy business. In 2022, RS and Cheetah Marine, an Isle of Wight and, more recently, Portugal-based builder of custom power catamarans since 1989, became partners, and RS Marine Group launched later that year as the parent structure over RS Sailing, RS Electric Boats and Cheetah Marine. That November, designer Jo Richards — known for the Pico, Vago, Bahia and Bug — broke from competitor Laser Performance to partner with RS, and a new entity, Ocean Play, was created to build and service those dinghies; the group's portfolio, including Ocean Play, was formally announced in January 2023. Under RS Marine Group, Partridge holds the title of CEO – Commercial and Newton-Southon CEO – Technical, and each company retains its own identity while finance, marketing, design and growth functions are shared across a group that by then made more than 30 boats spanning the RS Aero, RS Feva, RS21, Pulse 63 and Cheetah's power catamarans.
The designers
RS's design work follows the same outsourced-partnership model as its ownership story: the company assembles a team of a designer, hull manufacturer, and sail and spar manufacturers — each selected for world-class experience in their sector — always led by RS's own in-house team, rather than working from a single house designer. That shows in the range's credits. Clive Everest drew the original RS600 hull; a foil developer who later adapted the boat for hydrofoiling said Everest had, without quite realizing it at the time, designed virtually the perfect hull for foiling. Phil Morrison is credited with the RS Elite keelboat and, in partnership with LDC, the RS400. Paul Handley designed the RS100 singlehander, and Jo Richards designed the RS Cat 16 catamaran with RS's design team — the same Richards who, through Ocean Play, now designs and builds the Pico, Vago, Bahia and Bug dinghies for the wider group.
Construction through the eras
Construction follows the same outsourcing logic RS applies to design: by not manufacturing in-house, the company says it can select the best materials, manufacturing systems and suppliers for each model and market sector rather than being limited by its own production capacity. In practice that has produced two distinct construction families across the range. Training and recreational boats — the Feva, Zest, Cat 16 and others — are built in rugged, roto-molded polyethylene, prized for its low cost and durability in sailing-school use. The high-performance singlehanders sit at the other end: the RS100, for instance, is built with an epoxy sandwich hull, carbon-fiber spars and epoxy foils, a lighter and stiffer approach suited to racing rather than everyday abuse. More recently, RS has folded sustainability into construction directly — the RS21 keelboat uses bio-derived resins and recycled core materials, and its hull is sized so six 21-foot boats stack into a single 40-foot shipping container, cutting both transport cost and emissions.
Who RS is for
RS's core audience is club and class racers: each of its race-boat classes runs under an independent Class Association that organizes racing and training, maintains class rules, and runs its own website — an infrastructure layer that gives buyers a ready-made racing scene rather than just a boat. Alongside that sits a training and recreational side built around roto-molded, low-maintenance boats meant to survive years of sailing-school use, and a smaller accessible-sailing line represented by the RS Venture Connect SCS, launched in 2011. The brand's growth beyond that core — into electric RIBs, custom power catamarans and, following an April 2026 committee vote, an outside one-design class adopting the RS name — reflects a company still expanding around whatever a sailor, or a class, asks of it.
