Tiwal sailboats: a French inflatable dinghy built around one patented idea
Tiwal builds inflatable, collapsible sailing dinghies in France, engineered around a single premise: an inflatable hull rigid enough to sail hard, paired with a laser-cut aluminium frame that folds the whole boat down small enough for a car trunk. Marion Excoffon designed the boat, and Emmanuel Bertrand, her partner in business and in life, co-founded the company with her as its president-founder. What began as one designer's answer to a personal frustration grew into a patented hull technology and a small French manufacturer with a US operation of its own.
Origins and ownership
Excoffon's own father refused to lend her the family sailboat, so she designed her own folding boat instead, working out the first prototype with the advice of designer Antoine Fritsch, who helped her develop that first model. She quickly steered the design toward a fully inflatable hull rather than a partial concession to portability — a world first for a sailing boat. Bertrand, her partner in life as well as business, joined her as the company's co-founder and president.
Tiwal introduced the boat at the 2012 Paris boat show, taking six orders that let the young company build around thirty boats the following summer. It carried the boat on to the Düsseldorf Boot show and then to the 2013 Annapolis boat show, where it won its first award. Les Echos reported that by 2017, Tiwal — then marketing the boat as the Tiwal 3.2 — had sold more than 600 boats across roughly forty countries; that same year it raised investment from Newfund and Proximea, a crowdfunding platform set up by Banque Populaire Atlantique, to help fund an American expansion, and it has run its US operations from the Boston area since.
The designers
Excoffon remains the designer behind the line, credited by name for both the original boat and its later racing variant. Antoine Fritsch's contribution was specific and early: he advised on that first prototype as Excoffon worked out how to fold, and eventually inflate, a sailing dinghy small enough to fit in a car. SAIL Magazine's 2023 review of the Tiwal 3R confirmed Excoffon as its designer as well. Developing the 3R took her and her team more than two years, as the power of its new rig forced considerable changes to the structure, hull, daggerboard and rudder, and led her to design an all-new vang-and-traveler system along with an all-new aluminium exoskeleton for the boat's attachment points and hull stability.
Construction through the eras
The idea tying the whole range together is the combination of an inflatable hull and an aluminium structure — neither alone would give the boat the rigidity Tiwal was after, but together they do. The hull itself is an inflatable 3D drop-stitch textile, two textile sides joined by numerous internal threads, which Tiwal describes as a patented world first for a sailing-boat hull; the aluminium framework around it is laser-machined for precision, which speeds assembly. The company holds patents covering that hull-and-structure combination in the US (No. 9,694,875), China (103958340) and Europe (2 768 723). Building one boat draws on roughly fifty suppliers, close to half of them French, and Tiwal has extended that same manufacturing know-how to a network of more than fifty companies beyond its own walls.
Lines and generations
The lineup runs across four sizes: the Tiwal 2, the Tiwal 2 L, the Tiwal 3, and the Tiwal 3 R built from it. Reports from the boat's early years called the original boat the Tiwal 3.2 before the current name settled in — the same boat, not a separate model. The 3 and 3 R carry the range's documented engineering story described above.
Who Tiwal is for
Tiwal answers a storage-and-transport problem more than a class-racing one: the appeal is a dinghy that folds down small enough for a car trunk yet still sails like a rigid boat, on the strength of the patented hull-and-frame combination behind it. That premise runs through the whole range, from the simpler Tiwal 2 and 2 L to the performance-oriented Tiwal 3 R, which took Excoffon's engineering approach and pushed it toward racing rather than portability alone.