Winner sailboats: a Dutch performance-cruiser yard's flagship-to-revival story
Winner Yachts describes itself as a manufactory that has built performance cruisers since 1986, a small Dutch yard whose boats carried Van de Stadt naval architecture from the flagship 12.20 down to the trailerable 8 before a 2016 bankruptcy interrupted the line. The brand did not disappear: production continued under new ownership, with hulls now built in the Netherlands and construction and full assembly carried out in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. That arc — small-yard beginnings, a well-regarded mid-range boat, a hard stop, and a cross-border revival — runs through the rest of the Winner story.
Origins and ownership
By 2011, YACHT magazine called Winner a small but excellent shipyard, noting it had just revamped its mid-range 10.20 into a significantly sportier boat; that same review identified Remco Sol as owner of the yard, a role he still held, as director, when the company later went under. In 2015, the year before the bankruptcy, Winner relocated from a larger site in Enkhuizen to a smaller one in Medemblik, the Dutch sailing magazine Zeilen reported. Winner Yachts was declared bankrupt in August 2016; Zeilen's report found the shutdown orderly rather than sudden — no boats were under construction at the time, and staff were able to find work elsewhere. Sol, quoted in that report, put it plainly: once the order flow dried up, the yard eventually had to decide to stop. One casualty of the timing: molds had already been made for special parts of a variable-draft daggerboard version of the Winner 8, but the prototype itself was never built.
The brand and its molds did not stay dormant. YACHT later reported that, following the insolvency, brand rights passed to the German dealer Nordic Yachting, and the builder's current site is signed by Christoph Becker on behalf of the Winner Yachts team, identifying him as leading the brand. Under this ownership, hulls come from the Netherlands, while construction and complete assembly take place in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
The designers
Van de Stadt Design's own project listing credits itself with the Winner 12.20, describing it as the top model of Winner Yachts in Enkhuizen — the flagship of the original Dutch-built range. The Winner 8, the smaller trailerable cruiser-racer that followed, carried the same pedigree: Van de Stadt Design's own listing, a Sailing magazine review ("The design is from the Van de Stadt office"), and a boats.com preview all credit the firm by name. YACHT's testers made the same connection from the sailing side rather than the drafting table, crediting the Winner 10.10's high rigidity to its Van de Stadt design. Across the range's smallest, midsize, and largest boats alike, Van de Stadt Design is the one naval-architecture name that recurs.
Construction through the eras
Winner built around a laminated hull-deck connection from early on: YACHT's 2011 review of the 10.20 described a foam-sandwich deck with a polyester strongback and reinforcement plates under the fittings, joined to the hull by lamination worked fully from the inside; Winner's own description of the later 9 uses similar language, saying its laminated deck-hull connection "guarantees a durable sailing yacht." The builder also designed for interchangeability across the line: keel foundations, it says, are basically identical on all Winners, so a keel can be changed later if a boat's sailing area changes. Under current ownership, hulls are laminated in vinylester to create what the builder calls a homogeneous, torsionally rigid composite, paired with stainless steel cradles it describes as extremely durable. Every model, past and present, is built to design category A — a category the builder says works as well for cruising sailors as it does on the regatta course — and current models add an electric pod drive whose recuperation function recovers energy while under sail.
Lines and generations
Winner's own history of its predecessor models describes the 10.10 as developed after the 9.50 and the 11.20, incorporating design features from both. The 9.50, launched in 1987, gave way in 2013 to the 9 — Winner's own copy calls it the successor to "the extremely popular Winner 9.50, with 260 units sold" — a boat nominated for Yacht of the Year in 2014. Under Nordic Yachting, that 9 gained a fast, regatta-tuned Speedlight variant in October 2021: developed from the Winner 9 Plus, the builder describes it as aimed at sailing shorthanded or singlehanded and suited to current Northern European regatta formats, carrying roughly ten more square meters of upwind sail area than the standard boat. The 10.10 itself, first built in 2005, was revamped into the sportier 10.20 by 2011. At the top of the original Dutch lineup sat the 12.20 (40 feet), the flagship "top model of Winner Yachts in Enkhuizen"; at the bottom, the trailerable 8 (26 feet) arrived in 2014, the last new model before the bankruptcy.
Who Winner is for
A Winner suits a buyer drawn to a small yard's take on the performance cruiser — Van de Stadt-designed hulls built to design category A, sized from a trailerable 8 up to a 12.20 flagship, with a brand history that includes both continuity (the same laminated hull-deck construction and interchangeable keel foundations across generations) and disruption (a 2016 bankruptcy the brand did not simply survive but carried forward, rebuilt under new, cross-border ownership). It suits someone drawn to that specific design lineage and its Northern European performance-cruising focus more than to a mainstream production builder's scale.
