“I certainly need to focus on various things,” says Stefan Zimmermann Zschocke (pictured above), two weeks into his role as Oyster Yachts’ latest CEO. He spent his first week on connecting to the team, the second at Cannes Yachting Festival, and now he’s moving onto connecting with customers . . . before he processes the manufacturing process.
Zimmermann Zschocke’s appointment as CEO comes as Oyster Yachts has been enjoying strong sales (January saw an announcement of £55m in new boat sales revenue), and launching new models like the Oyster 805. It’s also driving owner programmes such as the World Rally, Bluewater Academy, and Oyster Explorers Club forward …. to build a strong Oyster community.
During Cannes 2025, aside from inviting MIN onboard to talk wider strategy, Zimmermann Zschocke met with many of Oyster’s suppliers and partners. He says he knows every CEO in the ‘top ten of suppliers’, and that shipping them out to Lush — Richard Hadida’s boat anchored nearby — was the perfect place to follow-up “with the guys of Raymarine and Navico and many others,” and “bring them in to make sure that we are together working on some of the innovations.
“It’s not only about innovation of the product, it’s innovation about the parts that you can put in,” he says – looking for the 360 degree approach.
It’s especially important that Oyster gets it right with what goes onboard.
Some new owners “don’t have a clue of what they are doing,” Zimmermann Zschocke says (he’s been sailing since he was five), but the company’s evolved to “deliver them everything that they need in order to get there.”
For example, there’s the Oyster Blue Water Academy, which was announced at a London showcase by the brand earlier this year.
“Customers are signing-up in order to get full training to learn how to sail the new boat.
“We are not only helping them with starting sailing but also getting them a crew. It’s a whole service package,” he says.
That package helps owners to adjust to their boat and guide them through the tech.
“When you look 30 years back there was no supporting devices helping you to sail. Now when you look at a boat like this, there’s a bow thruster, and a stern thruster. You can actually turn the boat 360 degrees . . . you can easily sail the boat.”
“Certainly you need to learn how to sail it but there’s a furling system that didn’t exist before . . . mast furling and boom furling . . . and all of that helps, together with the navigation. More and more people can come onboard who do not have the sailing experience.”
And, Zimmermann Zschocke says people are not buying the boat just for sailing, they are buying it for going on a world rally . . . the ultimate escape. The company’s got 20+ boats signed up for the 16-month edition, which commences in January 2026.
Engineering data into process
Zimmermann Zschocke wants to get boats to customers as quickly as possible. So one of his tasks will be optimising Oyster’s production process.
With 20 years under his belt in the marine sector as an engineer with global manufacturing experience across Rolls-Royce, HanseYachts, and Aston Martin, he says he likes to “industrialise a little bit more of companies.”
“I love manufacturing. And I also love lean. I love process optimisation.”
Zimmermann Zschocke is drawing inspiration from the automotive sector but warns “you can’t just copy and paste it, but you can adapt it.”
He’s an advocate of Toyota’s methodology, “the principles of trying to do it as simply as possible so that everyone understands. Then doing a lot of process checks and quality checks and making sure that the team knows what to do, and then reporting that from a KPI point of view.
“It’s about how many hours have you spent today on [manufacturing] the boat, and are you on target?” If a company’s not on target, challenges can be identified
“There might be quality topics, material cost topics, many other topics,” that need looking at. But the key is that “then someone needs to come in and help the guys.
“Oyster is one of the top, from a quality point of view, and we need to keep that in order to drive the process. The better and the faster we can get the boat to the customers, the customer will love it. So that’s certainly one of my main focuses.”
These process principles are needed in many boat companies which have grown exponentially from small-scale master craftsman manufacturing.
“Normally what you can see is great products, great quality, great teams,” he says, but sometimes the companies grow so fast, they haven’t been able to create effective processes as they go.
Oyster’s 805 was unvelied in May 2025. “We need to finalise all the design requirements and then build the first boat. But [we’re] also looking at the [wider] product range from an option point of view. This means looking at a new fixed bimini for the 595 with the option of retrofitting it to 675, and 565. The 595’s garage is also going under the microscope so that customers can get a boat out comfortably.”
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