Cygnus Sails A Brief History
Cygnus, in its present form was established in 1975, primarily as sailmakers and chandlers to the local sailing community.
Northamptonshire and Leicestershire are surrounded by some of the best inland sailing venues in the U.K. and though it may seem a strange location, Cygnus have built up a good reputation amongst local sailing clubs.
Richard Eisler took over Cygnus in 1975. Cygnus were developing windsurfing sails, teaching windsurfing and retailing windsurfing equipment.
Richard has always been involved in sailing, dating from the time when his parents sailed in Kenya.
With the growth of windsurfing in the 80's and one-design dinghy sailing becoming ever more popular, sails were being mass-produced overseas and there was a need for skilled, experienced sailmakers to back up the new developing industry. The decision to move into this fast-moving sport was quickly taken, and importers seized their chance to work with Richard.
Cygnus pioneered new techniques for repairing and altering sails and accessories. They sourced new machines, materials and staff to keep up with changing developments and that is still maintained to the present date.
Cygnus moved to the present location in the early 90's and this gave them a bigger shop and more sailmaking area. They further diversified into other watersports, but the sail repair part of the business remained the backbone of the company.
1999 saw the new sport of kitesurfing appear. Cygnus developed boards, control bar safety systems, and kite repairs.
With a reputation for repairing sails, requests to repair kites soon followed and were added to the retail side of the business.
Cygnus were now actively involved in the repair of dinghy sails, windsurfing sails and kites and were retailing dinghy sailing ,windsurfing, kitesurfing and waterskiing equipment.
With a dramatic increase in the amount of Dinghy Sailing Schools seen in the late 90's we became very busy repairing school sails and with our vast experience of repairing sails we saw a definite need for high quality school sails that were built to last. Consequently, we now produce specialist school sails to sailing schools around the world.
And now the web------------------------------
That's the story so far,with the next step being the web and on-line shopping. It's an exciting time for us. We hope you will find our site interesting and we will try to pass on some of the useful contacts and information we have gained over the years.
Cygnus is now run by Richard in the new and bigger loft at Glendon an carries on with the shop retailing specialist watersports equipment.
Cygnus now also manufacture Flags, Banners and supply conference and exibition graphics to various companys, these graphics are printed using the latest digital systems.
We welcome your comments.