Edson And Family Are All In The Same Boat

REDMOND

When Walt Edson was a teen, he vowed he wouldn't follow his father into the boat business.

It was 1966 and Edson wanted to go to Vietnam. But a sports injury kept him home, away from the battlefields.

But when Edson failed his military physical 27 years ago, he found himself drawn into his family business, where his father, Walt Edson, and his uncle, Orin Edson, ran a highly successful Seattle boat-retailing business called Advanced Outboard.

Despite his initial leanings, he has spent most of his life in the same business as his father.

"I swore I'd never do this," said Edson. "But here I am."

Now, 44-year-old Edson, son of one of the Puget Sound area's top boat salesmen and nephew of the founder of Arlington's Bayliner Boats, is the veteran of another kind of battleground - an economic one.

In the mid-1960s, Edson's father and uncle split up. His father opened a Lake Union boat dealership, Chris Craft of Seattle, while Orin Edson started Bayliner, now one of the Puget Sound area's most successful boat companies.

Walt Edson, too, eventually opened his own company, Boatland U.S.A. The firm grew to four stores, in Everett, Woodinville, Redmond and Fife, before it was bought out by Hawley's Boats and Motors in 1989.

The timing couldn't have been better. The year that Edson sold his company, the business of selling boats went into a deep slump that forced many boat-builders across the country out of business.

"Maybe it was luck. Or maybe it was making the right decision at the right time," Edson says.

The downturn turned into good fortune for Edson. He never got all the money he had been promised because the slump forced Hawley's into bankruptcy. Still, he found the industry depression opened up opportunities to buy other troubled companies.

Edson used money he had saved as owner of Boatland USA to buy the assets of four failing firms, some of them among the biggest names in boat building. Companies that in good times would have been worth "several million dollars" cost Edson "several hundred thousand," he said.

During the three-year downturn, Edson bought the boat-making equipment of Old Town Marine (the Minnesota-based pleasure-boat line of Johnson & Johnson's Old Town Boats), Citation Boats of South Carolina, Texas' Sterling Boats and Markell Boats, of Burlington, Wash.

The purchases "allow me to be a major manufacturer at little cost," he said.

Edson moved the assets to Marysville, where he set up shop temporarily, making 10- to 21-foot fishing and pleasure boats under the Markell and Sterling names.

"We sorted out the stuff we had and started manufacturing the better models," he said. The company makes 27 models.

Last week, Edson moved the company to a building he already owned in Redmond, at 17343 N.E. 70th Street, near Marymoor Park. Edson said the reason for the move is to add retail, rental and repair operations to his manufacturing business.

By offering customers a choice of options for their boats, building and selling the boats at the same location and keeping his sales force to a minimum, Edson expects to price his boats well below his competitors.

"By having no freight, no salesmen and no dealer markups, we can save the customer about 30 percent," he said. "Costco has shown us that that type of deal is a good one. It's a price-conscious society right now."

He plans to at least double his current seven-person work force.

Most of the workers will be hired for manufacturing. Marketing will be kept in the family. Edson has hired his two sons, Matthew, 21, and Nathan, 18, to handle sales.

Nathan, like his father was before him, isn't so sure he's destined for boat-making. "I've also thought about being a high school teacher," he said.