Slow Motion, FAST GROWTH SEAKEEPER

Seakeeper is not lacking when it comes to setting lofty ambitions.

“Our goal is to fundamentally change the experience of being on a boat,” says Kelsey Barrett, director of marketing at the company, which innovates marine stabilization technology.

OK, then.

Founded in a Maryland garage in 2002 by John Adams and Shepard McKenney, one a Naval architect and the other a pioneer of joystick technology in boats, Seakeeper navigated some rough waters initially.

The company’s first gyrostabilizer – which eliminates up to 95 percent of boat roll, the side-to-side motion that causes seasickness – hit the market in 2008 during the Great Recession. And boatbuilders they contacted weren’t sold on the product, insisting that people actually liked the motion of the ocean.

Some quick course correction helped the company get its sea legs.

“Instead of going to boat builders, what we did was go to the public, and we started refitting boats with the product,” Barrett says.

“It was the consumers who ended up going to the builders to say, ‘Hey, I want your boat, but I’m going to go with this one because I can put a Seakeeper on it.’ So, they kind of created that demand working backward.”

Seakeeper’s ties to Berks County came through needing to locate a company that could handle the ultra-precise tolerances integral to the manufacturing of its products.

It found that company, Joma Machine Company, in Mohnton. Due to high demand, Seakeeper soon became Joma’s sole client.

The companies then decided to take the relationship to its logical conclusion, with Seakeeper purchasing Joma in 2011.

Seakeeper eventually outgrew and grew tired of its campus-like digs – lugging steel from building to building in the middle of Pennsylvania winters got old quickly. It found the type of large facility it sought in Leesport. A yearlong, piecemeal move to its new headquarters was completed earlier this year.

About 150 of the company’s 270 employees work at the Berks location. The rest of its workforce is spread out across the globe. Seakeeper has employees in Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy, where it opened an office in 2018, allowing the firm to service its overseas customers without having to travel.

Last August it expanded into a new realm with the launch of Seakeeper Ride. Its flagship product is most effective when boats are at rest; the Ride cuts down on pitch and roll when boats are in motion.

“We would like to move into the territory of creating this image of motion control experts, so it’s not just one motion we can control,” Barrett says. “Think about air conditioning in cars. There was a time where that was an option, and now you would be hard-pressed to find roll-up windows or no air conditioning. Our long-term goal is to make people forget that boats used to roll.”

5460 Pottsville Pike Leesport | seakeeper.com