How a Worn Out Jib Sheet Inspired me to Start Loop.
I’ve been racing on Amethyst for about a year now. She’s a 40-foot cruiser-racer moored at Poole Yacht Club. Typically I work the foredeck, the sharp end where you’re constantly hauling lines, wrestling sails, and getting thoroughly soaked to the bone when the weather turns. Naturally, I’m hooked. It’s fun, but it can be brutal, especially through autumn and winter when every gust feels personal.
One Sunday, I turned up for our usual race and noticed something different. Sitting on deck was a brand new jib, crisp, bright white, perfectly stitched. I wondered what had happened to the old one, the sail I’d spent a year battling storms with. So I asked around.
“Five grand for a new jib this size,” a crewmate told me. “Old one’s in the garage. Probably headed for landfill.”
That stuck with me. Five thousand pounds’ worth of material, battered and torn maybe, but full of stories. I’d sailed with that jib through the winter series, in howling winds and sideways rain. It didn’t seem right for it to just end up as rubbish. That thought didn’t go away.
The Workshop
Every so often, I like to run ideation workshops with a few friends, just a few days away in the countryside, or city testing ideas and seeing what sticks - I call it the ‘Ideation-Weekender’, it’s a workshop and framework that I picked up from working in the technology sector for the past 25+ years. I arrived at the weekender full of ideas, I had everything from a food waste recycling service (remarkably it doesn’t exist in Poole) to launching the UKs first Vehicle to Home (V2H) reseller program, but I kept coming back to the idea of giving old sails a second life. Something wearable, maybe, but small and practical.
Then it clicked.
For over a decade, I’ve been quietly fixing old watches for friends, lusting over obscure Japanese watch brands and collecting weird horological finds, whilst attending the odd meet up with fellow horological enthusiasts. So I wondered, could I combine the two? Old sails, re-crafted as watch straps.
I started researching, finding organisations like Clean Sailors who were doing great work with repurposed materials, I noted how sailing-inspired fashion was having a resurgence. And as it turns out, the worlds of watches and sailing have long been linked, in the last few years we’ve seen racing collaborations between Sailing GP teams such as Luna Rossa with Panerai, and Red Bull Alinghi with Tudor. Massive racing teams creating bespoke watches for their crews. Was there was room for something more personal, more grounded.
Finding the Materials
With that in mind, I started sourcing materials, to start with I bought a few used mains and jibs from eBay, then picked up a torn kitesurf sail from a friend, I even rescued an old spinnaker from my family. If anything this taught me that trying to find a consistent source of material would probably be a challenge. Nevertheless, I wanted to keep things local, so I reached out to Poole sailmakers Crusader Sails to learn about materials, and to see if they’d let me collect offcuts that would otherwise be binned. Credit to Andy Cross at Crusader Sails, he proved to be really helpful and enthusiastic about the project - he very kindly gave me a tour of the factory to show me just how everything es made.
I had no experience in working with materials, let alone developing prototypes, so got in touch with Bournemouth University and Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) to see if I could find people with the right design and prototyping skills, that might want to help see the project through. That’s how I met Kelsey from K Wiliams Costumes, an experienced designer and seamstress from California doing her MA here. We hit it off instantly and started talking about early prototypes together, figuring out how to turn old sailcloth into something people would actually want to wear.
The goal is simple: to take these retired sails, whether discarded, damaged, or just surplus, and turn them into watch straps that carry a sense of adventure. Straps that not only look good but have a story woven (pun intended) into every stitch.
What’s Next
Loop is still in its early days, but the direction is clear. We’re testing materials, refining designs, and shaping the first prototypes. The crew is forming, the brand is taking shape, and the energy’s growing.
For me, it all comes back to that old jib from Amethyst, proof that even something worn out and weathered can start a new voyage.
