Builder Highlight: Maritime Customs
Meet Wayne the builder behind Maritime Customs, a Geelong marine engineering and fabrication business that has grown from a single-car garage into a workshop building custom boats with CNC Marine.
His story is one built around a lifelong passion for boats and a willingness to take a chance.
Wayne’s background is in rigging, truck driving and engineering, with engineering initially something he worked on in the background. But after finding himself making more from small weekend jobs than he was from driving trucks, he decided to make engineering his full-time income.
From there, things grew. Wayne moved out of the garage and into a much bigger shed, and Maritime Customs began to take shape.
Boats were a natural direction for him. He has been around boats and the ocean for most of his life and had always enjoyed building things out of aluminium. He also wanted to build boats differently after becoming frustrated with the way he felt some larger-brand boats were being built.
Today, Wayne’s focus is on creating boats that customers can make their own. Rather than simply choosing a boat from a catalogue, customers can work with Maritime Customs to tailor the boat to what they want, with advice from CNC Marine to make sure changes don’t negatively affect the boat’s performance.
That approach is reflected in the name Maritime Customs. Wayne explains that the business grew from custom engineering requests, combining the marine industry with the custom work that has become such a big part of what they do.
What comes through most clearly when talking to Wayne is how much he enjoys the work. He says he no longer dreads Mondays and will often spend his weekends in the workshop building boats.
For Wayne, Maritime Customs isn’t just about building boats. It’s about taking an idea – sometimes starting as nothing more than a conversation or a flat sheet of aluminium – and turning it into something a customer can take out on the water.
Learn More About Maritime Customs Here:
