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 and ran the business until he was joined by his younger brother, Jonathan, in the early 80's.

Jonathan had been instructing windsurfing, at the National Water Sports Centre in Nottingham. Cygnus were developing windsurfing sails, teaching windsurfing and retailing windsurfing equipment before the two brothers joined forces in 1985..

Richard and Jonathan have always been involved in sailing, dating from the time when their 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. Jonathan had first seen the sport whilst on a windsurfing trip in France. He learnt to kitesurf on the meagre kit available and helped pioneer the sport, becoming involved in the foundation of the BKSA, whilst developing, testing and manufacturing early kitesurf equipment. Cygnus developed boards, control bar safety systems, and kite repairs. Jonathan then went on to be one of the first UK Instructors.. Having travelled the world with his kitesurf equipment, in March 2002 he married up his kitesurfing and snowskiing skills to learn snowkiting, with Ben and Michael of Concept Air (who were the pioneers at that time), in the Great Lakes of Quebec in Eastern Canada.

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.

Rob Ashman joined us 2 years ago and is now chiefly in charge of repairing kites and helping manage the shop.

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.

In April of 2006 Jonathan decided to move on and has now left Cygnus (in Nov2007)

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.

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