Boat Branding

When we first got our second sailboat we decided that we wanted to rename her and make her our very own. We had lived the last year on a boat that we hadn’t personally named, and weren’t fond of her name. We would not be making that mistake our second time around. We already knew she would be Necesse (latin for Necessity) and we were quick in going through the whole renaming process. We bought the champagne, did the readings, eradicated the boat of anything with its former name…all of the rigamarole. The only thing we were lacking was proper boat lettering to tack on the new name.

Since Necesse was a mess when we got her, we were more concerned with getting all her systems up and running rather than making her pretty. So Eben went over to the Bahamian hardware store and bought those little letters that you see people put on their mail boxes, and that is what we used to write Necesse on the back of the boat. We had her this way for years, thinking one day we will get around to doing that better. That day has finally come. Now that all the systems are running and our projects are more beautification, it was time to grace her with a name/logo worthy of attention.

We contacted Do-It-Yourself Lettering to get our boat stickers made because they gave us the ability to…do it ourselves. It is pretty amazing the type of customer service we got. We were in direct contact with one of the co-owners who helped me with the design every step of the way. Their website is great in that it lets you choose from an infinite amount of fonts, colors, and designs. But since I had a specific “look” in mind (the same font, logo, and design as the blog name) I merely emailed that image over to them with the dimensions of the back of our boat and they made it happen. There was a lot of back and forth to make it is was perfect and was we all agreed on it, it was printed and mailed off to us.

The application of the vinyl lettering to the back of our boat was easier than easy (for me anyways!) The instructions they sent with the lettering was very straight forward and easy to follow. Eben taped up the lettering and we dinghied out to see it from afar, and once we found the height we liked Eben set to work at pasting it on. This looked a little hard for him, but only because of the angle he was working at and the fact that he was doing it from our dinghy. It took about half an hour of carefully scrapping the letters on to the boat.

It looks perfect. We are both so happy with how simple the application process was and how great it turned out. With the dock boxes that Eben made we managed to clean up a lot of the junk that was cluttering the back of the boat. And now with the lettering on there too, the back of our boat looks clean, professional, and loved.