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Mad River canoes no longer being produced

Glenn MacGrady

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"In 2022, Confluence Outdoor, Mad River’s parent company, announced they were pausing canoe production. They are focusing resources on two of their other brands, Perception and Wilderness Systems, to meet the surging demand for kayaks. A company representative reports that they hope to start making canoes again in 2023. You may still find some of last year’s models in shops, and decades worth of canoes on the used market."
 
I guess the old pipe smoking bunny is, dieing of cancer? I've got a MR canoe hanging up in my shop. It's the heavy one, but I have no regrets.
 
I don't understand, the used canoe market is still bonkers. Weren't Swift and Esquif doing some manufacturing for them? Is that on hold as well?
 
Mad River Canoes; another loss from the Corporate mentality.

This is a message to the small businesses out there: If you care about your product, keep making it yourself. Once it is sold to a corporation who cares nothing about the product, valuing only the bottom line and return to investors, the product quality will be cut and cut again until the business will be closed. A sad pattern in our country as the corporations winnow down their perceived competition.

Mad River Canoe did have a good long run and leaving many fine canoes behind to be used and enjoyed for years to come.
 
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I totally concur with SouhernKevlar and pb. As a former MR dealer I was stunned and dismayed when I saw the quality of the products that they were turning out after leaving Vermont. I still enjoy my vintage craft from the 80’s and 90’s very much and will be passing them on to my children and grandchildren.
 
actually didn't realize they were still making canoes at all... I'd see lots of the MR Adventure which is a sort of plastic open kayak, scarcely a canoe. Just made me look, the MR website shows a T-Formex Explorer which probably is a fairly decent canoe.. wonder if they will in fact start making them again. It's hard when the giant conglomerate takes over, was thinking about the demise of Royalex too..
 
Thanks goodness Ted Bell resumed building boats. Bell Canoes was also a victim of corporate greed. Mortgage to the hilt, take the cash, sell it off, ring the death knell. It’s criminal.

Eta: link to more discussion on the demise of MR-
 
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It's hard when the giant conglomerate takes over, was thinking about the demise of Royalex too..
The rise of T-Formex has at least demonstrated one thing - PolyOne (the penultimate purchaser of Royalex rights) didn't understand the market. All they had to do was raise the price.

If there's a market for T-Formex today, it stands to reason that the market for Royalex never truly dried up but that it was merely misunderstood.
 
Did some conglomerate buy the rights? Were there other uses for royalex? I’m wondering if the paddling world was merely a casualty of buying a competing technology to shut down competition. I despise big conglomerates run by fund managers.
 
PolyOne bought Spartech, who in turn had bought the rights from UniRoyal. These links will explain it better than I can:


Originally there were a few other things made with Royalex, but in the end its only real application was whitewater canoes, which turned out to be too small a product line for PolyOne. Royalex wasn't bought to shut duwn someone's competition, it came as part of the deal when PolyOne bought Spartech. It was just too small a fish in too big a pond.

Thankfully we have T-Formex now. We almost didn't. Its development nearly bankrupted Esquif.
 
The rise of T-Formex has at least demonstrated one thing - PolyOne (the penultimate purchaser of Royalex rights) didn't understand the market. All they had to do was raise the price.

If there's a market for T-Formex today, it stands to reason that the market for Royalex never truly dried up but that it was merely misunderstood.
I don't have any proof, but there was widespread speculation that the tooling at the Warsaw plant that produced Royalex was pretty well shot and continued production would have required a significant investment in upgraded machine tools that PolyOne deemed not financially worthwhile.

I have heard that during the last few years of Royalex production canoe manufacturers were rejecting 15% or more of the sheet they received from Spartech, which seems a pretty huge rate of wastage.
 
I hemmed and hawed too long about a $350 white Mohawk Solo 13 in Tampa on FB Marketplace given the 10-hour round trip and gas to go get it. It sold.
 
I found the original paperwork from mine when I purchased it. We took the paddles and life jackets with us, and went down the road to the nearest place to put in.
I have no regrets getting it.IMG_20230430_093703298_HDR.jpg
Roy
 
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