The world is his Oyster – Hadida on reviving an icon
Oyster Yachts owner Richard Hadida shared his first yacht with the late F1 personality Eddie Jordan.
He says he doesn’t play games. If times are tough, he’ll call it out.
But Richard Hadida, owner of Oyster Yachts, is also keen to talk up the good times.
Like the recent night he sat with his 21-year-old son James on the deck of his Oyster 885 Lush, watching a whale and her calf frolic in the water below them.
“It was just getting dark and we switched the engine off, had a glass of wine and just hung out with these two whales,” Hadida told us in Cannes on a quick trip back to Europe from Australia.
“She was looking up at us and there was a curiosity. I said to James, ‘Can you believe we’re doing this?’”
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That was, Hadida reckons, just one among myriad moments he is enjoying as part of Oyster’s World Rally, the company’s biennial around-the-world voyage he joined with wife Ali and two-year-old son Harry this year.
He was inspired to join the Oyster’s owner-only, 16-month supported circumnavigation at the finish reception for the last rally in Antigua.
“There were a hundred people that had just spent the last year and a half together. And the tears and emotion in that room were so powerful because they’d forged lifelong friendships and they’d seen just incredible things, a true life-changing adventure,” he said.
“And I thought, ‘We need to experience this’. We’re seeing incredible things every day. It changes your perspective on life.”
Oyster CEO Stefan Zimmermann Zschocke (left) and Hadida unveil the new 36m project.
Owning the company helps, but Hadida admits it would have been easy to put obstacles in the way and look at joining the next World Rally in 2028 or 2030. “There’s always an excuse to put things off,” he said.
“But then I thought, I’ve got carpe diem tattooed on my wrist for a reason. So we signed up. If you’ve got the opportunity, don’t kick the can down the road, because who knows? No one can see four, six years into the future.”
However, while experiencing “life-changing” moments on the Rally, Hadida’s eye is still firmly on the business ball. Alongside CEO Stefan Zimmermann Zschocke, he is orchestrating a major period of development for the brand.
“I don’t play games,” he says. “I won’t say it hasn’t been hard, because bloody hell, it’s been hard. Any business like this is. But it’s incredibly exciting.”
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He flew back for Oyster’s unveiling of a new 60ft catamaran concept at the Cannes Yachting Festival, the company’s first departure from the classic bluewater monohull. Within 24 hours, the first hull had been sold, he said. “This is the best boat show we’ve had since I bought the company, by a country mile,” Hadida told us at the time. “It’s incredible. I’m just on cloud nine.”
A couple of weeks later in Monaco, Oyster unveiled a 36m monohull design in a strategic push into the larger sector following client feedback, including missing out on a sale to actor Tom Cruise who wanted a sailing yacht larger than Oyster’s 27m flagship 885.
“We innovate through input from our owners,” Hadida told us at the Monaco Yacht Show. “The catamaran came from that pressure. Very famous people have said to me you build a cat, I’ll take one. And I know personally of four people who wanted a monohull of this size, and I just didn’t have it.”
‘I’m not doing it as a hobby’
The current momentum is a far cry from when Oyster ceased operations and went into administration in 2018. Fortunately, tech entrepreneur Hadida was a convert, sharing Lush with the late F1 driver and team principal Eddie Jordan, who had become “like a father, a brother, a friend, a very, very big force in my life”.
Instantly, Hadida knew he wanted to rescue the ailing British brand.
“I had no intention of buying Oyster, if truth be known,” he says. “I was on holiday with Eddie in his house in Cape Town and we opened the newspaper and saw Oyster was in administration. Within half a heartbeat, I said, ‘I’m going to buy it’. Eddie didn’t think it was a good idea.
“But Oyster had a fantastic reputation, the Rolls-Royce of the seas. I just thought, ‘What am I going to do for the next 10 or so years of my life?’ I was at a point where I was lucky enough to be able to pick whatever I wanted to do on the planet. And I’m not someone who does nothing. I wanted to take the brand and elevate it.
“But I’m a commercial man. I’m not doing it as a hobby. I’m doing it specifically to create a big, strong business.”
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Turning the company around has taken longer than he thought, but the appointment in 2025 of experienced engineering and operations leader Zimmermann Zschocke has been pivotal, he says. Another recent addition has been ex-Sunseeker senior leader Adam Wheeler as chief technology officer.
“Someone once told me their standard rule of thumb is to multiply everything by Pi,” says Hadida. “So if you think it’s going to be three years, it’s going to be nine. If you think it’s going to cost you 30 million, it’s going to cost you 90 million.
“Having Stefan on board, delivering positive EBITDA, is what we’ve been chasing from the beginning.
“So we’re finally on a firm keel, we’ve got the growth. Sales have just gone ballistic. It was just a question of timing. Now is the time for us.”
Richard Hadida’s Oyster 885 Lush during the Oyster World Rally. Photo: Ugo Fonollá
For his part, Zimmermann Zschocke said Hadida’s willingness to embrace ideas outside the box is a key driver. He is tight-lipped on backlog figures but says the earliest delivery date now is 2028.
“Normally if you work in a private equity environment the only thing is reducing costs but it is the opposite, of increasing the quality and luxury,” he told us.
“I needed to get the house in order and we have done a lot of footprint optimisation, throughput time reduction, lean manufacturing. All our boats are now on time. The owners are happy to get it even earlier than expected.
“And now we are starting these incredible chapters. Having an owner who is supporting me in that is for me the best thing that can happen. I’ve found no one in the organisation who says, ‘No, that’s completely stupid’.
“We certainly argue about things, but everyone is on fire in the company. And that is so incredibly different to any other organisation I’ve worked with.”
Pushing into the burgeoning catamaran vertical is a case in point.
“It’s another great market,” adds Hadida. “A lot of people coming out of motorboats will go into cats more than into monohulls.
“My mother’s 85 and she’s loved coming on Lush for the last 10 years. But she can’t travel at 20 degrees anymore because she has a stick. But she could go on a cat, for example.”
Channelling the force
The brand’s heritage and appeal to the adventurous-minded is what led actor and non-sailor Ewan McGregor alongside skipper and childhood friend Eric Strickland to choose an Oyster for a voyage from Scotland to Brazil for a documentary to be called True Wind. Instead of one of the latest models, the pair opted for a 55ft 1988 Oyster they had found.
“I went to see the boat with them and they were like little kids, we all were,” he says. “I get texts every few days from Ewan saying how much he’s loving learning to sail while sailing across the ocean.”
From Hadida’s perspective, that brand affinity and the allure of the World Rally and other owner events such as racing regattas gives Oyster a unique position in the market and is a tangible driver of sales. “If a billionaire doesn’t want to buy a boat, they won’t,” he says. “But when they decide they want to buy a boat, they do their research and find us.
“Our owners are all successful, by definition. They’re obviously sailors, but they share that sense of adventure, too.
“We had a dinner the other day with a couple of owners and the first guy goes, ‘I climbed Everest and K2 last year’. And the other revealed he had too. How often do you get two people that happen to have climbed K2 and Everest?
“I think it’s a certain kind of person. I’ve never met an uncool Oyster owner.”
To complete the trilogy, Hadida promises more disruption at the Fort Lauderdale show.
“There are three markets out there: sailing, catamarans and the other one, 20 times bigger. A massive market. Just saying,” he teases.
