The “Antal Method”: how the company develops deck equipment with ocean sailors

Antal is a reference brand indeck equipment for sailboats, synonymous with quality and innovation.
With a product range for boats of all sizes (from dinghies to maxis) ranging from winches and stoppers to blocks and trolleys, Antal stands out for the robustness, efficiency and reliability of its technical solutions.
Over the past year, the company has established a test and development team, the Racing & Development Team, of deck equipment, composed of top ocean sailors, which it presented to the press during a meeting at the Genoa 2024 Boat Show.
The Italian fair comes for Antal after the one in Cannes, where the Padua-based company was present for the first time, to closely follow one of its target markets, France.
The Genoa meeting was also an opportunity to take stock of the company’s activities a year after the new management took office, which includes new Director Enrico Gomiero but with the Carraro family well present to give continuity to the company’s history.

Antal Method. The Racing & Development Team

Since its origins, Antal has had a clear goal: to find solutions to the needs of sailors. And it is because of this philosophy that the company has been chosen by many international sailors, such as Giovanni Soldini for example, for many of its challenges, namely the ability to know how to give concrete answers, with customized solutions, to every “need of any sailboat. Antal of this philosophy has made it a “method,” a way of working that has historically distinguished the brand and continues to do so today.
A way of working that now, as recounted at the Genoa Boat Show, receives a kind of officialization or new look: the center of Antal’s development process today is called Racing & Development Team.
The goal of the birth of this project is to involve top-level sailors to understand what their needs are when it comes to deck equipment, and together design a product that is as responsive to these needs as possible and test it at sea, even before it is offered on the market.
For now, the team consists of Pietro Luciani and Andrea Fornaro (currently on the Class40s) and Cecilia Zorzi (currently on the Mini 650): they are the ones who provide the insights from their hours of racing and sailing that allow Antal to create a series of prototypes suited to their needs.
Prototypes that will later become series production, and will enter the Antal catalogs after a testing phase that makes them highly reliable.
Around this team revolves an important part of Antal’s new product development work that will soon be released for the 2025 season.
The first emblematic product to be unveiled to the world for the first time at Mets in Amsterdam is the winch from the new Just for Race line.
This is a high-tech product developed primarily for racing and performance-cruiser boats.
Antal’s aim is to remain at the forefront of an industry where technological development is crucial, making sophisticated items, such as deck equipment, and doing so at the limit of their features (especially weight, seeking maximum lightness).
Testing the prototypes at sea with ocean sailors, as well as in the laboratory with a whole series of static and dynamic tests, therefore becomes the key step in this process.
The technological vanguard of Antal’s work in the near future will remain in the world of performance, which is why the Racing & Development Team is destined to expand, but with the aim of having “cascading” spillover effects also on all the lines closer to the cruising world, to guarantee all boaters high-performance, reliable and made in Italy products.

• For more information, visit www.antal.it

*Redational in collaboration with Antal