They had the most loyal and active owner's groups in the US and they threw all that away
Times and tastes change. From what I hear in our harbor--- and we have the Puget Sound GB dealer here now--- the majority of people who buy GBs today are former GB owners. To new or younger boaters, GBs are seen as old fashioned, stodgy, ridiculously overpriced designs and they want no part of them.
The looky-loos who come down our dock when we happen to be working on our boat and stop and remark what a lovely boat it is all have one foot in the grave. The young folks who come down the dock looking at the boats don't give our boat or the other GB in the next slip a second glance. They ooh and ahh over the modern Euro-swoop boats on the dock.
The Eastbay is seen as modern and cool so it's no surprise that whatever success GB is having is in that line of boats.
Personally, I have thought for many years it's been long past time to put a bullet in the head of the traditional GB design and do something different and new. I think it was really dumb of them to try to "modernize" the GB by putting a faster hull and more power and/or pod drives under what is now a 49 year old house design. You can gussy a barn up with modern doo-dads but it still looks like a barn. Same thing with GB.
I think the company deserves what it's getting for being blind to the market changes. It's as though we were still trying to flog the 707 to our customers. Great plane in its day but its day is long, long gone.
It will not surprise me--- and from what I hear from acquaintances at the dealer it won't surprise them, either--- to see the GB brand disappear altogether and fairly soon. It's been interesting to see the recent evolution of what is passing through this particular dealer--- fewer and fewer GBs and more and more other brands. I'm talking used boats here. There have not been any new GBs come through for a long time. I think the last one was a GB47 that was part of a bank sale from the failed GB dealer in Seattle. The folks who bought it got if for half price. The bank didn't want to be in the boat business and just wanted it to go away. The dealership/brokerage in our harbor is doing very, very well from what our friends there tell us. But more and more of their sales are not GBs.
Brand loyalty is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The old folks still cling to it but the new crowd buys what grabs them on the spur of the moment and then changes it out as soon as something cooler comes along regardless of who makes it.
Car manufacturers are having a hell of a time with this and have been for years. Twenty, thirty years ago a car brand consisted of just a few models. Maybe three or four. Today, a brand has to have a ton of models if they expect to survive. I read an interview with one of the car CEOs--- it might have been Alan Mulally--- who was talking about how a company could once get away with just a few basic models per brand but today they need eight or ten or even more. It makes it hellaciously expensive, he said, hence the sharing of platforms as much as possible, the moving offshore of as much production as possible, and the rapidly increasing use of manufacturing automation so they can get rid of their expensive humans as quickly as possible (the aerospace industry is doing exactly the same thing).
So I think the Grand Banks line is all but officially dead. And that's okay. It's their fault they couldn't keep up with the market--- actually I don't think they even recognized the market anymore and were still clinging to a market that is dying off at an accelerating rate--- so they are joining the growing list of failed or failing companies who's glory years were long ago.
There's nothing new in this. History is comprised of companies led by people who saw an opportunity, jumped on it, were wildly successful, then failed to recognize the continuing changes around them, and faded away. My gut feel is that this is what's happening now to Microsoft although they've got a long, long way to fall so the crash is a ways off.
