Under the tune of a beach boat, he is flying like a real little sailboat. Tiwal, a Breton SME, imagined in 2012 the very first inflatable dinghy. She presents at the Salon nautique, which is held from 8 to 16 December Porte de Versailles in Paris, his last born, the "Tiwal 2". This yellow and black dinghy of 2.80 meters, of forty kilos and which assembles in a quarter of an hour, is able to board an adult and a child.
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A real boat. The idea of the inflatable boat came to Marion Excoffon, co-founder of Tiwal, while her father refused to lend her the family ship to go sailing alone at sea. "Since that's how it was, I wanted to design my own boat. and make it myself, "she explains at the microphone of Raphaëlle Duchemin in France moves on Europe 1." I wished a boat that is different from what we see today: a boat without constraint".
The main concern of this designer was to imagine a boat that can be used simply and to be stored without difficulty. "In the field of light sailing, dinghies, boats are difficult to rig [equip a building, ed ]," continues Marion Excoffon. "Sometimes it takes an hour, you need a slipway, a transport trolley, you have to be able to store it in a garage: the boats are aging, they are getting damaged."
A hull in drop-stitch. By dint of sketches and models, she imagined a drop-stitch sailboat, a material that swells and owes its strength to the network of nylon threads that constitutes its structure. "We have to imagine two textile walls, and between these two walls we have threads We send pressure inside, the threads are stretched and we get a very rigid material when inflated, which is very interesting in this area because a good hull is a rigid hull, "details the entrepreneur. Once inflated, the Tiwal can go to sea without a launching trolley or trailer. Once deflated, it fits in two bags and can quite lodge in a car trunk.
Based in Vannes in the Gulf of Morbihan, Tiwal employs nine people and has already sold over a thousand of its small boats in some fifty countries. The company also has large buyers such as the Club Méditerranée or the National Union of outdoor sports centers. If you want to buy their latest model, possibly to drop it at the foot of the tree, it will take 4,790 euros.