When Oceanco unveiled Simply Custom in 2023, the risk was that it would remain an elegant positioning exercise: a collection of renderings signed by the great names of yacht design, built around a promise — simplifying the full-custom process without sacrificing personalisation — that was still entirely to be proven. Today that proof has a name, or rather a designation: Y729, the first hull born on the Simply Custom platform, which has just entered the outfitting phase at the yard’s facilities in Alblasserdam, in the Netherlands. The formula is no longer a catalogue hypothesis: it is an 80-metre yacht under construction, with delivery scheduled for 2027.
One technical foundation, endless interpretations
The idea behind Simply Custom is as simple to state as it is complex to achieve: a pre-engineered technical foundation — hull, propulsion and energy architecture, systems — on which designers can draw freely and the owner can concentrate their decisions on what truly matters to them, entrusting the technical side to the yard and its partners. The platform starts from 80 metres in length, for a gross tonnage of between 2,500 and 2,700 GT, and integrates an electrical propulsion and energy architecture, optimised for the most demanding operating profiles and backed by the comfort standards — noise, vibration, seakeeping — for which the Dutch builder is known.
This, it should be made clear, is not semi-custom in disguise: the personalisation of spaces, layouts and design remains total. What changes is the perimeter of the decisions required of the owner. As Wim Verhoeff, sales manager at Oceanco, put it, the yachts remain advanced and complex, but “our approach allows clients to focus on what matters most to them”.
The Collection, a designer catalogue
Around the platform, Oceanco has built The Collection: a portfolio of designs that today numbers twenty-eight exterior proposals and seven interior concepts, conceived as a starting point — not a destination — for each owner’s project. The list of signatures is a statement of intent in itself: Espen Øino International with Clarity, Winch Design with Reverie, Nuvolari Lenard with Domino, Hot Lab with the Superleggera 80 and its echoes of 1960s automotive design, and then Pininfarina, Sinot, Vallicelli Design and Team for Design – Enrico Gobbi, through to interiors by Luca Dini, Zuretti Design, Studio Liaigre and BURDIFILEK. Every design can be adapted, combined and reinterpreted: the collection is there to spark the dialogue, not to lock it inside a configurator.
Y729, the proof at sea level
It is with Y729, however, that the formula leaves the territory of concepts. The first Simply Custom yacht carries exteriors by Espen Øino International and interiors by Zuretti Design, with Arrow Monaco providing technical representation: a steel hull and aluminium superstructure, 2,600 GT of interior volume, accommodation for fourteen guests and up to twenty-eight crew, a 13.8-metre beam and diesel-electric propulsion delivering a top speed of 16 knots. The most interesting detail, though, is biographical: this is the owners’ first yacht, having come to new construction after many years of chartering — precisely the client profile Simply Custom declares it wants to reach, those who desire a vessel entirely their own without having to oversee every technical choice in the shipyard.
Erwin de Looff, Oceanco’s project director, noted that with Y729 the team was able to “utilise the readily available Simply Custom technical backbone to kickstart the project”, giving the build a pace that a traditional full-custom project would struggle to match in its early stages.
The takeaway
Y729’s move to outfitting shifts Simply Custom from the category of marketing intuitions to that of industrial models that work. In a market where the 80-metre bracket is among the most vital segments of large yachting, Oceanco has built something more than a platform: a way of compressing the time and complexity of the process without compressing the ambition of the result. If the 2027 delivery confirms the premise, the rest of the industry will find it hard not to take note.
