Peter Lynn ARCHIVE
In the 1970's Elwyn and I started various businesses making wooden games, puzzles, toys and turnery, gradually bringing in other owners under an umbrella organisation called Alford Forest Manufacturers. Products were mostly sold to craft shops throughout New Zealand.
With my intense interest in kites, it wasn't long before we were selling a few kites as well, with an inspirational boost from connecting with other kitemakers while visiting the US for a forestry conference in 1976 (my father was a keen farm forrester).
But by then, the business side of kite making was getting in the way of what I really wanted to do which was to understand why kites (usually don't) fly (I'm still not very sure) and explore new ideas.
Consequently, I sold the kite business, then called the Craft Kite Company, to our family doctor who was looking for an interesting sideline. Unfortunately, the C K Company become moribund as other issues in his life took priority (he died of throat cancer in 1981)- so I started making and selling kites again- with a sense of not being able to avoid fate.
By the middle '80s the kite side of our business had grown a lot with a growing export market in the US and Europe. My dream of making a living selling kites was being realised and we withdrew from the wood businesses to concentrate on kite making.
At about this time we first encountered the "kite mafia", a consortium of kite shops in the UK, Italy, Holland, Germany and the USA which set out to control the wholesale market in a mercantilist sense- rather like the original Hanseatic League.
They made it clear that I could sell only thru them, under threat of boycott for any kite shop who sold my products directly. On the one hand they were great to deal with- paid on time and were generous with invitations to events. On the other hand, the margins they applied to our kites were eye-wateringly high- sometimes 300%- which severely limited our sales volume.
In 1990, when I arrived in Europe with the first kite buggies, I told Gerard van der Loo, the consortium's capo di capo, that I was going it alone and they could do their worst.
In response to this Gerard said, 'before you do, give me an hour or so', and came back with an offer for a joint venture between his business Vlieger OP (den Hague), and Peter Lynn Kites to be called Peter Lynn International.
In the early 2000's, Peter Lynn International became enmeshed in a lawsuit with Seiger de Boer who was copying our Peel kites and passing them off as from us. This case succeeded but cost so much that PL International came under financial strain and was folded back into Vlieger OP, who became a licensee for PL traction Kites.
My approach to kite business was that innovation, finding the next breakthrough, had absolute priority over every other product criterion: advertising, graphics, packaging, even customer service in some cases. When a business is successful in bringing the next hot thing to market, it can be wildly successful and nothing else then matters. Of course, this is not easy to do and can only be consistently achieved at the cost of many failures.
Gerard van der Loo and Vlieger Op were my ideal partners in this, never offering a word of criticism when an idea failed while energetically exploiting our various successes.
Gerard became a close friend and business partner but died in 2004(?) from melanoma. Vlieger Op was then taken over by Herman and Jeannet Bredewold who ran it until going out of business in 2022, the proximate cause being covid. Herman and Jeannet had a different view of how to do business, and in later years could not be persuaded to try anything new unless Ozone had already successfully brought it to market. Peter Lynn traction kite products market share declined throughout their tenure until Vlieger Op's final collapse. In their support, by 2010, the industry had entered a period of consolidation when doing the little things well mattered more. To counter this, since 2010, the industry has been defined by three major innovations, de-powerable 'foil kites, single skin traction kites and kite 'foil boarding. The first two of these were pushed hard by me but not supported by Vlieger OP until others had shown the way.
Meanwhile, the single line kite side of our business had been taken over by Jenny Cook, Craig Hansen and Simon Chisnall, with Jenny later selling out to Craig and Simon. Their business, Peter Lynn Kites Ltd., became a licensee of the Peter Lynn brand name owned by Elwyn's and my investment company Lynn Consolidated Ltd. Craig and Simon have made a great success of their business with a constant stream of creative new designs and contracts with 20th Century Fox (publicity kites for "How to Train your Dragon" and with Disney World. Chinese copying is their major challenge.
