Profile: Boutique brokerage Cecil Wright and Partners
21 October 2021 by Cassandra Tanti - Monaco Life
It was a hectic time in the lead up to the Monaco Yacht Show for the Cecil Wright and Partners team, not because they were unprepared, but because two of the three yachts they were exhibiting were under contract to be sold a day before the show opened. Not bad for a boutique company with a handful of senior sales brokers.
It is onboard the 50m Feadship Hanikon that I meet Henry Smith, a Partner and Director of Cecil Wright and Partners, a boutique yacht brokerage with offices in Monaco, London and Jersey. This is Henry’s eighth Monaco Yacht Show, and we were supposed to meet onboard La Masquerade. But that 55-metre Amels, along with the 49.70 metre Feadship Herculina, were both under contract to be sold, leaving Cecil Wright with three expensive berth positions, and only one saleable yacht to exhibit.
Monaco Life: Can you give us the back story of Cecil Wright and Partners?
Henry Smith: Chris Cecil-Wright and I were working together at a larger Monaco based brokerage and we studied how the market was developing and thought ‘there’s just too much out there to know everything’. Chris has been in the industry for 30 years now, and back in the day it was possible to know every big yacht owner and every big yacht, therefore you could be an authority on everything. But as time has gone by, there are so many more yachts and so many different owners, there’s just no way of knowing everything. So, our principal idea was: why don’t we specialise and focus on a very specific area of the market and ace it? So, that’s what we are doing, and doing it very well.
What area of the market are you focussing on?
Northern European pedigree motor yachts, specifically Feadship. We’ve built, bought and sold more Feadships than anyone else. It’s quite extraordinary. Our 10-year plan was to be recognised as the authority on Feadship, and within three years we already had our first cold-call from a client saying he had heard we were the Feadship guys, so could we sell his Feadship? We subsequently sold the 60.55m Kingdome Come within four months.
Over the past few years, the largest Feadship sale in almost every year has involved Cecil Wright and Partners. We’ve also built some very sizeable yachts and have several more large new builds on the cards now with Feadship. Chris built Madame Gu, which everyone in Monaco would recognise – the iconic 99m Feadship which, at the time of delivery, was the largest yacht ever launched in Holland; Tango; Hampshire IIwhich you see here a lot on Quay Kennedy, Sherpa, … the list goes on and on.
