Forecast 2015: Joe LoGiudice—Hustler Powerboats

As are many of the manufacturers in the performance boat business, Joe LoGiudice and the crew at Hustler Powerboats in Calverton, N.Y., are looking forward to the 2015 Miami International Boat Show, which opens in less than seven weeks. Come mid-February, LoGiudice, who has owned Hustler since 1997, is bringing the company’s display inside the Miami Beach Convention Center in a “good traffic area,” he said.

You can catch Joe LoGiudice and the Hustler/Checkmate team inside the Miami Beach Convention Center at the boat show in February.

And like this year’s show, LoGiudice and his team will be displaying models from Hustler and Checkmate Powerboats, the Bucyrus, Ohio, company LoGiudice’s Global Marine Power purchased in 2013. LoGiudice isn’t ready to let the cat out of the bag in regard to which boats will be at the show as well as a model reintroduction Hustler has planned for 2015 (stay tuned for the news), but in the meantime he said the production process at Checkmate is coming along nicely. In fact, he said Checkmate’s 24-footer is now being constructed using a one-piece mold for the hull and cockpit, which makes the structure of the boat stronger.

With a hand in both the larger and smaller powerboats we asked LoGiudice what he envisions for the boat business in 2015, and here’s what he had to say.

We plan on making some improvements in regard to both companies over the next year. We’re really embracing more of the automotive technology as far as interiors, fasteners, and such. As custom powerboat builders, we need to embrace the efficiency and understanding of how things are made—there’s a lot of good technology out there.

We’ll see what happens with the price of gas, but for now that’s a positive thing. We hope to take some of our small boat customers and get them into larger offshore boats. We’re definitely going to stay focused on high-performance boats at Hustler as opposed to shifting our focus to center consoles like many of the companies out there. We’re in the high-performance business and we’re going to stay there. It seems like every time I talk with someone who bought one of those three- or four-engine boats, they remind me how much gas they guzzle and how much they miss their go-fast boat.

Editor’s note: To read the feature on Hustler Powerboats in the March/April 2014 issue of Speed On The Water magazine, click here to download the interactive pdf for free.

Forecast 2015: Joe LoGiudice—Hustler Powerboats

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