What Are the Odds? The Rise of Stephen Miles Design

In April of 2012 I reached out via good-old Facebook to Stephen Miles after seeing posts of his insane paint jobs on several super high-end RC boats. Little did I know, three and a half years later Miles would have caught the attention of several high-profile performance boaters and become the go-to painter for Outerlimits Offshore Powerboats.

Max, an Outerlimits SC 39 catamaran owned by Michigan’s Burton Kirsten, is Stephen Miles’ favorite Outerlimits paint job to date.

Just this year alone his expanding family-focused company, Stephen Miles Design (SMD) in Owensboro, Ky., has been responsible for the graphics on several new Outerlimits, models, including Burton Kirsten’s Outerlimits SC 39 catamaran and Vinnie Diorio’s Outerlimits SL 41 V-bottom, not to mention Jeff Ford’s 2008 RPM Powerboats 26 Redline catamaran. To say he, his wife and business partner, Heather, his brother-in-law, Tristan Gibson, and his fellow painter/righthand man, Steve Boarman, have been busy would be understatement.

Kirsten’s all-carbon 39-foot canopied pleasure catamaran from the Rhode Island boat builder is Miles’ favorite design to date, but that probably won’t last long as he has a half-dozen more Outerlimits coming his way in the near future. Pretty incredible for a 42-year-old who not that long ago was airbrushing T-shirts.

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