About OQI

OQI has a rich history within the Marine Industry, having undertaken an extensive range of boat building in the leisure marine sector to offering a wide variety of services and support for the more commercial operator for many years.

Facilities

Situated in the heart of the Solent, our waterside premises in Hythe enjoy an enviable location with direct access from Southampton Water. We are able to offer our clients a profusion of services from a highly skilled workforce. With our associated partners on site we are able to provide yacht refit and repair facilities with deep water berths for vessels up to 70 metres.

People

They have a wide range of experience in all types and sizes of vessel. This enables us to provide a more enhanced service to our clients from bespoke one-off items to full installations and custom outfits. Our exterior team offer a full range of services from advanced teak work including traditionally laid decks to plug work and bespoke composite construction. In general boatbuilding the number of tradesmen with experience in traditional yacht and boat building is rapidly decreasing and can only be found in specialized companies such as OQI.

Martin French

Managing Director

Martin has been in the Marine Industry since leaving the Military in 1987. He has gained a wealth of experience in the manufacturing of all types of craft from sailing boats, power boats through to commercial craft. During his time in the industry he has been involved in developing and bringing many new products to the market including some iconic highly regarded vessels. Moving from production boat building into providing bespoke services for much larger vessels he has a great deal of expertise to enable the team to provide services for all levels of tasking in the Maritime Sector.

Mandi French MICB PM.Dip

Finance Director

Mandi is a member of the ICB with over 29 years’ experience in bookkeeping and accountancy. She has worked in the Marine Industry since 1988, covering all aspects of running a business from personnel, marketing & exhibition organisation through to buying, production planning, aftersales and service, freight & shipping, in addition to the accounts.

Jock Hunt

General Manager

Having worked for us for the majority of his working life Jock is a highly valuable member of our team. He has gained a world of experience in managing all manner of marine build and refit projects from 20ft to 200ft, both on site and abroad. He also has the ability to quickly ascertain an individuals skillset which is enormously important to managing a good, motivated happy team and obtaining the best productivity. The way people are managed has a big impact on how they perform and is one of our key objectives with our team.