‘One Design’ Sails: Keeping Soldano’s work & Giorgio Zuccoli’s legacy Alive

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Images: Martina Barnetova, Luis Rebelo, Emmanuelle Beauchard. Local & independent lofts are key to maintain the health of any racing class and last years we’ve been seeing a drop on local loft alternatives. 
Marton Balazs & Panka are owners  ‘One Design Sails’, former Ullman GZ Hungary. In the past they worked closely with Soldano who has stop building sails.  Now Marton is continuing Pablo’s work under a new brand. Below the text he sent on the project.

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Marton Balazs: “Giorgio Zuccoli and Pablo Soldano started their loft as ‘Ullman Sails Iseo’, where they’ve made a huge number of amazing Multihull sails. 
‘One Design Sails’ with the ‘1D’ logo was their brand for trapeze vests and some other small products. 
When Giorgio passed away, it was a truly sad news for the sailing world, but Pablo decided to continue the business himself. When he finished to build sails a year ago, and with the opportunity to continue his work we asked him if we could use the 1D logo as we wanted it mainly on it’s spirit. 

Now we are building mainly Catamaran sails under his brand, ‘One Design’ , from  F16,  to F18, 20 footer like Hobie Fox or Nacra Inter 20 and Tornado.  We are working on some new projects too, which are not not public yet. 

At Lake Balaton we produce sails for different boats, but they are only available in Hungary at the moment on measuring process. We also have some great Optimist designs, and we are more and more involved to other dinghy classes too. As we have a small loft with a small team, and we are working step by step towards bigger things like moving to a bigger place and building a bigger team is on the table now.

Panka adds. “I think that the opportunity of learning from Soldano helped us a lot. Marton is a former boat builder, and as a sailmaker he learned every tiny tricks from him. Still today when he is down he calls Pablo, it’s like a mystic teacher-student relationship.
On the results we are getting in July our F16 sails finished the Europeans in Cesenatico at the second place with Emmanuel Le Chapelier and Eric Le Boudec. Last month at the Tornado World sin Carnac the Aussie Brett Burvill and Lachlan Gibson finished at the 4th place. We are very proud of these results, and hope that more regattas will come where our sails will end on the podium.”

Marton: We are located at lake Balaton, Hungary. We are also Tornado sailors and we plan to race on the Tornado events as mixed team,  but sometimes work is more important so  you can reach us at the biggest catamaran events. Our website is under construction but our international Facebook page is very active. If you need sails we have dealers in France (Yachting Express Services), in Italy (UV Covers and Bolsena Yachting),  and some more are coming…
We are involved in some really great new projects. We are developing our sails furhter continously, that’s the way how Pablo did the business, and that’s how we do it too. Finally we are lucky to have partners who are very motivated to work with us.

One Design Sails FB