The Man Behind the Mold 40
LAKELANDBOATING.COM
Great Lakes-born and -bred, marine industry designer Peter Granata has made a career of bringing boats to life for their most important asset — the people who own them. by heather steinberger
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t’s natural for boating enthusiasts to think about manufacturers first when they reflect on their favorite brands. After all, your eye is drawn to that distinctive logo, a shiny emblem that holds all the magic of the brand promise. But a boat doesn’t start in a factory. It starts in the mind of a designer. One of the marine industry’s top designers is a son of the Great Lakes. His name is Peter Granata, and over the years, he’s produced an array of award-winning designs and patented more than a dozen ideas. Boating magazine named him one of the top four “game-changers” in the country. He’s the former president of the Marine Design Resource Alliance. And he was born and raised in Chicago. Granata says he always felt drawn to the water. While family members limited their on-water activities to the occasional fishing trip in Minnesota or Wisconsin, the young Granata wanted more. “I’ll never forget the first boat I bought,” he says, laughing. “I bought it with a friend. We were 18, 19, something like that, and we cruised past this place that was still under construction. It had one boat in the window, a 15-foot tri-hull with a 50-horsepower Mercury, and we made arrangements to buy it. We launched at Burnham Park with the idea of cruising to Marina City. We had to go through the Chicago River locks. We heard that we were supposed to tie up, so we tied up. We barely got that sucker off in time.” Laughing, Granata says he spent countless hours enjoying Lake Michigan after that first misadventure — yet the water was no more than a pleasant diversion from his real focus. Cars, his first love.
| october 2014
The leap from land to water As a young 20-something, Granata and a friend devised an idea based on push-button car radios. What if, with power seats, you could just hit a button and readjust your seat to its preferred position? Granata decided to walk into a local engineering firm with the idea in hand. “I was a rookie,” he says. “I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. I asked to meet the president of the company; this was a time when the hippies were running around, and I was a clean-cut kid, so he said OK. I think he got a kick out of it.” The firm took on the engineering work while the young men raised money to fund their endeavor. Granata found a Japanese artist to hand-craft illustrated booklets that cost roughly $75 apiece, gathered the books and his friend, and drove to Detroit. “I went to American Motors, where they let me go through my whole presentation before telling me, ‘That’s great, but we don’t make power seats!,’” Granata recalls, chuckling. “I got nowhere at Chrysler. General Motors was a great experience, and then I went to Ford. They asked how soon they could get prototypes, and a few months later, we got a purchase order for 50,000 units. That was Friday. On Monday, they cancelled it, and I was left with nothing to do.” There was always the family business. Granata’s father,
photo by nancy mcgregor