Swede dreams

If some marketing goon were going to give a lecture on the value of brand awareness, then I can’t think of a much finer example than Hallberg-Rassy. This is a brand that has stuck unswervingly to a blueprint of quality bluewater cruisers without blinking for decades. Multihulls? Forget it. Cruiser racers? No way. Racing yacht? Please… All that pays off, and it is no coincidence that Hallberg-Rassy is one of the only major survivors of the tsunami of bankruptcies that overtook Swedish boatbuilding in the 2000s. Hallberg-Rassy just cruised on. Yet, for all the marque’s reputation for conservatism, the latest generation of Hallbergs are (whisper it) quite radical. Take the 340, for example – although her