Last summer, the Harpoon slayed, so to speak, on social media. That’s when Cape Fear Catamarans posted a video of the 22-foot aluminum vessel, its newest creation, online.
The Harpoon footage “racked up millions of views over Instagram and Facebook and really took off,” said Ben Watts, business operations and sales director at Cape Fear Catamarans, a small boatbuilding company headquartered in Wilmington.
The company’s phone blew up.
“I was answering calls from Belize, New Zealand, Greece, Dubai, pretty much every state you could think of in the United States, the Cayman Islands. I mean, you name it, we were getting interest and response from all over,” Watts said.
A boating social media network picked it up again in January and “reignited the fire,” Watts said.
Historically, the company had built everything from 22- to 35-foot custom boats for offshore fishing and public safety.
“The Harpoon has had such a huge response internationally that we’re going to go ahead into full production on the Harpoon and get away from the custom end of it,” said Barry LeRay, lead designer and fabricator at Cape Fear Catamarans.
LeRay’s company is one example of a local manufacturer that’s growing. Boatbuilding is one of the target manufacturing sectors identified in a 2022 economic mobility report commissioned by New Hanover County. But attracting manufacturers to the Wilmington region, big or small, has its challenges.
Announcements about large-scale manufacturers bringing hundreds of jobs to the area have been few and far between in recent years, although local officials have racked up some wins with existing and smaller companies and a Brunswick County announcement in 2023 promised 500 jobs.
According to the economic mobility report, produced by economic development consultancy firm Greenfield, New Hanover County’s limitations as of 2022 included a lack of available sites and buildings, the need to expand utilities to available sites and difficulty recruiting/maintaining younger workers and engineers.
Of the site and building limitation, economic development officials say they’ve seen some results from efforts to turn that around.
“In partnership with New Hanover County, we are proactively preparing publicly held land positions at Blue Clay Business Park and Holly Shelter Business Park for investment/economic opportunity. The county is in the process of pulling key infrastructure to both sites over the coming years in order to provide a home for future employers,” stated Scott Satterfield, president and CEO of Wilmington Business Development, in an email in February. “We are also partnering closely on privately held positions, like Wilmington Trade Center, where New Hanover County is also investing in infrastructure to provide speed to market and competitive pricing to one of the region’s most attractive industrial positions.”
Both Pender and New Hanover counties have found success in luring employers by focusing on infrastructure, he said.
“Post-pandemic reshoring has put some wind at our back with manufacturers, but the genesis of our recent success was our push 20 years ago to develop ready-to-build industrial sites in New Hanover and Pender counties,” Satterfield wrote. “Companies want quality properties equipped with the latest industrial infrastructure. Communities have to get out in front of this, making investments that look downrange. We’ve had terrific support from our government partners; they truly get it. We’ve also had some terrific private partners. Now the region is seeing the fruit of those investments and the results of those partnerships with economic development wins.”
Bill Early, executive director of Brunswick Business & Industry Development, said Brunswick County is lucky to have two megasites – the Mid-Atlantic Industrial Rail Park and the International Logistics Park.
“For the last seven years, we have worked to get these sites fully infrastructured with adequate water, wastewater, natural gas, electricity and fiber optics. Today, there are two water lines capable of supplying water to both industrial parks. Sewer lift stations have been constructed at both parks and fiber is now available at these sites,” Early stated in an email. “We are working to finalize funding for a 1-million-gallon water tank at the Mid-Atlantic Industrial Rail Park. Currently, we are working on an Infrastructure Master Plan for the Mid-Atlantic site to determine potential needs to increase water and sewer capacity at these sites.”
He said Brunswick has been able to move forward with infrastructure planning as a result of funds approved by the state legislature for megasite development.
Epsilon Advanced Materials, a company that makes graphite for electric vehicle batteries, announced in October 2023 that it wants to build a massive facility on 150 acres in the Mid-Atlantic Industrial Rail Park and hire 500 people to work there.
In the case of boatbuilding, bringing manufacturers here is more complicated than it might seem.
“While we have access to a lot of the assets and amenities boatbuilders seek, it is a highly cyclical industry sensitive to rapid shifts in discretionary consumer spending,” Satterfield wrote.
And starting a boatbuilding business can be daunting even if all the pieces listed in the economic mobility report are in place.
“It’s not something you can just pick up and start,” Watts said. “There’s a lot of institutional knowledge somebody’s got to have in order to do it.”
Economic development officials believe the Cape Fear region is in a strong position with other industries. They include aerospace, energy, industrial equipment, building products and consumer food and beverages, Satterfield wrote.
“Our life science presence is concentrated in contract discovery, and we were among the early destinations for that North Carolina-born industry,” he added. “Biomanufacturing is tougher given the need for large, infrastructure-rich sites, but our aggressive product development strategy could open opportunities for us there.”
Across multiple manufacturing sectors, the workforce remains a top concern.
“Workforce development has to continue to shift in this area,” said Jim Flock, general manager of aerospace manufacturing firm HSM Machine Works and chairman of the Cape Fear Workforce Development Board.
He said the region has long been seen as a vacation and retirement area, with a plethora of tourism- and hospitality-related jobs.
“I think that workforce development really needs to focus on letting people know and be aware of opportunities (outside tourism and hospitality) available to them and that companies need to improve their attraction and retention approaches,” Flock said.
With the increasing use of artificial intelligence, companies will also have to reskill and upskill existing employees, Flock said.
Along those same lines, Satterfield said the outlook is encouraging.
“One reality we have to accept is that modern manufacturing is more capital-rich than it used to be. While that means fewer jobs, those jobs now come with more required training and better wages. AI and robotics are reinventing much of the U.S. economy, and manufacturers will be using emerging technologies to improve efficiencies,” he said. “That will put a premium on maintaining a productive, trainable, flexible workforce.”
For Cape Fear Catamarans, workforce issues ebb and flow.”
“We’ve had times when we’ve been razor-thin on staff, but we’re still looking to hire more people,” Watts said. “I’ve tried a handful of different ways to identify people, everything from Craigslist to Indeed, and it’s kind of a gamble on a lot of that. It’s tough finding good, qualified people willing to do the hard work that’s boatbuilding, so that’s a constant challenge – finding good-quality people that you can retain.”
Satterfield said communities everywhere face the challenge of producing skilled manufacturing workers.
“Greater Wilmington has excellent manufacturing education and training programs both at the secondary school level and at Cape Fear Community College. But we face headwinds when it comes to making our young people aware of the attractive career opportunities that are available in our region’s manufacturing sector – good-paying jobs with benefits and the possibility of advancement,” he said. “Another audience we need to reach are parents who may not understand that today’s manufacturing environments are safe, clean workplaces that offer stable, sustainable career paths. We need more dialogue among students, parents, teachers and school counselors about manufacturing careers.”
Companies begin their search for sites with a list of factors critical to their new facility’s long-term goals, Early said.
“These may include (the) current capacity of our infrastructure, workforce skills and available buildings and sites. Until the final few sites are identified, companies look for potential hurdles that could cause delays in their speed to market. Seeking ways to remove these hurdles continues to be the top priority of Brunswick BID,” Early wrote. “As we look to the future, infrastructure, particularly water and sewer capacity, will be extremely important for Brunswick County’s continued growth.”
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