This November, Titouan Pilliard becomes the youngest skipper in the history of the Route du Rhum. He will sail it alone, across 3,543 nautical miles from Saint-Malo to Guadeloupe, on a monohull that was rebuilt rather than bought new. We have his retired spinnaker in the studio, and the first pieces are cut.
The youngest skipper in Route du Rhum history
Titouan Pilliard is twenty. He is a business student in La Rochelle, he is from La Trinité-sur-Mer in Brittany, and in November 2026 he will start the 13th edition of the Route du Rhum — Destination Guadeloupe as the youngest competitor the race has ever had.
The Route du Rhum is a solo transatlantic, run every four years from Saint-Malo to Pointe-à-Pitre. There is no crew, no stopping, and no outside assistance. It is one of the hardest things in offshore racing to do at any age, and Pilliard will be doing it while still an undergraduate.
He is not new to the ocean. In 2022, at sixteen, he sailed the final leg of the Tour du Monde à l'Envers alongside his father Romain — Cape Town to La Trinité-sur-Mer, 5,800 miles in 25 days. He has been part of the Use It Again project since he was twelve.
A boat with four lives before this one
The interesting part, for us, is the boat.
USE IT AGAIN for YOUTH is a 52-foot Finot-Conq monohull launched in 2007. It has passed through the hands of sailors including Charles Caudrelier, Servane Escoffier and Pierre Casiraghi. Rather than commission a new boat for a new campaign — which is what a well-funded offshore project normally does — Pilliard's team took a nineteen-year-old hull and refitted it according to circular economy principles.
That decision is worth sitting with, because offshore racing has an uncomfortable relationship with sustainability. The sport is powered entirely by wind and produces some of the most eloquent advocates for ocean protection in the world. It also runs on carbon fibre, epoxy, and a culture of building new for every campaign, in which a competitive boat is obsolete long before it is worn out.
Refitting a 2007 hull instead of building a 2026 one is the single largest emissions decision available to a campaign, and it is the one almost nobody makes. Everything else — the sponsorship messaging, the ocean advocacy, the school visits — is downstream of whether you built a new boat or reused an old one.
Use It Again for Youth: young people talking to young people
Use It Again for Youth is the initiative Pilliard founded to mobilise 16-to-26-year-olds around ocean protection and the circular economy. Within six months of launching it had gathered over forty ambassadors in France and internationally.
Its founding premise is a piece of communications realism: the message lands harder when it comes from inside the generation being addressed. A twenty-year-old preparing a solo transatlantic on a rebuilt boat is a more persuasive argument for reuse than any campaign an institution could write, because it is not an argument at all — it is just what he is doing.
He has the Vendée Globe 2028 in his sights after this.
What a retired racing spinnaker actually is
A spinnaker is the largest and most fragile sail on a boat, and it is a genuinely different material from the kitesurfing sails most of our work comes from.
Kite canopies are relatively heavy ripstop nylon, backed by stiff polyester Dacron in the leading edge and struts, sometimes with Mylar film laminated in. A racing spinnaker is nylon too, but far lighter — thin enough that a full sail packs down to something you can carry under one arm, and light enough that it is measured in fractions of an ounce per square yard.
That lightness is exactly why spinnakers get retired while still looking almost new. They do not usually wear out gradually. They fail suddenly: a broach, a wrap, a shrimping incident, a gust taken at the wrong angle, and a sail that was fine ten seconds ago has a tear through it. Offshore, the sail comes down, the race goes on, and the spinnaker is finished as a racing sail on a boat where a failure costs a result.
What is left is an enormous quantity of extremely light, strong, brightly printed nylon in a fabric weight that almost nothing in normal manufacturing produces. It is a superb material and it has, in the ordinary course of events, absolutely nowhere to go — the same multi-material, low-volume, no-clean-polymer-stream problem that makes kitesurfing kites practically unrecyclable.
Cutting the spinnaker
Working from a spinnaker is a different discipline from working from a kite, and it changes the design decisions.
Scale. A downwind sail off a 52-foot monohull is vastly larger than a kite canopy. For once, panel selection is not a hunt for a survivable area — there is more sound fabric than we need, and the constraint flips from scarcity to choice.
Weight. Spinnaker nylon is much lighter than kite ripstop. That is an advantage and a discipline at once: it makes for a finished piece with almost no weight to it, and it means seams, edges and stress points have to be built for a cloth that will not forgive a lazy construction detail.
Graphics. A racing spinnaker carries the campaign's identity at enormous scale — colour fields metres across rather than the tight, busy print of a kite. Placing a pattern piece on that is more like cutting into a painting than cutting into a printed textile. Where a colour break falls on a finished piece is the entire design decision, and it is made with the sail spread out on the floor.
Provenance. And it is a specific sail. This is not "spinnaker nylon" bought as a raw material. It is the sail from the boat that will cross the Atlantic in November, from a campaign built on the principle that things should be used again — which is a rare case of the material and the message being literally the same object.
Why this collaboration exists
We make things from retired sails because the alternative is landfill for a textile that has not stopped being excellent. Pilliard's campaign refits a nineteen-year-old racing hull because the alternative is building a new one for no reason. These are the same argument applied at different scales, and it was not a difficult conversation.
What makes it worth writing about is that neither side is asking anyone to accept less. The boat is a real competitor in a real transatlantic. The fabric is better than what we could buy new — lighter, stronger, and carrying a history that no new material can be manufactured with. Circularity works best exactly where it is not a sacrifice, and this is one of those places.
Follow the campaign through Use It Again as it heads to Saint-Malo this autumn. The pieces cut from the spinnaker are in the studio now — you can see the rest of what we make from retired sails in the upcycled sail jackets and sail caps and accessories collections, each piece numbered, each one from a sail that has already been somewhere.
Sitting on a retired sail, spinnaker or kite that deserves better than a skip? Send us the details — type, size, condition, and where it would ship from — and we will tell you honestly what it can become.