Ronstan is born when Ron Allatt and Stan Lenepveu decide to set up a manufacturing facility, producing both wooden-hulled boats and the stainless steel deck fittings they required.
With the help of a few friends they started to construct the boat-building factory in Advantage Road, Highett, laying out and digging the foundations themselves. The factory was completed in 1953 and the name Ronstan Marine Equipment Pty Ltd was registered on 21 December that year.

By 1955 another factory was needed, so a further building 60x50 feet was built at the rear of the first one, in Advantage Road, Highett. Ron moved out of the small factory and started accepting orders for larger boats. Another boat builder was needed, and Bernie Phelan was employed.

The 1960 credit squeeze hit the marine industry hard. Production boat sales died. Cash flow needs were urgent. The advent of fibreglass also promised to radically and permanently change the boat building scene, making it a more capital intensive industry. Ron and Stan eventually decide to concentrate on making boat fittings alone. The pair realised their future lay in the mass production of marine hardware. Thus began the Ronstan Fitting tradition – the RF prefix which continues today. They sold the retail store to the Warner family, Jack Eggleton and Brian Barnes, (it became Anchor Marine) and disposed of the wood-working equipment to concentrate on the new direction.

The first export sales were made in the late 1960s when a Canadian airline pilot, Don Findlay, took a trial consignment home with him in the cockpit. A DC-8 pilot, Findlay had turned up at the factory on his layover to investigate fittings for his part-time wholesale yacht hardware business. The stock sold well, and Ronstan’s first international distribution deal was set up with Findlay Imports in Vancouver.
At that time, only cast brass and bronze shackles were available in the US, and word spread via Findlay’s contacts about this innovative Australian company making shackles from stainless steel.

By the mid 1970s, Ronstan had increased its catalogue range to more than a thousand items. It was supplying 3000 swivelling deadeye cam cleats a month to Hobie catamaran manufacturers in the US, and had created a special main traveller car for the Swedish America’s Cup challenger Sverige. A giant 120 ton capacity press had just been installed in a new press shop which doubled the production area. By that time Ron was specialising in product control while Stan developed and designed the new machines and tools.

In 1990 Ronstan branched out into markets outside the marine industry, marketing stainless steel rigging components to the architectural and construction industries. The non-marine charter was to find new markets, applications and opportunities for marine products that marine distributors were not prepared to chase. A dedicated Non-Marine Sales Manager was appointed in that year and in 1992 Rowan Murray was employed as Non-Marine Sales Representative.

Having joined Ronstan as a young sales rep in 1976, Alistair Murray was appointed its new Managing Director in 1997. In that year turnover reached a record $20 million. With a workforce of about 160, efficiency in manufacturing was fundamental to the firm’s success; products could be airfreighted all over the world and still be competitively priced in the destination markets.

At the 50th anniversary in 2003, the five directors of Ronstan are Michael Hanlon (chairman), Graham Cunningham, Alistair Murray, Laine McCooke and Louis Sander. The senior management team comprises Alistair Murray, Louis Sander, Laine McCooke, Tim Maishman, Rowan Murray, Tim Melville, Bryn Wellington and Peter Dowdney (living in the US with his family, running the US company). Other managers and partners in the company include Tony Tanner, Mick Wade, Vince Jayaratne, John Davis, KC Fullmer, Alan Prussia and Neil Taylor.

Today

Ronstan has come a long way since its humble beginnings, but fortunately not too far. Ron and Stan still drop in to the Sandringham headquarters from time to time, and people all over the world still recall with pleasure their former relationships with the company. The Australian company with international reach remains as it always has been, a business where the people matter.