Up until 1968, his company, then called Poole Power Boats, in the southern English County of Dorset, had been a sales agent for manufacturers.
One of those was American company Owens, which produced speedboats up to 17 feet. It had designed an 18-footer but decided to pull out of Britain, leaving Pool Power Boats with no product to sell.
It was the opportunity Mr Braithwaite had been waiting for. “I was a marine engineer but I had itchy feet. I wanted to create something. Owens suddenly closed its speedboat factory [in the UK].
“I managed to borrow £5,000 (at that time about B200,000) and I bought the mould for the hull. We started making boats.”
Did he have any doubts? “No. I’d learned an enormous amount about the marine industry. I wanted to create something that was English and of the highest quality because in the days I started, everything that was English was bad.
“It was the time of [the British Motor Corporation] going bankrupt. Even Rolls-Royce wasn’t good at that time. [Britain] had a very bad name. I never told anybody in those early days that we were British.
“In 1970 there were seven of us and we turned over probably £100,000 (B4 million) in that year.”
It was the start of something big. Today the company – now named Sunseeker – turns over £300 million (B15 billion) and directly employs 2,300 people.
Last week Mr Braithwaite was at the JW Marriott Phuket Resort & Spa in Mai Khao for Sunseeker’s annual dealer get-together, bringing some 240 people from around the world for a couple of days of serious stuff followed by golf, sailing, or relaxing – and parties.
He was in Phuket earlier this year for the first time, at the Pimex boat show.
“We came to Phuket [for the dealer conference] because we had learned that [Phuket] was a very warm and welcoming environment. The people are absolutely amazing. The way we and our delegates have been treated is amazing – that’s the Thai people, extremely kind and obliging.”
Phuket – and the Marriott – have also shown they are able to handle a disparate group of nationalities from as far apart as Moscow and Rio, Mexico and Greece.
Phuket is also a relevant choice because of growth in Sunseeker’s far east markets. “In the past five years it’s grown enormously. The far east is probably 25 per cent of our business – we have over 110 boats in HK alone.
“I see the far east as a very important part of our business. It will grow, I believe.”
He also feels that small markets – five or six boats in each – are just as important as big markets. “You can be selling 40 or 50 boats into the States and then they switch off the light one day, as they often do, and you haven’t got it any more.”
Mr Braithwaite had a dream when he started making boats: “I had this vision that I wanted to create something like Hoover [the British vacuum cleaner].
“I think that’s the most iconic name – it doesn’t matter what kind of vacuum cleaner you have, you ‘get the Hoover out of the cupboard’. ‘Hoover’ [in Britain] means ‘vacuum cleaner’. I wanted to create something that meant ‘boat’.
Helping to do that has been a long relationship with the makers of the James Bond movies.
“They came to see us. People pay a lot of money [to have their products in the Bond movies]. But we said, ‘We can’t pay money but we’ll work with you. We’ll lend you the boats and we’ll lend you the technicians to teach you how to drive them.’ We built up a fantastic relationship.”
Sunseeker boats have appeared in the past four Bond movies.
The relationship includes having boats blow up, though these are not fully fitted-out models.
“We’d make a boat that from the outside looked totally finished but wasn’t. There was no interior. That’s what they blew up.
“We had one blown up in The World is Not Enough. We had to provide a boat that looked like a 34 Tomahawk, hit the beach and then it blew up because Bond hit it with his rockets from the boat he was driving.”
“In Panama [shooting scenes for Quantum of Solace] we had to ship five 43-foot boats [to the set] and one 37-metre. I think we lost two [to explosions] in that.”
Were the exploding boats a good investment? Absolutely, says Mr Braithwaite. “That was one of the best things in terms of making us a household name.”
Sunseeker may not yet be quite on the level of Hoover in terms of British language usage. But then again, James Bond has never been seen using a Hoover, and to our knowledge no one ever blew up a Hoover in a movie.