1 Elan Sailing Yacht for Sale

Updated 7 October 2026 · By Hulls.io Editorial

About Elan

Elan Yachts builds sailing yachts in Begunje na Gorenjskem, Slovenia, as one division of Elan d.o.o., a company many sailors know first for its skis. The group describes four divisions: skis and sports equipment, sailing yachts, equipment for sports venues, and composite parts for the wind-power industry.

Elan dates its founding to a September morning in 1945 and credits Rudi Finžgar with starting it. Its roots lie in a wartime workshop that made skis for the Yugoslav Partisans. Boats followed within a few years, beginning with canoes and kayaks: Cruising World dates the start of boatbuilding to 1949, while the German magazine Yacht puts it in the early 1950s, with kayaks and small motorboats. The marine business later grew to larger sailing and power yachts.

Two design studios shaped the sailing range. J&J Design, founded in Ljubljana in 1983 by the brothers Japec and Jernej Jakopin, says its first decade was marked by bestselling designs for Elan, among other large builders; the yard itself lists the Elan 31S of 1984 as the first of its boats with a spoiler transom. From the mid-1990s Humphreys Yacht Design became Elan's principal designer, beginning with the Elan 295 and working alongside the yard's in-house engineering team. On the building side, the yard says it adopted vacuum-assisted infusion lamination (VAIL) for serial production in 2003, and that every Elan hull is now infused.

At boot Düsseldorf 2011 the Elan 350 was named European Yacht of the Year 2011 in the Performance Cruiser category, ahead of the Azuree 40, Dehler 32, First 30 and JPK 1010. The award was initiated by YACHT magazine and is judged by a jury of editors-in-chief and test managers from leading European yachting magazines.

In recent years the range was organised into three lines: the E Line of crossover cruiser-racers (including the E4, E5 and E6), the Impression line of cruising yachts, and the GT line of luxury performance cruisers, including the GT5 and GT6. Marine Business News reports that these boats were developed with design firms including Humphreys Yacht Design and Studio F.A. Porsche.

Ownership has changed several times. Elan was state-owned for much of its history. In 2015 the Slovenian state holding company SDH sold the Elan group to Wiltan Enterprises, which took 95.1 per cent, and Merrill Lynch International, which took 4.9 per cent. By 2017 the new owners had brought in John Peterson, described by Cruising World as a former president of Hunter Marine, to run the marine division; Cruising World reported that year that the yard had built nearly 300 sailboats a year at its peak and 80 in 2016. In May 2019 the private equity fund KJK Fund III completed the purchase of all of Elan d.o.o., which became part of a new holding company, KJK Sports, with Elan's chief executive Jeffrey Tirman leading both.

The yacht business is now in transition. In March 2025 Elan Yachts announced that it would stop taking new orders, finish only the boats already under construction and refund deposits, while the yard and brand went through a complete strategic reorganisation; Yacht reported that it was not in insolvency proceedings. In November 2025 Elan announced a new range of three carbon yachts from 65 to 80 feet, the SixtyFive, SeventyThree and Eighty, designed by J&J Design and Guillaume Verdier. The new range replaces the Impression, E Line and GT ranges and ends the long collaboration with Humphreys Yacht Design; Elan said it expected the first hull to be on the water in early 2027 and that the moulds for the earlier models would be retained.

For buyers, that means every Elan on the used market today belongs to a range that is no longer in production, so it is worth confirming exactly which model, line and year you are looking at.