HOLLAND — Exciting things are happening at Composite Builders in Holland.

The shop, founded by Brian MacInnes in Grandville in 2014 after he retired from professional sailing, provides development and manufacturing for a variety of composite products.

Since opening, the business has moved twice. In 2016, it opened its first Holland site on Eighth Street. In 2018, a need for more expansion encouraged the move to 430 W. 18th St.

The new location has 30,000 square feet of manufacturing space, with 70,000 addition square feet available. Before Composite Builders moved in, the nearly 75-year-old space belonged to Holland Hitch.

“If you were in this building back in the summer, you’d think, ‘Oh my gosh. How are you going to work in here?’” MacInnes said. “The building was black. It was dusty and dirty and greasy. So, over the summer and through the fall, they blew the whole building out, painted the whole thing, added all-new LED lighting and brought it up to code.”

Now, Composite Builders is working on one of its largest projects yet — a 75-foot sailboat for Stars & Stripes Team USA, an America’s Cup syndicate operated by Dennis Conner.

“We are really excited to be entered into the America’s Cup with our core values of being an authentic, inclusive and all-American team,” said Tod Reynolds, COO of Stars & Stripes. “And we think there’s no more tangible way to do that than building our boat right here in the middle of the country, right in the heart of America in Holland, Michigan.”

So far, Reynolds has been impressed.

“We’ve been blown away by the amount of expertise locally,” he said. “When you first think about building boats, you don’t necessarily gravitate toward Michigan. But the composite industry, as well as some of the boat-building tradition and heritage here, is pretty strong.”

This isn’t the first time Composite Builders has supplied important equipment for a sporting event.

“We do a lot more than boat building,” MacInnes said. “We pride ourselves in making things out of composites. We do sit-skis for the U.S. Paralympic team. In the last Olympics, they won 15 medals on our skis, which is just awesome.”

There’s another big project currently underway at Composite Builders — a set of theatrical shades for The Shed in New York City.

The Shed is a 25,000-square-foot, eight level building located on West 30th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues in Manhattan. A moveable outer shell doubles the building’s footprint when deployed over an adjoining plaza to create The McCourt. This shell is where the theatrical shades will be installed.

“There are fourteen of these shades, and they roll down to enclose the building during concerts,” MacInnes said. “Each one is about 3,000 square feet and six to seven tons.”

MacInnes expects the project to be completed in the next couple of months. The sailboat is slated for completion in August or September.

Composite Builders is, for the most part, a one-stop shop.

“We can really do it all,” MacInnes said. “We can cut your molds, build your tooling and make your parts. So, we try to be a one-stop shop for composites. Whether it’s a little drone or a 75-foot boat, we try to treat all of those projects the same.”

— Follow this reporter on Twitter @BizHolland.