The Webb family — and by extension North Shore Scaffolding — has a long history with sailing: from Tony Webb building a boat to pay the bills in the 1970s, to the company sponsoring a New Zealand America's Cup campaign, to Clifton Webb representing New Zealand at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Tony Webb, co-founder of North Shore Scaffolding, competed in numerous New Zealand inshore and offshore events. He actually started scaffolding while building a boat in the 70s — and selling that boat is what enabled him to buy the Certified scaffolding gear that started the company. The sailing connection is woven into the company's origin.
In the mid-to-late 1980s the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron wanted to encourage youth into match racing and sought sponsors for ten Elliott 5.9 boats. Through Tony Webb, NSS sponsored one of the inaugural boats to help get the programme off the ground. Many of the New Zealand crews who featured on the match-racing circuit over the following 30-plus years came through that RNZYS youth programme — it's credited for much of New Zealand's America's Cup success. Around the same time, the Ponsonby Cruising Club set up a Learn-to-Sail programme using Optimist dinghies. Tony, a past Vice Commodore of PCC, helped get it going — NSS sponsored a training boat and helped secure further sponsors across the construction industry.
Enter a young Clifton Webb — nine years old, and completely unaware of the work behind the programme — at that inaugural Learn-to-Sail event. A few years later his sister attended too, and the whole family was involved in sailing. The NSS boat was the only boat the siblings ever sailed there. Clifton took to it, and moved on to Murrays Bay Boating Club — his introduction to the Coutts family. He soon befriended two of Russell Coutts' nephews, Mark and Ben, and raced with and against them for years.
In 1989 a young Russell Coutts was finding his feet in match racing. A national scholarship regatta had been set up, heading for a showdown between KZ7 hero Chris Dickson and Finn Class Olympic gold medallist Russell Coutts. The boats became a sticking point — Dickson's father owned one of the fleet's top yachts and Chris protested to switch boats. Russell needed a better boat to even things up. His father, Allan Coutts, was a construction manager at Mainzeal — an NSS client — and through the family connection he called Tony to ask if the Webbs' boat (the previous season's championship boat) was available. It was. The showdown was sailed in even boats, Russell won, and his international match-racing career began. He later wrote in his book "Course to Victory": "Tony & Christine, Citizen Trials 1989, that was the start. Russell Coutts."
A few years on, a teenage Clifton was trying Laser Class sailing — young at 15. He entered Murrays Bay's annual 24-hour race in an NSS-entered boat with his friend Alistair Tate. You could tell at a glance who sponsored the boat.
In 1996, after losing the New Zealand Youth selection trials on a count-back, Clifton stepped into the International Finn Class — following childhood idols including Russell Coutts — to chase Olympic selection. In March 2000 he won selection for the Sydney Olympics and represented New Zealand that August. In 2004 he narrowly missed a second Olympics, losing a European selection event to Dean Barker, then coached in Europe and America before returning home.
Then the Global Financial Crisis hit. By the time Clifton returned from overseas, NSS was a fully family-owned company. In 2012, as the America's Cup re-emerged, Team New Zealand was building catamarans with giant wing sails — which needed scaffolding built around the wing for construction. Short on money, they called NSS for help, and the company became a supply sponsor. In 2019 NSS supplied the scaffolding to assemble Team New Zealand's new foiling monohulls — with a few wide-eyed scaffolders signing confidentiality agreements before they could even see the boats. The 2017 win brought the Cup home, and is why Auckland had world-class sailing on its doorstep that summer.