Leon Slikkers began his boat-building career at Chris-Craft in the joiner department making cabin tops in 1946. In the early 1950s Leon began building 14 foot runabouts in his garage after work. In 1954 he registered the Slickcraft name, and the following year he left a promising career to open his own shop and fulfill his dream at the age of 27. He sold his house and started a small factory on Washington Avenue in Holland, Michigan. Leon began experimenting with a new material, fiberglass, in 1955. Within three years, the company put a few of the boats into production and by 1963 had stopped building with wood.
In 1969 Leon sold Slickcraft to the AMF Corporation. He stayed on as president to head up three AMF companies (including Slickcraft), but eventually realized that the large corporation's business principles did not match his own and left after four years. Leon started over in 1974, building sailboats under the name S2 Yachts. Within 10 years, S2 was one of the top five sailboat manufacturers in the United States, known for building quality cruising vessels and racing boats. Gradually the company began producing high-quality power boats called Tiara Yachts, and phasing out the sailboats. S2 Yachts then constructed a second facility in Ft. Pierce, Florida and, in 1977 added Pursuit Boats to its product lineup.
In 2009 the S2 design and engineering group collaborated with the Marine Hydrodynamic Laboratory at the University of Michigan to develop Total Integrated Data Acquisition Systems (TIDAS), nautical research stations for coastal and inner-shelf freshwater and saltwater data monitoring.
In 2011 the S2 team start building the Zeelander line off boats.
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