Abstract Sandwich plates with one corrugated and one flat skin were studied with the goal to find configurations with higher strength and/or stiffness and reduced weight. A procedure for calculating homogenized orthotropic plate stiffnesses of the sandwich was developed and applied to a number of different profiles. The corrugations lead to increased bending stiffness in one direction but reduced in another. The effect on uniaxial and shear buckling was investigated, with improvements seen for certain combinations of corrugation geometry and material properties. Both conventional (flat) and corrugated skin sandwich panels with the size 1.34 m × 1.59 m were subsequently designed and manufactured for a hybrid ship hull specimen. The numerical analysis predicted the corrugated panel to be 25% stronger than the flat counterpart in spite of being 15% lighter (by numerical prediction as well as experimental weighing).