If not now, when?
“We’ve had people ask us, isn’t this exactly the wrong time to start an RV company?” said Chris Barth, vice president and chief operating officer for the start-up RV manufacturer, Ember RVs. “We have said again and again, together, ‘When is the right time to start an RV company exactly? Do you wait for the market to be down? When is it?’
“Yes, procurement is hard right now, but dealer inventory is very low and consumer demand is very high. If we’re going to say the procurement is the main problem, one of the great things is, anybody who’s able to run their business in kind of this new environment, and run it successfully, is a strong business and that’s a great partner to have.”
Launched early in 2021, Ember’s founder and CEO comes with an impressive pedigree: Ashley Bontrager Lehman is the granddaughter of Lloyd and Bertha Bontrager, founders of Jayco.
Lehman, Barth and the other two co-founders, Steve Delagrange and Ernie Miller, all knew each other from having worked together at their previous company. Currently, Ember is in the prototype stage and is expected to begin production by mid-October in a new building it will be moving into.
“This building that we’re sitting in today has 60,000 square feet of warehouse/manufacturing space, where we’re building out our first (prototypes), and also has 3,000 square feet of office space which the rest of our office staff are working out of today,” Lehman said.
But her team is excited to soon be moving into a new home – a $4 million, 90,000-square-foot facility that will become the company’s new headquarters starting in October. The building the company is in now will house the company’s lamination department and a welding shop. Eventually, all the office staff will move into the new building as well, but that likely won’t be until 2022.
“It is a brand-new building,” Lehman said. “It was a spec building that the contractor was just putting up and I got in with them earlier this year. It was early enough in the build process that I was able to request some changes to make it more suitable to building RVs.”
Upon hearing news of the start-up, reaction from the dealer community – many of whom know Bontrager from her previous company – has been overwhelmingly positive, Barth said.
“They’re saying this is fantastic to have a new option, we like the message that you’re sending, the product that you’re going after, the product segment you’re going after is a really live, active, very vital part of the industry,” he said. “It’s bringing people into the RV lifestyle for the first time in these entry level coaches.”
Specifically, that product segment – at least to start – is the lightweight travel trailer market.
“Coming from the Bontrager family that started Jayco, my grandparents at that time wanted to provide a family friendly unit that got families out in nature spending time together,” Lehman said. “So, when this whole thing came about I had a strong desire to do something similar to that idea of, let’s provide more of an entry level unit for families to go out and enjoy together. … So that was really my inspiration for why I wanted to start with a lightweight laminated travel trailer. And then Chris and his expertise really brought in the idea of building it for off-road and off-grid capabilities, and we just kind of meshed our two ideas together and that’s where we are today.”
“If we look at that entry level space,” Barth added, “there’s some pretty great things that we can say about that entry level buyer that we saw was missing in the marketplace. Entry level buyers are typically just looked at as a price-point shopper, and Ashley and I are both in agreement that we want to sell people in a value-proposition kind of way. Price is only an issue in the absence of value – this is one of those discussion points that we have again and again.
“I think it’s important to make sure the coach is off-grid and off-road friendly because not everyone can camp in a campground anymore. Campgrounds are very, very full. And there are people who want to go explore in this great nation of ours. They want to get off the beaten path and blaze their own trail.”
The lightweight trailer is only the first of what will be more models to come, Barth said, most he which he can’t talk about yet.
But future models notwithstanding, one thing Lehman is excited to talk about is the type of company she and the other founders are building.
“While we all get excited about building RVs, when we got to talking, we realized that what we’re really excited about doing is building a company that happens to build RVs,” she said. “RVs excite us all, but we really want to build a company that is focused not only on what the consumer is asking for, but also how we’re relating to our suppliers and our dealer base, and then also how we are treating our team members here at Ember.”
In October, Ember opened its manufacturing operations to dealers for the first time: https://rv-pro.com/news/start-up-ember-rv-opens-its-doors-to-dealers/