really appreciate for what they are and that we’d only work with vendors who’d be willing to make changes. Every tent is manufactured for us and to our specs. It’s the same with Wild Coast’s awnings. How diverse, or how complete, is the selection you offer your customers, Peter? PvD: All the products in those lines, the Wild Coast Camping Gear and theWild Coast Tents, are solid products. I’ve become very partial to the G-Stove. It’s a stainless steel stove with stainless steel accessories available. There is also the Snomaster, which is a fridge-freezer, so that when you’re off the grid you can actually have frosted beer glasses with ice-cold beer. We have some really fantastic products and some really great people who we work with. Portable Winch Co. out of Sherbrooke, Quebec is one of those great com- panies. They have been a great company to deal with and have an awesome product and they are Canadian. Their product a portable winch that can be used anyway you can imagine. I also understand that your clients are an ardent bunch, as well. PvD: Our customers have a lot of the passion. It’s not just that they can go off-grid and be self-sufficient; they also love tinkering with our products. Some people design their own light schemes; some people rig-up their vehicles by putting in our solar systems with dual-batteries. With the solar systems you can put in the fridge and we offer some great cooking gear. People build trailers, as well, and incor- porate our rooftop tents. We have one customer who has rebuilt four trailers in just the last four years and custom- ized it every time with our camping gear. It’s become such a trend in itself that we’ve picked up a line of Scout Trailers, products from TMG. There’s a lot of potential for this product. It’s a really beefy trailer that can be towed behind a Jeep, which is a fairly light vehicle. We bring them in and mount 35- inch tires on them – and they have indepen- dent suspension. It’s a great way of extending the distance someone can travel. I see at wildcoasttents.com that you host a section where you profile pictures sent in by your customers. You must hear a lot of great stories from them as well about their adventures in your rooftop tents. PvD: We’ve also met a lot of very great people through this company and we’ve been touched by a lot of inspiring stories. Three years ago there was a 78-year-old gentleman from the north shore of Vancouver who saw our website. He actually contacted us from the road, when he was close to Nova Scotia, to let us know that he was going to drop by and pick up a tent. When he got here, he told us how he gave up his apartment, bought a pickup truck with a cab where he had put down a decent foam, because he had always dreamed of travelling from one coast to the other. He traveled all through Northern Canada and then south to the East Coast to visit us. When he was here he showed us
By David MacDonald I ’ll be honest, Peter, the only place I’ve encountered rooftop tents is on the pages of National Geographic – I’m what you’d call an infrequent camper. Why do they inspire you? PvD: During a visit a number of years back, Trish and I dis- covered that rooftop tents are really big in South Africa – and Australia, actually. We also discovered that rooftop tents have been around since the ‘30s. When I was a kid back in Holland, I had a great-uncle and aunt who retired and traveled all through Southern Europe and Northern Africa, Morocco, all those places, in their Volkswagen bus. It’s the sort of thing a lot of people dream about. All they did was live out of their van and they’d pick fruit and fish. One of my warmest memories of them was a time they visited after a long trip and we fished from the canal beside our home and caught a couple of fish and cooked on a summer day. Those are sorts of memories, the things that have been inspiring to me in this business. “She grew up in the bush, actually. It was so remote that their mail was dropped out of a Sesna. Her father was a trader; he had a trading post.” So it’s a genuine, heartfelt passion that drove you to bring this international concept to the Canadian market? PvD: Absolutely. Rooftop tents are just a fantastic way to travel and it is just amazing, in hindsight, that there wasn’t anything available in this market before us at the time. We’re such a great overland country, a massive country. We also have extensive backroads, old fireroads, and crown land where people can camp. It’s a growing business, a growing market with a new generation that is embracing the outdoors. But what’s important is that it’s our passion. We vowed to ourselves in the beginning where we’d never allow this business to grow into something where we’re just selling a commodity; we’d only stick to selling items that we
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JUNE 2018 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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