A Sunshine Coast-based entrepreneur and life-long camping enthusiast is beating the Japanese at their own manufacturing game.
Jared Campion quit his job in 2018 – a decade after arriving in Japan – and converted his family car to a campervan with wood-panelled interiors, utensils, mattresses and bedding.
The idea was to rent out the campervan and introduce more Japanese holidaymakers to the joys of their own country’s great outdoors, gaining valuable user feedback on the design.
That prototype was the first Dream Drive campervan.
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“Originally, when I started the business, it was to be like the Jucy/Apollo/Wicked campers, where we would make our own vehicles and rent them in Japan,” the Dream Drive founder and CEO said.
“But because of the pandemic, I lost all my inbound customers.
“We shut down the rentals because of the pandemic and I was thinking, ‘Geez, it would be good to try to get our sales going in Australia’.
“We switched at that point to just manufacturing and selling the vehicles. We were selling almost 10 units a month to the local market.”
The Woombye resident admits that becoming a manufacturer and exporter was never the “grand plan”. But the ‘pandemic pivot’ has proven to be the best pathway for the business.
Now, each of the hand-built campervans come out of an 800sqm factory in a very small but central town, Komae, in west Tokyo that employs 30 craftspeople, including designers, parts installers and furniture-makers.
“In Australia, there’s amazing craftsmen and it’s really good for one-off original builds, but when it comes down to building a product, Japan is great for that,” Mr Campion said.
“The Japanese love to do the same thing again and again and just hone in and do it better, which I feel really suits what we do. The quality is really good.”
This month, the Aussie arm of the business was realised after he brought the first 4×4 campervans Down Under.
“Our first dealer is in Geelong and they can deliver anywhere in Australia,” Mr Campion said.
“I’ll be trying to find dealers – one around Queensland, too – just to make servicing and so forth simpler.
“We see Brisbane as a key market and the Sunny Coast. Ultimately, the Sunshine Coast is probably where we would have our offices.
“That’s a bit more time until we set up a warehouse here.
“But for the first step, we just want to get the factory in Japan busy.
“The special thing about us manufacturing (the campervans) in Japan is that we can access the 4×4 Toyotas, which are not available in this market.
“We can buy vans, do the conversion and then import them over – that’s a good differentiator.
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“Eventually, we do also plan to build other models and do lots of work locally.
“We’re basically trying to build more of a partnership with the large Japanese automotive manufacturers to do that.”
Although Dream Drive manufactures two campervan designs (including the more compact Tama), the larger KumaQ is the first available in Australia.
“It’s a four-seater and the second row of seats folds into a bed. So, four people can sleep quite comfortably in that van,” Mr Campion said.
“The queen-size bed is higher and then the seat folds down below it. We’ve made it so you can pack the bed away and have a lot of storage space.
“It’s designed to be like a nice camper you could use for two people. Or if you have a couple of kids, it works well for them as well.
“It’s got an outdoor shower, the kitchen facilities inside and also space out the back where they can cook.
“We want it to be a space you’d enjoy coming back to, read a book maybe, enjoy the view from.
“There’s amazing builds in Australia but a lot of the time, for me, they’re very practical builds – very clean designs. We really want to make more of a home on wheels.
“Being 4×4 means it really gives you more options of where you can go.”
Mr Campion said the KumaQ also was available in two-wheel-drive, with a diesel or unleaded engine.
Prices start from $123,000 (two-wheel-drive, unleaded) and $135,000 (4×4, diesel), and customers can choose their own interior colour schemes.
Mr Campion said that in Japan, the campervans were mostly sold to 45-year-olds with one or two children, wanting to do short breaks and “escape the city”.
But one unexpected market is the dog owners.
“In Japan, dog ownership is huge,” Mr Campion said.
“It’s not easy to travel with dogs in Japan. They’ll buy campervans so they can have their dogs sit in the parking lot while they go shopping – a very practical use.”
The product of what he calls “world-wandering hippies” – an English father and Australian mother, Mr Campion spent much of his childhood travelling in his parents’ 1974 Volkswagen campervan named Bertie.
He was 16 when the family moved to Australia, doing more ‘overland’ trips than ever before, including beach driving to Double Island Point and Rainbow Beach from Noosa.
Even then, Mr Campion noticed many more campervans on Australian roads than in England.
Japan’s camping life is different again.
“Tent camping is really big in Japan,” he said.
“A lot of Japanese people love to get a tent and then fill up their cars with these massive set-ups.
“But the campervan is really picking up more recently over there.
“Japan is somewhere between Australia and England where you do have that kind of cold climate where you need to be inside the vehicles but you also like to cook outside, Australian-style.
“That went into our design in Japan.”
Now with a wife and three children aged 12, 9 and 7 in tow, Mr Campion sees the van life with fresh eyes.
“Rules in Japan are really relaxed. You can just park pretty much anywhere and camp. I find it, in some ways, easier than Australia,” he said.
“Going from Tokyo to Lake Motosuko, there’s a nice lake there with an amazing view of Mt Fuji, and I also like to go to the coast near Izu – there’s a great spot called Heda.
“We do a bunch of family trips around there.
“When we go as a family, we normally spent a few nights in one of the free spots they have and pay for a nice tent park for a couple of nights also.”
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