A Look Inside Oregon Trail’r
An interview with Jon and Sawyer Christianson at Oregon Trail’r
What is your background?
My background is in cabinetmaking/fine woodworking, and my brother/business partner Jon’s skillset is rooted in design and metal fabrication. Our strengths are different, yet complimentary, and when combined with our mutual love for the outdoors, everything meshes perfectly for camper development. Our employee Simon has 25 years experience in fabrication across multiple disciplines, and a degree in product design from University of Oregon’s excellent Architecture and Allied Arts school. I’m very proud of how capable and talented our crew is!
Some of the links on this page may be affiliate links.
What year did you open your company?
We have been building trailers since the mid 2000’s for fun, but we officially did the paperwork to become Oregon Trail’R in February 2011, so fast approaching our 10 year anniversary!
What drove you to be a part of the Overland and/or Van Life community?
When we were kids, our family was in constant pursuit of adventure. Whether we were in our 1946 Willys CJ2 towing our “Modernistic” teardrop, or our 1965 International “shorty” bus (converted from hot shot fire crew bus to family camper by our parents), we were constantly in pursuit of exploration and finding peace in nature.
What are the reasons you started producing/selling the products you do?
Honestly it was not our intention to turn this into a business until it became painfully aware that it was the right path. Like I referenced earlier, we’ve been camping in teardrops with our family since we were literally infants, and in 2006-2007, post college, we helped each other build two teardrops for our own young families. At the time we were both working in the home construction field, and the country was on the precipice of a huge financial depression. During that depression, both our former businesses took a huge hit, and we found ourselves with nothing but time on our hands, so we camped… A LOT. This is when we realized the real draw to these campers. Everywhere we went we were hassled with questions of where to buy one, so we eventually decided to quit ignoring the obvious signs. With my cabinet shop, we already had a good start to the tools necessary for production, and some space to work in. We spent the first year or more working tirelessly on our prototype (while our lovely wives worked extra hard to keep our families afloat), and once that was finished and sold, the orders started coming in almost immediately. It became quickly apparent that my 1200 sqft cabinet shop wasn’t going to cut it, so we rented a space double that size in West Eugene in 2013 and went full steam ahead. Since then we’ve grown to roughly 8800 sq ft of shop space (necessary for the way we batch-build our trailers), and have worked very hard to create finely tuned processes for construction/assembly. I know I already told the long story, but to get back on track answering the question, we wanted to spend our lives building and perfecting the products we love to use the most, which is incredibly fulfilling for us and our families.
What do your customers enjoy most about your products?
I’d say it comes down to our highly considered designs and unmatched build quality. We are in the higher end of pricing for our industry, and by far have the longest waiting lists for our products, but my understanding is that many people are just sick and tired of poor quality products. The RV industry is famous for incredibly poor quality craftsmanship and quality control, and the realization that “you get what you pay for” seems to be catching on as more and more people are taking campers off-road that have no business being off-road (even if they have MT tires, a roof rack, and all the right stickers!). We take an entirely different approach to design, material choice, and construction, meaning we use only the best and most durable parts, materials, components, and systems, and we take our sweet time to make sure no shortcuts are taken, no mistakes are made, and every trailer is ready to hit the trail when it leaves our showroom.
Where is the majority of your customer base located?
That’s an interesting one. We went into this fully expecting that the majority of our campers would remain in state, or somewhere in the PNW. This has held somewhat true, given most of our campers are living somewhere along the West (best) Coast, we have Oregon Trail’R family in every corner of the US, even a few different countries. While we don’t have any kind of dealer network (nor do we want any), we’ve found it quite easy to ship these trailers around the country using independent shippers, and have sent them as far as Japan (We have more ready to ship to Tokyo right now, but Covid has understandably caused some interruptions in international shipping at the moment).
Where do you see your company going in the next few years or so?
I know the answer many of our prospective clients would like to hear is that we’ll scale way up, build hundreds of campers a year, export worldwide, etc. But honestly that would very likely do exactly the opposite of what our goal always has been, to have the most possible fun building the best possible campers. We’ve been in the business for only a decade now, but in that decade we’ve seen companies start, expand beyond our size, then fail, time and time again. The problem I see is that many of these companies were trying to create personal wealth, instead of trying to build excellent products. We’ll stay the course, putting our profits back into the company to improve tooling and processes, making sure QC is always on point, ignoring requests from dealers who would have us decrease quality to increase profitability, making sure we are ALWAYS enjoying our work, and continue to give the people what they want, a product they can put their full trust into to keep them and their families safe and comfortable in the pursuit of outdoor adventures.
Any additional information you would like to share?
One thing I’d like to add is that each year there are more and more copycats of our products, and I think it’s appropriate to warn folks that if a trailer looks like ours, but is significantly less expensive, you should be wary of its quality. I understand some people’s budgetary restrictions might keep them from ordering from us, and I totally and completely understand, but please avoid the copycats. Not only do they steal hard-earned intellectual property, but from what I’ve seen, they put all their efforts into the “look” and almost none into material or build quality (which is always a disaster on the back-end, because these companies don’t survive long, and you’ll receive no technical support when you need it after they go bankrupt). If your budget won’t support a legitimate Oregon Trail’R, but you appreciate quality, let us know and we can help point you to less expensive products made by folks in our industry who we think are building a good product. That said, there is no comparable teardrop camper to an Oregon Trail’R, and we’d love to prove it to anyone who is truly interested in maximum durability.
Want to learn more about Oregon Trail’r?
Reach out to Jon and Sawyer Christianson
