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THE PATHS
WE FORGE
Steve and Brandon Zinninger
Home is Where You Park It
Behind the warehouse, immaculately polished Airstream trailers glint in the sun. Next to them, beat up vintage campers will require many hours of work before they shine like that. Inside, an assortment of camp trailers and Sprinter vans run the gamut from blank slates to fully customized works of art.
For father/son team, Steve and Brandon Zinninger of Camper Reparadise, there’s a great amount of pride in seeing a previously dilapidated trailer or empty van head out the door as somebody’s dream camper or overland rig. Part of that feeling of satisfaction stems from the fact that some of the Zinninger’s best family memories come from time spent camping in a pop-up trailer—sometimes for months at a time when Brandon was as young as a year old.
Always entrepreneurial, the elder Zinninger had Brandon working for him from a young age, first as a short-order cook in the restaurant business. “Working in a kitchen, that's probably as high stress as you can get, especially at 15 years old,” Steve says. When Brandon opened Reparadise a decade ago, the roles reversed.
“Over the years, the duo has created a seamless working relationship, for which Brandon credits a clear division of labor and definition of roles. Brandon runs the business while his dad, always full of humor, keeps the crew of ten employees “cheery and smiling.”
When they first started fixing up old trailers, it was a hands-on learning experience for both of them. And it was personal. After years of fixing up old houses and cars, their first trailer project was a 1970s Airstream that Steve picked up in 2011 as a personal project.
After the learning curve of that original build, Brandon started working on other people’s trailers in his spare time, not charging much while he learned what he was doing. “It was YouTube University and calling in buddies that were engineers and welders,” he says. They learned quickly and, after founding Camper Reparadise, developed a reputation in the world of vintage Airstreams.
“The Airstream, which got us started, was an iconic kind of thing that everybody seemed to recognize,” Steve says. “They have an attractive shape and interior space that you can do a lot with. Since they’re aluminum they’re not rotted out like a lot of the wooden-built body skeleton trailers were. Everybody had their own idea of how they wanted them to look in the end, so we weren't working with a cookie cutter thing. We were doing something different with each one, so that was attractive to us.”
The Salt Lake City-based business still works on Airstreams, but it’s grown and adapted over the last decade, from custom-building retro-inspired event and vendor trailers to its current bread and butter, 100% custom, high-end Mercedes Sprinter van builds. With each person they’ve hired, they’ve sought out seasoned expertise—from welding, to electrical, to interior design, always keeping the focus on doing the highest quality work possible in order to keep these rigs on the road or trail for many years to come. Sometimes clients come in with detailed drawings of what they want, other times it’s scribbles on a cocktail napkin, and sometimes just a vague idea. One of the guys’ favorite parts of the process is turning those initial conversations with the client into a detailed plan, and getting the people and parts in place to make it happen.
Steve talks about a recent and enjoyable challenge of building a mobile veterinary clinic into a Sprinter van.
“Those Sprinters,” he says. “They can run 1,000 to 1,200 hours of labor to do fully custom design work, figuring out how do you put it in an X-ray machine and a scale and locking cabinets and fridges and freezers, and a surgical table and anesthesia and dental equipment, how do you put that in?”
Steve talks about a recent and enjoyable challenge of building a mobile veterinary clinic into a Sprinter van.
“Those Sprinters,” he says. “They can run 1,000 to 1,200 hours of labor to do fully custom design work, figuring out how do you put it in an X-ray machine and a scale and locking cabinets and fridges and freezers, and a surgical table and anesthesia and dental equipment, how do you put that in?”
But those challenges are what get life-long entrepreneurs like the Zinningers out of bed in the morning.
“I was born into (entrepreneurship),” Brandon says. I saw my parents trying to start a company when I was little, and then my parents operating their own commercial painting company when I was little. There wasn't anything unique about forging your own path; it was already instilled. I've never clocked in for anybody in my life, even if I didn't have this company, I'm sure I'd be doing something else where I would've been independent. As the business grows, it becomes a little bit more of a scary point where you start to understand that people are relying on you for their livelihoods. That gets you to the point that you have to always be focused.”
This focus is easier to come by now that Brandon has built a team of people that he can trust completely, his dad at the top of the list.
“With family, it's pretty easy to know exactly who you're working with,” he says. “You've got somebody that's re- liable and trustworthy and that's going to be there through thick and thin. It's kind of a no-brainer if you have somebody that you have a good relationship with in your life, to keep them around.”
For the guys, there’s a great deal of pride in watching a finished build roll away down the road with a happy client. But having grown up with a love for the outdoors, the biggest joy comes months or years later when they see photos of their works of rolling art parked in some beautiful wild landscape, knowing that inside, another family is having the time of their lives.
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