In 2019, Peter Williams decided he wanted to buy a truck bed camper for his camping trips with his son. When he learned that the few companies that made the campers were on months-long backorder, he decided he wouldn't let that stop him.
Williams founded Super Pacific, a Portland-based maker of truck bed canopy campers, in 2020. Four years later, with about 20 employees and a 26,000-square-foot factory and assembly space in North Portland, Williams said he is focused on leading innovation in the market.
"Essentially, it's a pop-up camper, but it mounts on your truck bed rails in such a way that it leaves your truck bed open, so it's really useful," Williams said about Super Pacific's product. “We were responding to a gap in the market or a lack of supply for an emerging product in the camper space."
Williams said he was inspired by the many years he spent working as a carpenter and sleeping in truck beds. And as a former employee at Nike’s innovation lab, Williams said he thought he could enhance truck-bed campers with some design-focused elements.
These include using the strongest and lightest materials possible and creating attachments such as panels and awnings made specifically for the canopy camper to keep gear organized and in place while driving.
“I always got the cheapest shell I could find for my trucks, which meant I was hauling heavy compressors and heavy tools out of the trucks in this weird, hunched over squat position,” Williams said, which is why there are also hatches on the outside of the camper’s shell for easy access to the bed.
The campers are made as they are ordered and take about six to eights weeks from order to pickup for customers. Williams said Super Pacific works with local material suppliers and do all of the assembly in-house. It can currently pump out about 40 campers a month.
While Covid brought supply chain problems and a softening in the market, Williams said business has become more regular in the last few months as he anticipates a busy 2024. He also wants to focus on diversifying the company's offerings given the price point, about $14,000, and premium quality of their main products.
“We just released a seatback organizer that'll go on any seatback, so that opens up a lower price point to a much broader audience,” Williams said.
Super Pacific also plans to expand into the van camping space, something that not many other makers are doing. While there are a lot of camper vans, Williams said, he wants to focus on building canopy attachments that attach to the top of vans.
Coming from Nike, known for its state-of-the-art innovation, Williams said his work there continues to inform how he and his team build and improve upon their campers.
“I'm pretty good with products, that's where my brain goes, but marketing is this whole new thing,” Williams said. “That actually was interesting at Nike to see how they're an incredible products and innovation company, and they're also an incredible marketing company. Those two parts, how those two things support each other, that's definitely relevant to what we're doing.”
