my story

how and why i started building teardrop trailers

In 2016, I was living in the Woodlawn neighborhood on the south side of Chicago and working at a small independent school in Hyde Park. I had decided to move back to my hometown, Seattle, and to take a year off so I could take my time traveling across the country and do some writing. I figured the best way to do this would be with a teardrop trailer in tow, so I decided to build one.

I have always loved to design and build things--my alter-ego is an eco-design architect influenced heavily by Buckminster Fuller and Christopher Alexander--and I have always loved camping, so it made sense to build my own camper trailer.

The alley behind my building wasn't the ideal place to construct a camper, but I found ways to cover the job under a tarp when it rained in the spring and I managed to get through the 90+ degree afternoons in June, to complete the build just a few days into July (a lot of sweat went into the build--both figuratively and literally). Then I hit the road . . .

. . . and the storage compartment doors popped open in the first five blocks, and the bike rack collapsed on the highway before I got out of Illinois (not destroying my bike, fortunately). So I adjusted the latches to the doors and I had someone weld a hitch receiver much more effectively to the back of the trailer. I also made many minor adjustments on the trailer and in my design notes while I was on the road. It was a lovely journey otherwise, and I took that trailer to many beautiful places on the way.

Fast-forward to 2018. I was walking and talking with my brother on another south side, this time in the Rainier Valley of Seattle, when I realized I wanted to build another camper. My brother is a wood-worker and cabinet maker by trade, and I knew he would appreciate my desire to improve on my design, so I ran the idea by him and he offered his expertise and tools to support me in the process. That's how my first truly "teardrop"-style trailer was born. The inspiration for this particular look, with an aluminum-clad top and varnished plywood sides came from a home-made teardrop trailer my partner, h, and I had seen and been awed by in the Badlands on another cross-country trip the summer before (2017).

So, I set out to make the perfect teardrop trailer. I gathered ideas from all the teardrop designs I could find online, but I was also guided by our personal needs and desires as campers. I built this camper in a better, but not ideal workshop, this one being a small garage just outside my apartment in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle--while working at a cooperative elementary school nearby. I had to push the trailer out of the garage and roll my workbench out from under the built-in shelving at the back of the space in order to work, which meant that rainy days were still a challenge.

But I got that trailer ready by the following summer, and h and I took it to Vancouver Island for a three-week journey.

We loved it! (You can get a peek into that adventure in the Travel Tales section of this site.)

And now I was really hooked. I had an even stronger desire to apply what I had learned--while building and camping in our wonderful red-top teardrop--to making an even better camper. You should know this about me: I have generally been a "new adventures" kind of guy, doing something decently well the first time and then moving on to other projects. I used to say I suffered from beginner's luck--the downside being I rarely ever refined and improved my ability to do any one thing in particular (the exception being in the realm of education, where i spent 20+ years making adjustments to everything).

My challenge: how to keep building teardrop trailers? I couldn't just keep building them for myself (ourselves). My solution: build teardrop trailers for other people. Now, I have made self-bows out of osage orange and hickory for other folks, and I have even built a number of geodesic domes for schools and other non-profits, but those things require a very small or modest investment, so I could afford to "give it away." But the materials cost for a quality teardrop trailer runs in the range of 6-8K, and I knew I couldn't make one for each of my friends and family at that cost. So I started considering whether I should make them for sale. That led me to wonder what I usually do before starting into something new: would doing this make the world a better place? Would it add value to those who invested in one? I even had a term for this: "benefit motive;" that's what I feel should really run business decisions in a sustainable economy, not the profit motive.

I decided that well-designed, conscientiously built ( eco-friendly) teardrop trailers do indeed offer a benefit to those who use them, so I shifted my focus to designing camper trailers with customers in mind--not just abstract customers, but those who knew they wanted one and who had an idea about how they would use one. In other words, I would design and build teardrop trailers to suit the specific needs and desires of people who were ready to buy. This, I realized, would require a process that involved my customers in the design process, which I describe on the ordering page of this site.

This may not be as easy as building trailers according to a universal design template and then offering them to consumers, but it surely is more likely to benefit everyone--campers get what they really want and need and I get to build something that makes campers happy.

Win, win.

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