From a handful of employees and building their innovative folding-wall A-liner campers, Avan moved into pop-top caravans and outgrew two more Hallam factories before purchasing and developing their present site in Pakenham, in 2003.
Avan’s workforce is 360 employees. “We sell 45 to 60 campervans a month,” Jeff, 72 and from a family of 11, told the Yarrawonga Chronicle. “There’s an enormous market.
“We came to Australia in 1965 because Dad wanted a future for us. I’ve travelled all over the world. This is paradise, this country is paradise. It’s sad there are some people who just won’t work and expect to get it easy.”
Jeff was previously a production manager with a glass manufacturing business in Dandenong. “I just wanted a change in direction,” he said.
With a keen interest in caravans and because of his perceived “relatively simplicity and usefulness of campervans”, his big work change has proved a huge success.
“It’s unbelievable,” Jeff said of the company’s success, after tough beginnings. “It gives us enormous satisfaction.”
Designed by Columbia Best, based in Pittsburg, Pennyslavia, USA, the A’van products’s popularity, and that of the A’van Club of Australia is obvious with around 100 vans and over 2000 people throughout Australia.
With their parents officially retired, Jeff and Scott now run the business, although their father, who is an avid motorhome traveller, still maintains a keen overseeing interest in the company’s operations.
“If it hadn’t have been for Jeff, we wouldn’t be here today,” vice president and immediate past secretary Rick Houghton said in Yarrawonga at the 20th annual national gathering.
