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NEWS
Kimberley sheds staff
Loss of long-time NSW dealer forces Kimberley to downsizeHigh-profile off-road specialists Kimberley Kampers has been forced to cut almost a quarter of its staff after the sudden loss of a key NSW dealer led to a significant drop in sales, according to Managing Director, Bruce Loxton.
Express Tools and Camping in Unanderra, Wollongong was one of Kimberley’s six Australian retail outlets until its decision early this year to cease Kimberley camper trailer sales.
“We have been selling caravans and camper since the early 1990s and in that time I must have attended 280 shows,” explained owner Peter Hands. “I decided it was time to ‘go camping’ and visit all those places that I have been sending my customers to over the years.
Hands said his decision did not affect other aspects of Express Tools’ business and it will keep trading.
Loxton said Express’s decision to stop selling Kimberley products had an immediate effect on his business. “As we don’t sell directly and only build to dealer order, it affected our cash flow, so we had little choice but to downsize temporarily.
“However, we are in the process of appointing a new Sydney dealer and we expect things to return to normal quickly.”
Responding to the situation, Kimberley Kampers has retrenched 16 of the 72 staff at its Ballina headquarters, but the remaining 56 workers including all the company's apprentices and trainees have been retained.
Loxton said that with the current demand for Kimberley products, plus good export sales to Canada and the United States, he was confident the company would be re-hiring again soon.
He said Kimberley had delivered four T3 tandem axle luxury Kruiser models and a single-axle Kruiser S Class to the US and Canada in the past 12 months, while a senior Apple executive has recently become the owner of a hard-floor Kimberley Kamper.
Kimberley was prominent at the recent Sydney Caravan and Camping Supershow, displaying its latest 2017 iteration of its hard-floor Kamper with several technical innovations and has since introduced a Special Edition of its unique compact hard-shell Kimberley Karavan packaged with many popular options for a very competitive $83,900.
Meanwhile, the Queensland company is currently adapting the body of a Kimberley Kruiser S-Class to fit on the chassis of a Mercedes-Benz Unimog for extreme self-contained remote area exploration.
“We are not cutting back on our model range,” Loxton emphasised, “just the staff required to build them in the short term.”
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Written byMichael Browning
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