Meet the three mates behind Vibe Caravans 

Ask a caravan buyer what they want and you rarely get a floorplan number in reply. You get a plan. Three weeks up the Queensland coast in July. A winter in the Kimberley. A lap of Australia with two kids, a dog and a boot that shut on the third attempt.

Vibe Caravans was started on the idea that the van should be built around that plan. Three young Australians founded it, and between them they had the trade backgrounds to question how things were being done.

“There were things that had simply become accepted as ‘that’s how caravans are built’, and we wanted to question that,” the Vibe founders told caravancampingsales. “The idea behind Vibe was to take what worked, rethink what didn’t, and build caravans around how people actually camp and travel.”

Jed came to the business with about 10 years of house-building behind him. Joel had spent more than 15 years in the caravan industry as a contractor, and his brother Jarrod had worked alongside him long enough to know the trade from the factory floor up.

That mix matters more than it sounds. Residential construction and caravan manufacturing wrestle with a lot of the same problems – structure, layout, storage, finishes and how the whole build holds together – but the two trades approach them with different habits.

“When you work within one industry for a long time, certain methods can become normal simply because they’ve always been done that way,” the founders said. “Coming into caravans with a building background meant Jed wasn’t afraid to ask, ‘Why are we doing it like this?’ or ‘Is there a better way?’”

Joel and Jarrod supplied the caravan-specific knowledge to work out which of those answers were worth acting on. Manufacturing began at Craigieburn, in Melbourne’s north, in September 2021. The business outgrew that site and moved to a larger facility at Campbellfield in April 2025. Vibe remains Australian owned and its vans are built in Victoria.

Most manufacturers offer options. Vibe’s pitch is closer to a conversation, and it starts with the assumption that no two families pack the same way.

Rear bunk layouts run from around 18ft through to 24ft depending on what a family needs, and the bunks themselves can be widened to suit the kids who will be sleeping in them. Configurations get reworked rather than selected from a short list.

The kitchen is where the approach shows up most clearly, because it is where travellers bring their own habits with them.

“Everyone travels differently and brings different appliances with them, so we work with customers on things like cupboard sizes, bench space, storage and where their appliances will live,” the founders said. “If someone always travels with a coffee machine, air fryer or Thermomix, we want to think about where those things are actually going to go rather than handing them a standard kitchen and expecting them to make it work.”

“Instead of telling customers how they need to fit into one of our layouts, we try to make the layout fit the way they camp.”

The clearest example of Vibe’s thinking is also one of its least glamorous features, and it came from watching what owners were doing with the space they had.

“We noticed that a lot of customers were storing their dirty clothes and washing in the shower until they were ready to do a load,” the founders said. “Over time, especially when travelling, those clothes could become damp or start to smell, and everything had to be moved whenever someone wanted to use the shower.”

The fix was an externally mounted washing machine paired with an internal laundry chute. Dirty clothes drop straight through the chute into a basket below, beside the machine, instead of accumulating in the only wet area in the van. Vibe says it was one of the first Australian manufacturers to offer the combination.

It is a small idea that returns floor space and a cupboard to the interior, keeps the washing out of the living areas and makes laundry on the road a five-minute job. It is also a fair illustration of how the brand approaches design. Features are judged on whether they earn the space they take.

TOUGH is Vibe’s biggest-selling range and the clearest expression of what the business does. It is set up for off-road and off-grid touring, and it is the van most often specified with the sort of changes described above, whether that is a bunk configuration for a growing family or a power system sized for long stretches between towns.

Most buyers treat it as a starting point rather than a finished product, which is the point.

A lot of caravan value is won or lost in component choice, because it decides what happens at 3am when something stops working in a place with no phone reception.

Vibe builds on a Proline chassis and rolls on ROH Wheels, with 12-volt power and battery systems from Baintech and Victron, hatches and awnings from Aussie Traveller, and interior trim from RV Upholstery. Coast RV, Urban Republic, Apple Graphics, CPH Group, Razor RV and Adex Vanguard round out the supplier list.

Recognisable names matter to buyers for a practical reason. Parts are easier to source on the road, and a mobile technician in a regional town is more likely to have worked on them before.

Ask the founders what owners ring about half a year after handover and the answer is not what you would expect from a manufacturer.

“Honestly, sometimes they ring us just to say hello and see how we’re going,” they said. “We have owners who call to tell us where they’ve been travelling, what they’ve been up to, how the kids are going, or just to have a chat and check in.”

There are technical questions too, and ideas owners have had somewhere between Broome and Birdsville, which is where a fair bit of Vibe’s product feedback originates. But the tone of those calls says something about how the business has grown.

“We genuinely feel like we’ve built a big family and community around the brand,” the founders said. “We get to know our customers, their kids and their travel plans, and we love following along with their adventures long after handover.”

It shows outside the factory as well. There is an independent, owner-run Facebook group, full-time travellers documenting their builds as they go, and regular discussion in broader communities such as Caravanning with Kids. That sort of advocacy is hard to manufacture and easy to lose, and it tends to follow the brands that keep answering the phone long after the money has changed hands.

For families and couples weighing up a first serious off-road van, or an upgrade that finally suits how they actually travel, the offer is a straightforward one. Australian owned, Australian built, shaped around you, and backed by people who want to know where you ended up.

Discover Vibe Caravans and enquire about TOUGH layouts, customisation and availability.