Millard changes hands

Long-time Australian caravan brand Millard has been sold to hotel furniture and caravan parts supplier QFlow, with the new owner intent on stepping up production and manufacturing processes at Millard’s Ingleburn, NSW factory.

In a deal struck late last week, previous owner Gary Willer will stay on to manage Millard Caravans until he finds a management team to run it for QFlow.

“I’ll stay probably three months," Willer told Caravancampingsales. "We’ve got people in mind to run it, but in December you can’t do much."

Willer, who has steered the ship at Millard since resurrecting the brand 17 years ago, decided to exit the business so that he could retire.

It's QFlow’s first foray into caravan manufacturing, with the company until now supplying doors, windows and solar panels to the caravan industry.

QFlow will not directly manage its new investment, but will invest to improve processes and production, according to Willer.

“It’s an acquisition [for QFlow], to own at arm’s length, but they want to step things up. We will increase production and go to CNC machining furniture.

"The order banks are quite big, so we need to fill it by making more vans.”

Millard is one of Australia’s oldest caravan brands, started by Jim Darlington in 1947 and run by his sons John and Peter from the 1950s.

Millard then rode the wave of Australia’s early fascination with caravans that took off in the 1960s and by 1968 had 250 people working at a large factory in Liverpool, NSW.

At the peak of the caravan boom in the mid-1970s, Millard was one of Australia’s top caravan brands, along with Chesney, Coronet, Franklin and Viscount. At one point it was building up to 74 caravans a day, as well as averaging more than 4000 vans a year.

After a couple changes of ownership, in 2001 Gary Willer and the late Stan Edwards bought the Viscount jigs and fittings from the receivers of Viscount Caravans and, after being given permission by the Darlington family, resurrected the Millard brand soon after.

Millard considers itself an upmarket custom caravan brand and currently builds the Toura, Grand, and Breakaway caravans and Millard slide-ons at its 2000 square-metre factory site in Sydney’s south-west.