Encore RV Moving to New Elkhart, Ind., Location After Fire – RVBusiness – Breaking RV Industry News

ELKHART, Ind. – Encore RV took possession of a new building on Dec. 18 following a 2:30 a.m. Nov. 22 fire that severely damaged its former 15,000-square-foot production facility at 4340 Pine Creek Road, Elkhart.

The new, 60,000-square-foot location is off County Road 6 on Ada Drive, between the Lippert and Cleer Vision buildings.

“We’re just moving things over right now,” said Rick Schnippel, Encore founder. “We’re hoping to have everything moved in the first week of January. I really wanted our team to take some time off for Christmas. I’ve got a few guys that were almost insistent on working over the break, but I think we’re just going to do a little bit of a shutdown and let people relax a little bit because we’re going to go hard charging in the first of the year.”

Schnippel hopes to have production up and running by the second or third week of January, if all things go as planned, but some of the schedule relies on vendors.

“There wasn’t heavy enough electric in the back of the building,” he said, adding that a new air compressor will have to be installed because the current unit is not large enough for the level of production planned in the future.

The fire, the cause of which remains under investigation, speeded up an already planned expansion.

“We were doing two-a-day in the other building and could probably have gone to four- or five-a-day, so we still had room to grow,” he said. “But we just couldn’t expand into too many different products because we could only run one line.”

In the new facility, even at two or three units a day, the company will remain profitable, he said, but increased production now possible and likely.

“We’ll probably go up in production, but you have to do it cautiously,” Schnippel said. “You don’t want to eat up a backlog that we wouldn’t be able to refresh and have layoffs. We want to be responsible to the company and to the people who work here. It’s a lot of work ahead of us and our team’s excited to get a new beginning after having their home burned down.”

Schnippel noted that following the fire and move to the new facility, no employees were laid off.

“Everybody is still getting paid,” he said.

Source: https://rvbusiness.com/encore-rv-moving-to-new-elkhart-ind-location-after-fire/