Driving Force: A Scion’s New Project

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Ashley Bontrager Lehman was eight years old when she started showing up to Jayco Inc.’s annual family board meetings. The company that her grandparents founded in 1968 made its name, at first, building pop-up campers, then branched out into travel trailers and motorhomes. By the mid-’90s, when Bontrager was repping the third generation at the boardroom kids’ table, the northern Indiana–based Jayco was closing in on 300,000 units sold, well on its way to becoming the world’s largest privately held RV manufacturer.

“They’d bring in all us cousins, and as we got older, the topics they discussed got more business-direct,” Bontrager remembers. “But they’d invite a guest speaker or a representative from the accounting firm to come and talk business to all these 8- to 12-year-olds. So I very much felt like a part of the company, even when I was little.”

Photo Credit: Ember RV

Nonetheless, when Bontrager left Indiana after college—bound for Washington, D.C. and a Capitol Hill staffer gig—she had zero ambition to someday return to the Hoosier State and carry on the family business. Even less to try and disrupt the whole damn RV industry. But here we are.

Today, Bontrager is president and CEO of Ember Recreational Vehicles, based in Bristol, Indiana, 10 miles down the road from the Middlebury headquarters of Jayco, which her family sold to RV titan Thor Industries in 2016. Thor owns Airstream, Dutchmen, Keystone and other brands you’ve seen on the road. And Ember aims to set itself apart from that pack: “building a better RV by building a better RV company,” to quote the company’s tagline.

Bontrager’s three founding partners are all Jayco vets with backgrounds in product development and operations. She herself spent five years as Jayco’s marketing director after burning out on the Hill, resettling in Indiana, and marrying a local boy. Ember, which the four launched in 2021, now comprises about 100 employees, with a bedrock principle, Bontrager says, of making everyone feel as connected to the company as she felt as a kid in those meetings. “We want to hear from the people out there building the product and in our ownership-experience department, who are hearing from customers,” she says. “We want them to know that not only is the trade they’re doing important, but also their minds and ideas.”

Photo Credit: Ember RV

That’s the “building a better company” part. As for the better RV? Design, build quality and attention to detail are where Ember hopes to plant its flag. All of the company’s models—including the rugged Overland Series, the versatile Touring Edition and the new-last-year, budget-entry E Series—go in big for composite construction. A house-designed modular bed system allows on-the-fly floorplan customization. Generous water tanks and both standard and optional solar are among the nods to what Bontrager says are the swelling ranks of habitual boondockers.

“We’re giving consumers things they might otherwise add aftermarket, but we’re giving it straight from the factory,” the CEO says. “Even our E-Series, our most affordable, you walk in and look for the first time, and it doesn’t feel cheap, if you will.”

What she remembers most about growing up in an RV dynasty isn’t the board meetings or tagging along with her dad on business trips. It’s the camping. Sitting around a fire with her cousins—the kids got their own fire pit, the adults another—playing storytelling games and singing goofy songs. “They were some of my greatest memories every year, actually,” Bontrager says. “It was this great way to get outside of normal life and just relax. It still is.”

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Source: https://www.rv.com/rv/driving-force-scions-new-project/