Blog Post

One day I was driving along the road, looking at campers and caravans, and thought to myself: fancy spending all that money just to carry around air. Further down the drive, inspiration struck — what if we could evacuate the air but still include all the features? And so, the idea for MyGlamper was born.

I come from a farming background — always building, fixing and re-engineering things. I later became qualified in automotive and mechanical engineering with RAEME and IAME and opened my first workshop at just 22 years old.

From there, I gained a position with Frank Gardner OAM and BMW, which led to a career that eventually took me all the way to Formula One with Mercedes-Benz in 2003. During my time in the industry, I developed a strong understanding of aerodynamics, which later proved invaluable in understanding how to make MyGlamper work effectively.

After returning to Australia, I started Total Driver at Darlington Park — a performance and race driver instruction program featuring V8 Supercars that I built and engineered myself. It was here that I learned composites, as we manufactured all of our own race components and spoilers in-house.

We also ran a number of specialty programs, including the launch of the Land Rover Discovery 3 and Range Rover Sport. This was my first real introduction to 4WDs.

The program revolved around three key elements:

• Back-to-back competitor comparisons,
• 4x4 experience through the Darlington ranges,
• Hot laps in a Range Rover Sport with V8 Supercar drivers — and yours truly.

This introduction to 4WDs opened an entirely new direction for us, leading to corporate engagement programs, customer driving experiences, vehicle launches and specialised one-off events.

This path eventually led me to set the Guinness World Record for the fastest crossing of the Simpson Desert in a production vehicle — the Mahindra Scorpio. We were given a target time of 48 hours and a clearly defined route plan with waypoints and checkpoints by Guinness. We completed the crossing unassisted in just 13 hours and 21 minutes. Not bad for a first trip to the desert.

It is the culmination of these skills and experiences that has allowed MyGlamper to not only be conceptualised, but also designed, engineered and thoroughly product tested.

This testing has included over 100,000km of real-world development, including many impromptu camping trips with my partner — a level of testing commitment she definitely did not realise she had signed up for at the time. Nor did she always see the funny side of random tent explosions and prototype failures in the middle of nowhere.

That said, she now has a kitchen, hot-water shower and toilet, which keeps her reasonably happy.To make all of this possible, I had to develop an entirely new approach to flat-packing what my partner refers to as the “necessities.”

Initially, I thought the project would take around six months — probably due to my usual habit of underestimating the scale and complexity of the challenge ahead, or perhaps because I genuinely enjoy solving difficult problems.

Instead, it has taken more than four years, multiple development prototypes and test mules, incredible persistence and countless design iterations to achieve a finished product that many people said was impossible. Then again, they said the same thing about the Guinness World Record attempt — and we still left three hours on the table.

There is far more to the success of MyGlamper than simply making a cassette stand vertically on a towbar.Ironically, we now hold global patents relating to this process, so in an understated sort of way, it is actually an extremely technical achievement.

And like anything that has never been done before, the challenges were endless.There were many product limitations that people had simply accepted over the years — but I decided not to.
One example was air tents. One of the key challenges was discovering why manufacturers never show the pack-up process. The answer is simple: they trap air. They are marketed as easy to set up, but conveniently avoid showing the reality of packing them away because, quite frankly, it can be a pain in the butt!

Due to the size of My Glamper we exacerbated all these problems, even to the point of blowing tents up.
I won’t tell you exactly how I identified the problem, but the solution required us to completely redesign how air tents function and the materials used to build them.

The end result has been incredibly effective. MyGlamper now requires only a SINGLE inflation and deflation point. We do not need separate air valves on every support post like many large-name campers currently on the market, and it certainly does not take hours to pack away.

It is simple, lightweight, efficient and reliable.
Stay tuned for more of MyGlamper’s trials, tribulations and breakthroughs... We are only just getting started.