Rental-to-Ownership Growth, Organic Search & Quality Van Builds with Brett

I’m Brett Ellenson, owner of Boho Camper Vans. We started as a rental company, and we evolved from customers wanting to rent into us selling them the vans we were already building for our rental fleet. That’s kind of how customers found us to be a trusted source of quality, through our rentals and into our builds. From there, the rest is history.

It’s a pretty mixed bag, but we see a very large audience of women, particularly women 40, 50 and up. That might be 40% of our marketing segment as far as who buys and rents. For the clients who rent from us, it’s anywhere from 25 years old all the way up, people into their 70s and 80s. We’ve even had clients into their 90s. It’s really all across the board and all around the world. We have vans in Hawaii, a van over in the UK, and vans in all 50 states except two.

The biggest thing is that we want to give people less of an RV feel. We want to present something inviting and warm, something they can tangibly feel ownership of and take pride in. On top of that, our main groundwork is a focus on quality. From the ground up, we predicate ourselves on a very high level of quality in our manufacturing.

When people are out camping with friends who have other RVs and they hear the stories, “this didn’t work today,” “that didn’t work,” we feel confident and happy to hear our clients get to tell their friends, “Nope, everything’s running great. We don’t have those issues with our Boho van.”

There are a few different ways. A lot of it is that we rank really well on Google, and we do ad spend, including AI ad spend, on that. We also hit events, which are great traction for getting people to see our product out in the wild, where they can touch it and feel it. But the best way is our rental fleet, which we’ve had since the beginning. Clients get to take vans out if they’re on the fence about whether they even want to do van life, and we recommend that all the time, go try it out and make sure van life is for you if you’ve never done it.

We’ve had renters do engagements, wedding parties take vans out, and everything in between, people traveling across the country to visit family, especially during the COVID years. A van was about the safest way you could travel. You could stop in and safely get yourself around the country. Instead of taking vans out for three to five days, people were taking them for three to five weeks to travel and visit family.

To finish the point on our marketing strategy: with those rentals, clients actually get three nights of their rental trip credited back toward a build cost if they decide to go for a build with us. It becomes less of a sales pitch. Rather than saying, “here are all the great components you’re going to love,” we say, “go try it out, see it for yourself, and then we’ll put our money where our mouth is.” We’re not trying to capture rental money, we’re essentially giving it right back to you and putting it in the best place it can go, which is getting you into your own build.

I use it quite a bit. We use it for social media posting to get a quick, broad view of trends, taglines, and catchphrases, because we want to be as catchy as possible. We also use it to help with emails. Where we’ve leaned into AI more is on the business side of our manufacturing.

We’re in the very infant stages of implementing new AI strategies, actually building out AI software right now that we started over the last two or three weeks. We’ve given ourselves a deadline of November to have it done. It’s going to help with our manufacturing process, workflow, job costing, and material allocation. We see it being a top-down revamp for the company.

Not just yet. Admittedly, I just had a call with Google this morning. We do utilize their AI tools on their platform, so yes, we use those in marketing, and we get to see the performance of them. We do a lot of manual work with how we use our Google Ads, because that’s where we spend really most of our dollars, which isn’t even that much. It’s less than $500 a month on Google Ads, and we rank really well.

Honestly, I want to pick your brain on this, Stephen, because if there are other tools we should be using, that’s kind of why I wanted to jump on this podcast, to see what you’re finding most advantageous in the market.

We’ve actually grown a lot here. We’ve kind of been thought of as a Ram ProMaster builder, because that’s what most of our builds were. The Ram ProMaster is the easiest entry on price, and it’s only available in front-wheel drive. If customers want four-wheel drive, we look at a Ford Transit or a Mercedes Sprinter. We build on all three chassis, and we’re one of the few manufacturing companies in the country that builds on all of them. A mid-level would be a Ford Transit, and the highest is a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter.

This year we’re going to do more Mercedes-Benz Sprinters than we’ve done in basically our entire company’s history, because we’ve been trying to break that mold for a while. You get a 5,000-pound flywheel spinning in one direction, with people thinking you’re just this one thing, and that’s been the Ram ProMaster for us. But we’ve done more Ford Transits and Mercedes Sprinters in the last six months than in the previous year and a half, and through the end of the year that’s only going to keep trending up as we diversify across all three brands.

As far as financial stakes go, the rental company is much closer to 25 to 30% of our business, probably nearer that 25% mark. About 75% of our revenue comes from van sales direct to customer.

I’ve actually never been asked that, it’s interesting. A lot of our customers hit us up with fun videos and photos of their experience. It probably sounds arrogant to say we hit on everything, and that’s not the case, we have miles of gaps in between. But to fill in on some of what we do: we’re always trying to give customers a level of freedom in their life. That’s set as some of our catch lines, we want customers to feel a true sense of freedom and adventure. That includes people who are ADA, we’ve built several vans for people with wheelchairs and other needs that we tailor-build for.

On the flip side, people also phase out of owning RVs and van life, so we provide a sales service on the back end. If a client is looking to sell their vehicle, we help with that sale at the end of their journey. We love filling in the gaps along the way, providing service when people are on the road, whether it’s a part that failed or a recommended place to camp. We try to encompass everything.

Pick a niche and really refine your skills on the one you choose. Things take time to gain momentum. You can do something repeatedly and it might not seem like it’s working, and people immediately want to jump to, “I’ve got to try something new, something different.” Unless something is totally failing, that might not be the time to pivot. If you have a true, structured practice and a dedicated vision of where you want to take something, you’ve got to give it time to come to fruition.

The analogy I use is the news story written about the egg that’s hatched and the chicken that pops out. There’s such a long process in between, the incubating, the developing, that you never see, until all of a sudden it pops off and you think, “wow, that happened overnight.” But that’s not the case at all.

I really appreciate your time, Stephen, and the chance to speak with you. For us, we just want people to know we’re here and available to help in any way we can. That means giving people a stress-free way to travel and take the stressful nature out of life. That’s what our company is here for, bridging the gap in work-life balance and making it a more seamless thing, get out, adventure, have some freedom, and take the stress load off your life.

Thank you very much.