Ten years of TentBox

We ordered our first roof tent online in 2014, knowing almost nothing about the company we bought it from, on the basis that a campervan cost considerably more than two lads in their 20s could justify and that pitching a ground tent every other night across a whole summer in France sounded more like a job than a holiday. So we bolted it to the roof of an ordinary car and drove south, with no real plan beyond seeing where the road went.

The tent did what we hoped it would. What we hadn't anticipated was how much of the summer we'd spend talking about it, because almost nobody we met had seen a roof tent on anything other than a serious 4x4, and so at campsites, at petrol stations and once from a car window at a set of traffic lights, people kept asking us what it was and where we'd got it. By the time we came home, it had stopped feeling like a niche idea and started feeling like a fairly obvious one that nobody had bothered to make easy to buy.

It took another two years before any of that turned into a business. TentBox started properly in 2016, out of my garage in Southampton, which is more or less where you'd expect two brothers with a good idea but no factory to begin.

What ten years actually changed

There's a version of this post that lists the milestones, and for the record they exist: a first warehouse and then a bigger one, the original Lite and Cargo, the Go, the Lite XL, a new HQ, the showrooms, Club TentBox, and around a hundred people now doing work that once happened between a garage door and a driveway, fifteen of them designing and developing the products themselves.

None of that is the part that changed how we think, though. The more useful thing we learned, and it took a few years and a lot of conversations with TentBoxers to see it clearly, is that the format changes how often people go away rather than simply making a single trip more comfortable. 

When your bed is already made and setting up takes minutes rather than an hour, camping stops being a logistical exercise that needs planning weeks ahead and becomes something you can decide on a Thursday afternoon and be doing by Friday evening. 

The gap between one big trip a year and a decent weekend away every few weeks is almost entirely a question of how much effort stands between the idea and the drive, and once we understood that, it became the thing we design against.

We're proud to be connected to campsites

This is worth saying plainly, because a lot of the outdoor industry would imply otherwise. A lot of you will use your TentBox at a campsite a couple of hours from home, with a shower block and a shop and other people parked nearby, and as far as we're concerned, that's the point rather than a watered-down version of it.

There's a whole strand of this category built on remoteness, self-sufficiency and the idea that time outdoors has to be earned through some degree of discomfort, and we've never found it very convincing. British campsites are genuinely one of the better things about camping here, precisely because they're easy to reach, sociable, forgiving of a family arriving late and slightly frazzled, and full of the kind of low-effort weekend that people actually repeat. A Saturday in the Peak District with friends, kids running about, and somebody's barbecue going three pitches over is a good weekend by any sensible measure.

That doesn't mean the products are built soft. Some of them have been out on Dakar Rally support vehicles across the Sahara and up to the Arctic, and those trips matter because they feed directly into how we engineer for the wind, rain and cold that you're far more likely to camp in over here. But it isn't the brief we work to. The brief is a family fitting one to the car they already own, and getting two nights away without a great deal of fuss.

Most of what's new came from you

The new Lite and Lite XL we launched earlier this year are the clearest illustration of how that works in practice. 

The redesigned mattress has a waterproof section by the door because enough people told us that rain and spilt tea find their way in at exactly that spot; the pole bag rolls up because owners were tired of them flapping around at night; the ladder changed to make pitching and packing down quicker; and the travel cover straps double as a way of rolling the cover up once you've arrived, which was somebody's improvised workaround long before it was a feature we shipped.

Very little of that originated with us in any meaningful sense. It came out of the TentBox Community group on Facebook, from conversations at TentBox Takeovers, and from emails that tend to open with some version of "this is probably a small thing, but". 

That community is also the number we're most proud of after ten years, with more than 100,000 TentBoxers now on the road and close to 140,000 people in the group, a fair few of whom are still working out whether a roof tent suits them at all. The meet-ups are organised by owners rather than by us, and if you fancy the next one, the events tab in the group is the place to look.

I’ve been thinking about TrunkBox for 10 years

TrunkBox is the thing we wanted on that first trip across France and didn't have, and it's taken ten years and a considerable amount of your feedback to arrive at what it is now: a stacking, modular system that keeps your kit organised the way you want it, with a Soft Cool Bag and Water Tank that fit the same setup.

One point we'd rather make here than leave you to discover for yourselves is that the lid is weather-resistant rather than waterproof. It will handle a wet campsite and a motorway in the rain without complaint, but it isn't the place for anything you'd be unhappy to find damp after a week sitting uncovered in the rain. The purpose of it is straightforward enough: less time spent loading and unloading the car, and as a direct consequence, more trips that actually happen.

What comes next

There's more in development for 2027 than we're able to talk about yet, and we'd rather tell you about it when it's real than announce something now and leave you waiting on it.

Whether you've had a TentBox since the warehouse days or you fitted your first one last month, thank you for coming along with it. Ten years on from a field in France, the ambition is the same as it was then, which is to help more people enjoy the outdoors, more often.

See you out there.

Ollie Shurville - Founder