We recently sat down with Leigh Tiffin, president of Tiffin Motorhomes, to discuss the Vanleigh’s beautiful full body paint as well as the men and women who are behind the exclusive Belmont paint facility.
Here at Tiffin Motorhomes, we’re known for excellent customer service and great quality products that are distinctive and have their own unique look and feel, and they really represent who and what we are as a company. A huge part of that is what we do at our Belmont paint facility.
20 years ago, my grandfather saw a changing trend in the motorhome market, and that was that people really wanted full body paint motorhomes, and there was nowhere around here to get that done. Just like everything else we do, if you can’t get it done by someone else, we do it ourselves, and that’s just a response to what customers and the market wanted from us, and, you know, Belmont and Vanleigh is this very similar story. You know, customers wanted a high quality luxury exterior that no one else could offer, so we did what we had to do to make it happen.
From the time my dad and I started Vanleigh, we knew that we were eventually going to dominate the high-end market for fifth wheels. So our original product offering was the Vilano, and after a couple years of building Vilano, we realized that there was a customer craving for more out there, something that was even closer to what we’ve always done with their motorized products, and the Beacon was born.
So when we first started the Beacon, it was a lot like the Vilano, but then we said, “Hey, we’ve got to have a little something extra for this product,” and that’s when we realized paint was going to be the key feature that would distinguish Beacon from everything else we do.
When we introduced Beacon, we knew that that was rarefied air. In other words, there aren’t a ton of products sold every year in that category. And shortly thereafter, probably within the first 12 to 18 months, we realized that Beacon was something special, and we said, “Hey, we’ve got to increase capacity because this is going to become our flagship product at Vanleigh.”
And so we made some investments in the Belmont paint facility to expand capacity further there, and we were able to begin painting our Beacons in Belmont about three years ago, and ever since, it’s just been a great partnership with the team at Belmont and Vanleigh.
The unique thing about Belmont is that that paint facility is designed for painting nothing but large Class A motorhomes and large fifth wheels, and they paint only Tiffin products. This is very unique in the industry because most OEMs actually outsource their paint to a variety of custom paint shops and just try to piece it together, and those paint shops have mixed products, mixed brands, mixed manufacturers.
Our folks only work on Tiffin products, and it’s the best paint in the industry.