News

A severe lack of shipping containers will continue to cause limited stock and rising prices for camping and outdoor products, according to leading UK brand OLPRO. The company believes that the problems will remain ever-present in 2022, having experienced delays around several of its new products, including the highly-anticipated Wrap campervan awning, which sold out of pre-orders in May 2021.

OLPRO says that the camping industry has experienced issues in manufacturing enough stock to meet the soaring demand for products, with the cost of manufacturing also constantly increasing. A typical container costs OLPRO around US $2,000, but during 2021 that has jumped to about US $11,000 per container – due to high demand and an ever-limited number of available containers.

OLPRO’s managing director, Daniel Walton, said: “We’ve received nearly half a million pounds’ worth of stock less than we expected at this point in the year, which is a huge disappointment for a business like ours. Last year we were able to turnover £3.2million, so to have missed out on such a large amount of stock is definitely worrying.

“In some instances, the delays on shipping for our products have been so severe that we’ve had to pay roughly £200 per product to get them flown over by air instead. Some of our customers had pre-ordered their products at the end of 2020 and their products still haven’t arrived - we’re just as frustrated by the delays as they are. It’s just been an incredibly difficult year for logistics.

“Since June, we’ve been forced to introduce an entirely new system for pre-orders, so customers are only able to pre-order a product once we know it’s manufactured and it’s confirmed to be on the way from our factories. However, the issues we can’t work our way around is the shortage of containers and drivers available, and unfortunately this means we expect 2022 to be another year of limited stock and rising prices for our customers.”

Many of these issues can be attributed to the pandemic, but the United Kingdom also has the added complication of the fall-out from Brexit, which is contributing not only to red tape on import and export but also the shortage of logistics drivers and deliverers.