Tiger Trailers joint managing director, Steven Cartwright
In a year that is already proving just as busy and challenging – but at the same time rewarding – as the pandemic-gripped preceding one, and with 2021’s clocks having only just moved forwards, in the first of a new member series we grabbed five minutes with Steven Cartwright, joint managing director of Tiger Trailers.
What’s one of the key challenges currently facing the trailer sector?
It’s been an interesting and challenging 12 months through the pandemic. Trailer demand for the has been fuelled by significantly increased fleet growth requirements from food chain and parcel delivery customers, along with general hauliers and the rest of the road transport industry, which has helped the country through very difficult times. We and other trailer manufacturers are working with extended lead times entailing months in the double digits in some cases, but we are managing really well and have a number of initiatives in place to mitigate this significantly, enabling us to offer much more attractive lead times. One of these is our new partnership with Spanish trailer manufacturer Lecitrailer.
Tell us more about how this relationship helps to overcome current difficulties?
We have visited and worked closely with their team over the last three years, to bring to the UK market our Tiger Siberian range of temperature-controlled products. This spans rigid bodywork to multi-temperature box trailers and double decks. Lecitrailer has manufactured temperature-controlled products for more than 30 years and working together means we can increase manufacturing capacity and offer customers more product variety along with faster lead times.
Following an order from the UK’s most prominent frozen food retailer for tri-zone trailers enabling frozen, chilled and ambient drops using the one vehicle, interest in our temperature-controlled range is developing quickly and we are currently working with Lecitrailer on manufacturing and delivering fixed deck double deck refrigerated trailers for a top-four UK supermarket. In addition to this, we have a number of orders for ‘standard’ refrigerated trailers later in the year.
What else is happening in Tiger Trailers’ world?
Our Tiger Finance business is experiencing one of its busiest times to date, as in uncertain times operators seek financial flexibility that works for them.
Meanwhile, although we only moved into our new factory two years ago, we continue to invest in the manufacturing facility, and we have increased the Tiger team of people in a number of areas within the business, from engineering, production and aftercare to accounts and admin, enabling us to meet the demand for our products. In addition to all of this we are about to launch our brand new biennial corporate book, Tiger Tracks and we are shortly implementing further mental health and wellbeing support programmes across the business.
