When the RV market turned after COVID, most manufacturers had dealers to absorb the shock. Escapod didn't. The off-road camper company Chris Hudak founded with his wife builds, markets, sells, and delivers its own $50,000 trailers, which meant that when interest rates and tariffs hit at once, the contraction landed directly on a company carrying 80 employees and 24,000 square feet of factory.
Hudak's response was to spend capital he didn't have coming in, moving composite manufacturing in-house in the middle of the worst of it. Escapod is now more profitable in true dollars than it was at peak volume, on lower top-line revenue.
Below, Hudak walks through the growth that built the overhead, the diagnosis that reframed the problem, and what the bet cost him.
On the rocket ship years:
When we hit the market, it was just the right time, man. We went full-time and immediately it was an 18-month wait for our trailers. Sold out, bang. As fast as we could build them, we'd sell them, and faster.
So it was build, build, build, sell, sell, sell. Within the following year I realized we needed a bigger space—we were in this little four-car old auto shop—so we bought an old car dealership 10 times the size. Then we built an additional 10,000 square feet on top of that. About 24,000 square feet total.
Four employees to 80 at the height of it. Two models, almost two trailers a day, and I'm talking about in a short time. Every founder dreams of that. We went on a rocket ship.
On what moving that fast makes impossible:
It's impossible to focus on the foundation when you're moving that fast. Too fast? No. The path is the path we should've been on.
But you build a process in that meantime that requires that overhead. In 2021 and '22 you're just building as fast as possible, saying, "Well, if I do X, then in order to double, I need to do 2X." Everything is growing at the same rate.
And then you have to contract. You still have to manufacture the product. You still have to sell the product. You still have to distribute. You still have to market it.
The rocket ship is wonderful. It's fun, it's exciting, you make new models, you do all this fun stuff. But the forge and fire moments are the moments of downturn.
On choosing to be the manufacturer and the dealer:
We're in a very complex space. Not only do we manufacture the product, we market the product, we sell the product, and then we also distribute the product. You usually choose one of those things. I decided to do all four for some strange reason. It's maybe somewhat slightly controlling of the experience, but it's hard.
Here's what that costs you when the market crashes. It's a premium product built on a relatively thin margin with the volume carrying it. Your overhead stays the same and your revenue drops.
And we're not loading up 20 trailers and shipping them out. That's what big RV is dealing with now—they just kept shipping to dealers, the problem gets shifted to the dealer, and in the meantime, they figure out their house. For us it happened much faster, because we are the dealer. That almost doubly hits us. How do you scale down fast enough?
On realizing the problem wasn't the product:
Interest rates skyrocketing, tariffs, post-COVID—everyone already had a trailer. It's hitting you on both sides.
The realization was that this is a macroeconomic problem. We have the best trailer in the world, there's no question about that. We had the product. We had the interest. If you looked at our marketing and sales funnels, people are like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we love the product, but now is not the right time."
On doubling down in the middle of the worst of it:
We had the square footage, but we couldn't increase sales. So what do you do with the square footage? You vertically integrate. You take on more.
We made an insanely big bet, which was: We can't work at the rate that we're working at, so in order to get through, we have to take on the composite manufacturing of the trailer. A highly, highly technical process that takes up a ton of square footage and capital expense to get into. Now we do every piece of it—the weld, the composites, the final construction.
I made the decision around June 1, 2025. It took us all the way through December to have a fully productionized line.
In the middle of the worst of it, you double down. You're like, okay, we're going for it.
On making that investment when cash isn't coming in:
That's tough. There were some conversations with the wife. There were some moments of blood, and that's true blood, from myself.
You just do it. As a founder, you do it. It doesn't matter if you stay up all day, all night. If there's something to do, you do it. That was the mentality, and it was insane.
On working toward a payoff he couldn't feel yet:
No. No, you couldn't feel it paying off quickly. It was the focus on that little light in the distance, that little vision.
I'm somebody who, as long as I can see the path forward, never has a problem with the work that has to be done. I get into my lows when I can't see a path forward—when you can't identify how this works, or how you get through it. Just give me a glimmer of light and I'm like, that's the way.
And then once it kicked, you're like: Okay, now we're cash flowing in a positive direction. We're bringing profit to the bottom line at the rates that we need to be at for today's demand.
On why you can't automate anything that lives in your head:
Think about the non-value-add time you spend. A presentation to investors, crunching the numbers on financials—the actual building of the spreadsheet is non-value add. You're just building a spreadsheet. If you can get rid of that and focus on the message, now I get to have an investor conversation rather than build an investor conversation. It allows me to act like four of me.
But in order to offload anything, you have to build a strong process. If something is in your head, or if something is not replicable every time, or something is hidden, or something lives with Timmy in the mail room, you cannot automate.
So what it does at my level is say: There's a gap in my process here. There's an opportunity to automate, but in order to do that, I have to do X, Y, and Z first. Then you end up with a stronger process, which is more efficient and more replicable, and then you can automate.
There's nothing you can't automate. You just need to be able to build the process around it first.
On dealing with his own identity before he could lead anyone else:
The first thing I had to deal with was the identity part of it. How do you identify as this person, and what happens if it goes wrong? All of that stuff is tied up in us founders—like, this is me, right? I had to deal with that first before I could take on those other things.
It took a lot of self work to get to, "It's gonna be okay if this doesn't make it, but I'm gonna put myself on the line to make sure it does." Once you do that, you can show up for others.
There was no other choice. Backs against the wall. It was crippling.
And I would be lying to you if I said that I've completely divorced my identity from this successfully. But I know that it is not the entirety of my self-worth, and that I couldn't have told you a year ago.
On being more profitable on less revenue:
The craziest thing is that we are more profitable—not only percentage based, but actually true dollar based—than we ever have been, even when we were at 80 employees doing this big thing. On less top-line revenue.
The focus and the work we've done has brought more to the bottom line than ever before. That's the base building. That's the foundation. And a lot of it is the technologies we're leaning on, AI and automations, so the overhead's a lot smaller.
It's still a lot of work. We're in it still, in the trenches, still struggling through it, but it makes you feel really good. Last year was the year of the snake—shedding the skin, regrowth. This year is the year of the horse, and we're charging forward. I'm sitting up here, but there are many people who supported that vision: employees, partners, families. We all get to reap that reward.
Hear the rest of Chris's conversation on ShopifyMasters—the three-trailer order from Moab that turned a side project into a company, the AI employees now handling customer questions during an 18-month wait, and the handoffs he still does himself.
