A Summary of the year by Managing Director, Daniel Walton

2020 has been an unforgettable year to say the least, and to sum it up in one blog is almost impossible. Here in the UK, the beginning of 2020 wasn’t great for camping due to the weather and flooding most of us experienced. And when that finally started to clear up, we were hit with the Pandemic which put a halt to our camping holidays. Then, when we could finally start to go out and go camping again, campsites were sold out from the increase in new campers deciding to go camping instead of going abroad. With the way the COVID situation currently stands, we know that 2021 will be just as busy for the campsites, and people will continue to choose to stay in the UK and go camping for their holidays.

We began January 2020 without possibly knowing what was to come for the rest of the year. Despite this, it has been an incredible year for us as a brand where we have grown a considerable amount in a very short space of time. Earlier in the year, we introduced a 2 year warranty on all of our canvas products and we have really focused on improving the availability of our products by adding more of our products to stores like Amazon, The Range and Halfords. On top of this, we have also been developing more international websites and we’ve increased the number of international marketplaces we’re available on, which has been a great success.

As a result we’ve seen many more customers around the world tagging us in amazing photos of their OLPRO products and myself and the team really do love to see where our products end up in the world. With this in mind, we hope to continue the growth of our social media presence in 2021 and see many more people around the world using the hashtags #OLPRO and #OLPROeverywhere.

As you would expect, we had our busiest period during the summer months, but this year we had to contend with our biggest ever demand for products where seemingly everyone wanted to go camping. Despite this busy period, we were unfortunately unable to grow our customer services team in time to respond to all the emails and messages in the time frame that we would usually like to, and we admittedly struggled to cope with the high demand of our products that sold out so quickly. However, we are already in the process of doubling the size of our OLPRO team so that we can offer more support to our customers and develop faster ways for us to communicate with you all in 2021.

As a company we are extremely proud to have also supported some amazing organisations throughout the year. Most recently we’ve put together our first charitable Calendar with all profits donated to Make-A-Wish UK. We are incredibly proud to support this amazing charity and we want to help support as many seriously ill children and their families as we can by supporting Make-A-Wish UK. Another organisation we have begun to work with is Ecologi; and thanks to their support, for every tent we sell in 2021 we will plant a tree. We want to do more to help give back to nature and our ecosystem as we love to go camping and enjoy what nature has to offer.

Another thing that we’re really proud of is being nominated for some incredibly high profile awards, and even winning one or two! We began by winning the FSB Midlands’: Digital/E-Commerce Business of the Year award and more recently the Prestige Awards: Camping Equipment Business of the Year – Central England. We’re hopeful that 2021 brings us more awards and we’ll be working just as hard as ever!

Another exciting milestone for the company next year is our 10^th Birthday! We are so surprised at how fast this has come around, and how quickly we have grown within this time and we cannot wait to celebrate our birthday with you all.

We just wanted to say thank you to you all as we’ve had so much support from you throughout our journey and we cannot wait to see what 2021 brings. We hope you all have a great Christmas break and wish you a happy and healthy new year.