Behind the warehouse, immaculately polished Airstream trailers glint in the sun. Next to them, beat up vintage campers will require many hours of work before they shine like that. Inside, an assortment of camp trailers and Sprinter vans run the gamut from blank slates to fully customized works of art.

For father/son team, Steve and Brandon Zinninger of Camper Reparadise, there’s a great amount of pride in seeing a previously dilapidated trailer or empty van head out the door as somebody’s dream camper or overland rig. Part of that feeling of satisfaction stems from the fact that some of the Zinninger’s best family memories come from time spent camping in a pop-up trailer—sometimes for months at a time when Brandon was as young as a year old.

Always entrepreneurial, the elder Zinninger had Brandon working for him from a young age, first as a short-order cook in the restaurant business. “Working in a kitchen, that's probably as high stress as you can get, especially at 15 years old,” Steve says. When Brandon opened Reparadise a decade ago, the roles reversed.

When they first started fixing up old trailers, it was a hands-on learning experience for both of them. And it was personal. After years of fixing up old houses and cars, their first trailer project was a 1970s Airstream that Steve picked up in 2011 as a personal project.

After the learning curve of that original build, Brandon started working on other people’s trailers in his spare time, not charging much while he learned what he was doing. “It was YouTube University and calling in buddies that were engineers and welders,” he says. They learned quickly and, after founding Camper Reparadise, developed a reputation in the world of vintage Airstreams.

“The Airstream, which got us started, was an iconic kind of thing that everybody seemed to recognize,” Steve says. “They have an attractive shape and interior space that you can do a lot with. Since they’re aluminum they’re not rotted out like a lot of the wooden-built body skeleton trailers were. Everybody had their own idea of how they wanted them to look in the end, so we weren't working with a cookie cutter thing. We were doing something different with each one, so that was attractive to us.”

But those challenges are what get life-long entrepreneurs like the Zinningers out of bed in the morning.

“I was born into (entrepreneurship),” Brandon says. I saw my parents trying to start a company when I was little, and then my parents operating their own commercial painting company when I was little. There wasn't anything unique about forging your own path; it was already instilled. I've never clocked in for anybody in my life, even if I didn't have this company, I'm sure I'd be doing something else where I would've been independent. As the business grows, it becomes a little bit more of a scary point where you start to understand that people are relying on you for their livelihoods. That gets you to the point that you have to always be focused.”

This focus is easier to come by now that Brandon has built a team of people that he can trust completely, his dad at the top of the list.