Custom truck body manufacturer, Fourgons Leclair, has relocated its plant to Terrebonne, Quebec through an investment by the company of $8 million tripling its working size.
Marc Leclair founded the company in 2004 but has been in the trucking industry for nearly 30 years. Fourgons has manufactured more than 4,000 truck bodies since its inception.
At 78,000 square feet, the new building sits on a lot of 250,000 square feet so there’s room for expansion. Some of the features over it’s former facility include more hydraulic lifts.
According to Charles Plourde, director, sales and marketing, the move from the company’s old plant was only logical because of how quickly it grew in the last few years.
“We simply outgrew our other plant,” he said. “Our old plant was only 23,000 square feet and in the last three to four years we’ve seen major growth in our industry so we ran out of room. We didn’t have parking places for trucks. In our line of work we deal with retail sales and fleet sales for leasing companies…and sometimes you get a large fleet deal and they receive multiple vehicles and we couldn’t park them anywhere and the plant just couldn’t take all those orders anymore.”
“We want the employees to have a good work environment,” added Plourde making comments on the employee advantages. “So we put in a better ventilation system and there’s a lot of natural light in the building.”
For the last two years, the company has partnered with Dhollandia, the largest tailgate manufacturer in Europe (they pump out 42,000 tailgates a year in Europe according to Plourde, a number way up from the North American leader who manufacturers only 28,000 a year in the continent.)
Plourde said this partnership has helped grow its customer base.
“It’s a brand new line of product for us,” he said. “Customers appreciate it, which is good because it pushes customers in our direction.”
Fourgons Leclair has also partnered with Italian company Rolfo Plastic Gall. The company currently imports kits from Rolfo for their insulated and reefer units because of the high-quality sandwich panels system that surpasses the quality of the same systems found in North America.
Today, Fourgons employs 60 people at its plant, but it plans on increasing that number as sales grow. Plourde says Fourgons hopes to have 30 more employees working at the facility in the next two to three years.
“We also hope to double our sales in the next three years,” he said. “That may be a bit aggressive but that’s what we hope to happen.”
