Ron Fenech makes a point during his presentation Wednesday in Louisville, Ky., about Grand Design RV Co. In the background are his partners, Bill Fenech (left) and Don Clark.
Grand Design, a 7-week-old RV company, has been well-received by dealers at the National RV Trade Show in Louisville, Ky.
Grand Design was created by Don Clark and Bill and Ron Fenech, RV industry veterans who created Keystone RV and rocketed to the top of the RV industry with that company before selling it to Thor Industries Inc. The three then held leadership positions with Thor, before leaving those behind in the past year, The Goshen (Ind.) News reported.
?I think it?s great,? said Jim ?Dandy? Cooley, president of Dandy RV Superstore in Anniston, Ala.
Cooley and a couple hundred other dealers and RV industry people attended a breakfast Wednesday morning sponsored by Grand Design. At the breakfast the three founders outlined their plans for the new company, and Cooley liked what he heard and from whom he heard it.
?The Fenech boys and Clark are the same kind of human beings,? Cooley said. ?They are incredibly high-quality people who separate themselves from the crowd. I am going to be their very first dealer.?
What the trio said was that Grand Design will be located in the former Four Seasons Housing industrial complex on C.R. 2 north of Middlebury. There the company is building a prototype extended-stay fifth-wheel. They expect to begin producing and delivering one unit per day in January.
Prior to the breakfast, the Grand Design team, which includes the founders and Marc Houser, general manager, and Jerry McCarthy, vice president of service operations, spent Monday and Tuesday at a small table on the trade show floor meeting and greeting dealers and old friends in the industry. They drew a constant crowd.
?The whole industry is abuzz about what we are doing,? Clark said during a short break from his meet-and-greet duties. ?Everyone is rooting for us.?
At the breakfast the founders outlined how their creative business plan used to move Keystone to the top tier of RV companies will be discarded in this new venture. At Keystone they created ?competitive cells? within the company, where one trailer line was competing against others in the company. When Thor purchased Keystone, that model was adopted by other Thor companies, according to Clark, and those companies also grew.
?In a blink of an eye we were a very large, huge corporation,? Clark said of Thor.
But the Keystone founders didn?t want to be in a large company and one by one decided to leave.
Now the model for their new company will be to create products for six segments of the RV market, starting with the ?Solitude? fifth-wheel. From there, they will add a mid-size travel trailer and fifth-wheel later in 2013 and then maybe a toy hauler late in the year. But each segment will have just one product under the same Grand Design name.
?We are not going to have sisters or clones,? Clark said.
The new fifth-wheel will have a wide, 101-inch body, a 7,000-pound capacity axle, 40-inch slideouts and three 20-pound LP gas bottles that can be changed out for full ones at gas stations.
No Cut-Rate Internet Pricing
The company will also try to address one gripe common among RV dealers ? cut-rate pricing on the Internet from a few dealers.
Bill Fenech said the company will enforce minimum pricing standards so Internet pricing wars don?t break out. And some Internet RV dealers won?t be asked to sell the company?s products.
?We are not going to do business with them,? Bill Fenech said, which drew loud applause from the dealers present.
He said dealers do have to have a strong Internet presence because consumers are doing research on the Internet before going to a dealer to shop. But, he said, a line has to be drawn for online discounts.
?We are going to stay away from that class of dealer that is causing problems,? Bill said.
Nationwide Service Policy
The founders also floated an idea about service that causes RV owners to grumble ? the lack of a nationwide service policy.
Ron Fenech said they would like to create a nationwide service policy, where a Grand Design owner could get their unit serviced under warranty at any Grand Design dealer nationwide. He said the model would be based on what the automotive industry does, where, for example, a Ford owner can obtain service at any Ford dealer in the country.
?I think we have to get our arms around this,? Ron said.
Asking for a show of support for such a program the response was about 50-50 among the dealers present.
But overall, the dealer response to Grand Design was positive.
?They are very credible guys, which is hard to find these days,? said Frank Roberts, owner of Longview RV in Windsor Locks, Conn. He has been selling RVs since 1959 and seen RV people and companies come and go.
?We are interested in selling. I have?not even seen the product and I?m a buyer, Roberts said.
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Source: http://www.rvbusiness.com/2012/11/dealers-warm-to-grand-design-rv-game-plan/
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Dear Lifehacker,
It's important to know the difference between zoom lenses and prime lenses. A zoom lens does what you might expect: it zooms in and out, allowing you to magnify your subject. A prime lens can't zoom. If you want to move closer or farther away with a prime, you move your legs rather than turning a zoom ring on the barrel (i.e. the body) of the lens. Why would anyone prefer a prime to a zoom? Primes are often cheaper, offer sharper results, have wider apertures (which means they can take in more light, thus performing better in low light situations), and generally handle their specific function better than a zoom. That said, for enough money a zoom can perform just as well and offers more versatility. Obviously you have an advantage if you don't have to constantly change lenses. Zooms allow you to essentially change the lens, and therefore the type of shot you're getting, by zooming in or out. Primes do not.
Lens titles have two measurements. The first is focal length, as we just discussed, and the second is aperture. Aperture determines how much light your lens can let in. When a lens has a wide aperture, designated by a small number called an f-stop (e.g. f/1.8), it captures more light. When a lens has a narrow aperture, designated by a larger number (e.g. f/5.6), it captures less. Wide apertures allow you to take photos when less light is available because the lens can see more of the light. Take a look at the photo to the right. The pictured lens current has a wide aperture, and you can see a lot of light passing through the front glass of the lens straight through the back. If that hole were smaller, the aperture would be narrower and less light could pass through. Aperture isn't just a concept, but something you can actually see when you look at a lens.
Fisheye lenses are the widest lenses you can buy. As pictured to the right, sometimes they're so wide that your image looks like a circle and your camera actually captures part of the inside of the lens barrel, too. Fisheye lenses are used when you need to photograph absolutely everything possible in the frame or you want the look of extremely exaggerated depth. When you look at fisheye photos you'll often find lots of pets and people staring directly into the camera because it makes their faces look funny. Of course, more practical uses include photographing small spaces or distorting reality to create a specific meaning in your image. If you want to see an example of a fisheye effect in real life, just look through a peephole in a door.
Wide angle lenses create exaggerated depth just like fisheyes do, but to a lesser extent. When you want to capture a lot in your photo, you need to go wide. A wide angle cause some distortion, however. For example, if you were photographing a ladder laid horizontally across the frame it would appear to curve. The photo to the right demonstrates this effect. Look at how the walls curve inward as you look at the image from bottom to top. (The inward angle occurs, in part, because of the low perspective, but the curvature is a distortion resulting from the wide angle lens.) Although some very expensive wide angle lenses attempt to correct this distortion somewhat, and you can use post-production tools like Photoshop to make those corrections as well, the effect isn't necessarily bad. When you use a wide angle lens, simply know the image will distort and the depth will be exaggerated so you can use it to your advantage.
Standard lenses mirror what the human eye sees most closely. If you want your photos to look natural, standard is the way to go. A 50mm lens is generally considered to be the closest to what the human eye sees, although some will argue a 35mm is closer. Regardless, both produce beautiful, natural-looking photographs. Additionally, 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm are common focal lengths for inexpensive prime lenses (especially 50mm). This is great because it's a way to find lenses with wide maximum apertures (e.g f/1.4, f/1.8, f/2, and f/2.8) without spending a lot of money. If you're looking to take portraits or close-ups of nature, a 50mm offers the most options. Many prefer 85mm for portraits, however, as it flattens the depth of the image even more (and depth isn't particularly flattering to the human face?just look what a fish eye lens does and you can see). Regardless of what you choose, everyone should have a lens in the standard range. While they may not offer special features, they're rarely a bad choice for most types of photos.
When you need to get closer but can't, you pick up a telephoto lens. While you have the great advantage of getting closer to your subject without physically moving, telephoto lenses flatten depth to the point where it may look a little unrealistic. Consider this example: if you photographed two people walking towards you and one was many meters behind the other, a telephoto lens could make it look like both people were almost next to each other. Flattened space isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's important to know a telephoto lens causes it so you can take that into account before using one. As you can see in the example to the right, telephotos can isolate single subjects beautifully even when they're far away. If you choose a telephoto lens, make sure to spend the extra money and get one with optical stabilization. Everything is magnified by a telephoto lens, including the small movements of your hands and body when holding the camera. You'll end up with a lot of motion blur if the camera isn't stabilized, and since you won't have a tripod with you at all times you can save yourself some ruined images if the lens can help stabilize itself.
Super telephoto lenses can shoot the moon. When you want to photograph something that's really far off, this is the type of lens you need. Super telephoto lenses have the same pros and cons of regular telephoto, but to more of an extreme. If you're not aiming as far away as the stars, you can achieve some cool effects such as those seen in the example to the right. The background is, essentially, obliterated and reduced to an incredibly smooth blur. Because telephoto lenses flatten space more than any other type, you can achieve beautiful selective focus in your images.
Some lenses offer additional features on top of their focal length that can create interesting effects. Macro lenses allow you to focus on an object that's incredibly close?often times closer than the human eye can see. Tilt-shift lenses selectively focus on an area of the image and create a miniaturization effect. These two types are the most popular, but you'll find more if you start exploring. For example, Lens Baby offers its own brand of selective focus lenses that can create blur in parts of the image that a standard lens cannot achieve.
If you want to look presentable in every sense of word at your workplace than you have to look beyond your face and take care of your hands and feet too. Well kept hands and feet leave a good impression on others and give a strong message that you are an organized person who believes in good presentation of work.