DOUBLE D TRAILERS

Meet the fully customizable trailer company that allows you to build a trailer specifically for you and your horse

WORDS: APRIL BILODEAU

FINDING THE RIGHT TRAILER for you and your horse can be a challenge. While there are many brands on the market, few offer the customization options that many horse owners need. Brad Heath and Double D Trailers are changing the trailer game.

“We work with customers on an individual basis to create the trailer of their dreams,” Heath, the founder and designer of Double D Trailers tells The Plaid Horse.

The company was founded in 1994 in Pink Hill, NC, and was originally focused on farm equipment such as hay balers, horse feed, and tack. While they did have trailers available at the time, their inventory wasn’t nearly as vast as it would later become.

“With the trailers, I found that if customers wanted a blue one, I had a green one, but if I had a green one, they wanted a blue one,” says Heath. “It was hard to always have what people were looking for and it was too expensive to ship trailers in.”

With this experience, Heath and his father started thinking about building the trailers themselves.

“We thought it was a crazy idea at the time,” says Heath. But in 1997, they built their very first trailer.

Ten years later, they liquidated all of their agricultural inventory, got out of the farm equipment and put everything towards building customer trailers. The business got so big that in 2009, they moved into a 52,000-square-foot facility in an effort to keep up with their booming business.

Manufacturing is now based in Wisconsin to accommodate sales on both East and West Coasts, while designing is strictly online.

“We sell more trailers in California than any other state,” says Heath. “It made sense for us to move manufacturing somewhere more central to make our trailers accessible no matter where you lived in the United States.”

Designing Your Dream Trailer

Double D Trailers has an interactive website that presents design choices in a manner that everyone can comprehend.

You can choose from a one to fourhorse trailer, with or without a tack room, as well as bumper pull or gooseneck. There are even options to add a living quarters in your trailer.

Each trailer is specifically designed for horses and includes certain features that not only take horse safety into account, but also handler safety.

The average cost of a customer trailer is around $60,000, however, the company does offer financing options for buyers. Typically, a customer trailer takes just around 90 days to build.

How It Works

Once a buyer has chosen all of the custom options they want for their trailer, the team at Double D will contact them directly via text or email.

“The website is detailed enough so that the first thing we do is have you build it out online yourself,” says Heath. “Then the sales team will contact you.”

Since Double D Trailers only works with direct customer orders, the sales team is trained to ask all the right questions to make sure customers receive exactly what they’re looking for, such as horse size or what type of vehicle you plan to use for hauling.

Why no phone calls? Heath says it’s the best way to make sure a customer gets what they want.

“We prefer to keep a written record of all communication to ensure all details are completed,” he says. “However, we do a tremendous amount of Zoom calls to make sure that every detail we’ve ever discussed is accounted for and correct.”

Where To Find Them

Double D Trailers does not have a showroom, but they do have an option on their website called “Buyer Connect” where you can search for customers in your area who may have a trailer to show you. They also have an online forum where customers can interact with people who have previously purchased a trailer from Double D.

In addition to the information on their website about their trailers specifically, the company also has several articles to educate trailer buyers on the product in general.

“We have an email list that provides trailer owners and potential buyers with anything they would ever need to know about trailers,” says Heath.

The company has taken the amount of knowledge they’ve built over the years and applied it to their trailers for optimum safety for all. “We discovered that aluminum isn’t the best for roofing and floors because it conducts heat,” says Heath. “So we use Gavilite—it’s durable and aids in a better environment for the horse.”

The company strives to use materials that flex where horses need it most, such as potential spots where a horse may rear in a trailer as well as kick. Through their research, they’ve also discovered that horses prefer to travel in reverse, so the company offers the option for a “reverse load” trailer to ensure comfortable travel for the horses.

Trailer Innovation

While the company has great success with their trailers, they’re looking to the future of hauling by designing a 3-D printed trailer. The polycarbonate trailer is set to be a first-of-its-kind smart trailer, offering a magnetometer for vibration and noise as well as a thermal camera.

The prototype for the trailer is set to be revealed in Spring 2024.

For more information on Double D Trailers or to design your very own trailer, visit www.doubledtrailers.com.