Travel. Dream. Design. Build. Test. Evolve. Repeat.

Legend has it that Front Runner was conceived between a 1988 Land Cruiser 70 and a 1992 Mercedes G-Wagen in Botswana, around a campfire, near a majestic Baobab, amongst elephant tracks, by a handful of friends from South Africa with backgrounds in engineering, design, manufacturing and off-road racing. After suffering through numerous equipment failures on their expeditions around the world, they decided to take their shared passion for vehicle based adventure travel and dream up new, smart gear and build it stronger than… well, as they put it, “stronger than the elephants at the watering hole 1 klick over.”

And just like that, before the moon gave way to the sun, we were born.

With the gruelling African bush as a testing ground, we at Front Runner focused on a tough love approach to developing products. With both feet facing the future and little sentimentally for mediocre ideas of the past – common approaches to off-road vehicle product design were quickly jettisoned in favor of innovation, new materials, and superior manufacturing practices.

Today our products have a well deserved reputation (if we don’t say so ourselves) for quality, intelligent design, and durability. Our manufacturing facility just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa features in house laser cutting, bending and powder coating. Our CAD designed products by a team of engineers and built by skilled craftsman in our ISO-9001 : 2015 Certified factory.

That’s our origin story. Share it with your friends and family. Around a campfire. And for full effect, make sure you’re sitting in our chairs, by our tents, with our roof racks on your vehicles. Just sayin’.