TERREBONNE, Que. — Fourgons Leclair, a company that specializes in manufacturing and building customized truck bodies for every application, has relocated its facility to Terrebonne, Que.

The new building and land was an $8 million investment by the company who nearly tripled its plant size with the relocation.

The company was established in 2004 though its founder, Marc Leclair, has been in the trucking industry for nearly 30 years. In the last ten years, Fourgons has built more than 4,000 units.

The brand new facility is a whopping 78,000 square feet which sits on a 250,000 square foot lot. It features a lot of improvements from its old plant, including 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.”

The new facility caters to the faithful employees, as well.

“We want the employees to have a good work environment,” said Plourde. “So we put in a better ventilation system and there’s a lot of natural light in the building.”

Plourde added that the move to the new plant also had to do with the two recent and major partnerships Fourgons Leclair has invested in.

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.”