Lance Resurrects Squire Brand and Announces New 605 Mid-Size Camper

Smaller, lighter, more affordable. With today’s economy, these are the metrics truck camper manufacturers are using to generate sales. While RV shipments, as a whole, have increased in 2024, the cost of truck campers continues to rise. To counter this trend, the Lance Manufacturing Company, the worldwide truck camper manufacturing leader, is resurrecting the Squire brand. Discontinued in the early 2000s, the Squire offered the consumer lighter, more affordable campers, yet the budget-friendly brand fell out of disfavor due to the emergence of aluminum framing, laminated fiberglass sidewalls, and slide-outs.

The Lance Mfg Co turned to its existing catalog to roll-out the resurrected Squire brand that includes the 805 and 825 truck camper models for half-ton and 3/4-ton trucks respectively. As the company’s website says, the Squire allows owners to have it both ways by offering modern construction practices, using computer aided design and composite materials, with a more minimalist design and a more approachable price point. Tempered glass windows, propane-fired appliances, fiberglass-wrapped nose caps, and versatile MOLLE panel cabinets all aim at “giving the adventure enthusiast an option to turn their pickup into the ultimate go-anywhere, do-anything mobile domicile.”

The manufacturer revealed the 2024 incarnation of the Squire at the recent Elkhart Open House. The response, according to Jim Waters, Lance’s Marketing Lead, was very positive. What’s great about the Squire, is that it gives consumers more choices, especially with the popularity of overlanding, which demands smaller and lighter campers for better fuel economy and for off-road excursions. Yet, overlanding isn’t the focus nor the sole target for the new and modern Squire.

“We’ve moved, a little bit away from the overland thing as being centered to the design. It’s certainly part of it, but we’re really not trying to pigeonhole the Squire 100 percent into that because we don’t want to alienate anybody. We’ve got a lot of the people who fondly remember the Squire brand. We don’t want the Squire to be like, “hey, this is your off-road adventure camper.” Although it can certainly do that, just like any other camper, we still want people who are looking for a traditional slide-in camper to use for traveling, hunting, and fishing. So now we’re offering two separate product lines, two separate brands, which we revealed at the open house: the Lance premium and the Squire. But they’re still, from a nuts and bolts standpoint, the quality you should expect from something built by Lance, but just lighter and more approachable,” Waters said.

In spite of the ailing economy and high inflation, RV shipments in 2024 have continued to rise slightly compared to 2023. And the prospects for 2025 look even better. Yet, the cost for the typical truck camper has risen sharply since the pandemic. So how has the economy impacted the Lance Mfg Co?

“The economy has given us some time to refocus on lighter, more affordable truck campers. This project really began with the 805 that we brought as a prototype to our Open House last year. We’ve been producing the 805 now with some pretty good success for about a year. We took a different approach at designing it that was more minimalist. Instead of a big TPO nose cap, we went with the tried and true wrapped fiberglass nose that we have done for years and that many manufacturers still utilize. And then from a component standpoint, we went with standard propane-fired appliances rather than going with the pricey, Truma stuff that we have in our premium Lance line,” he said.

The 805 model has sold well since its release a year ago. Like all Squire campers, the 805 features the company’s minimalist approach with only a porta potty, 10 gallons of fresh water, and 20 gallons grey, yet the 1,555 pound camper still offers a spacious interior that includes a 6-foot countertop—the longest countertop at Lance—a propane cooktop, a U-shaped dinette, a DC compressor refrigerator, a 60×80-inch east-west cabover bed, a water heater, and a furnace. Full-length MOLLE panels above the countertop and the dinette not only serve as a structural support for the cabinets, but also a place where you can clip and fasten gear.

“The 805 was something that we built in the late 1960s,” Waters explained, “but we’ve built a variation of that floor plan throughout the years. We brought that back with this new construction, pretty much replacing all of our cabinetry with the MOLLE panel grading. Instead of having the extra weight and functionality of having cabinet doors and everything, we have these panels now, which give the owner the space to do whatever they want, and they can clip and hang stuff and things like that which has also allowed us to save some weight. I think it really makes the smaller campers feel more open, too. Once the Lance 805 gained some traction and we saw some sales, we got confirmation that this is something that people are interested in, so we started talking about taking that approach to the entire plant,” he said.

While the resurrected Squire brand incorporates much of what the classic Squire offered, the company won’t be offering corrugated aluminum side walls and wood frames like the original Squires built in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“When we talked about making these new lighter, more cost-efficient campers, we were like, ‘look, we don’t want to go turn back the clock all the way. We don’t want to go back to corrugated aluminum, and we certainly don’t want to go back to a wood frame, but we did need to make these things lighter, and we did need to make them a little more cost-efficient,'” Waters said.

Fortunately, the Squire will feature much of what had made the Lance Mfg Co the worldwide leader in truck camper manufacturing, meaning the quality and bones of the campers are pretty much the same. Both the Lance and the Squire brands feature CNC cut, dual-layer azdel walls. Aside from the TPO nose cap, the campers are built the same. As a matter of fact, if you were to look at a Squire wall and a Lance wall they are identical. The quality and the bones of the Squire, Waters says, are still what you would come to expect from any Lance camper.

“To achieve a more approachable price, the features and the components have rolled back to things that most people are used to in the RV industry, including traditional tanked water heaters or maybe a Girard instant water heater, a wrapped nose cap, and MOLLE paneling. Instead of having porthole-cut doors or the dual pane, Lexan acrylic windows were are going back to a standard framed glass window or a slider window. We ended up creating what we wanted it to create, which was a lighter, more affordable camper because all those things add up from a weight and a price standpoint. So rather than going with solid surface, quartz countertops that we have in the premium Lance line, we went with traditional MDF countertops in the Squire,” Waters said.

After successfully rolling out the SQ805 model for half-ton trucks like the Ford F-150, Lance designers turned their attention to their existing truck camper catalog. What other models in their existing catalog could be “Squire-ized?” Designers decided to set their sights on the Lance 825, a popular, 1,832-pound camper made for 3/4-ton trucks.

“The biggest knock on the SQ805 is that it doesn’t have a bathroom,” Waters explained. “So for the second model, we decided that we just wanted to take a floor plan directly out of the Lance lineup and see if “Squire-izing” it would work. So we just took a carbon copy of the Lance floor plan over, and went through everything, A to Z. We changed the nose cap, changed the windows, changed all the components, and some of the materials. So we have now launched the SQ825, which from the bones and the layout is a Lance 825, but at 1,725 pounds it’s a little bit lighter and a good deal cheaper.”

Yet the one thing that’s been missing in the Lance Mfg Co’s catalog is a hard-side camper made for mid-size trucks, but not anymore. Lance engineers are now in the process of designing a camper for mid-size trucks called the 605. Yep, you heard us right. The Lance Mfg Co is now getting into the mid-size truck camper game. A prototype of the new camper has already been built.

“We now have a prototype for a mid-size truck camper. We are calling it the SQ605. We shrunk down the 805, basically, by making it narrower and shorter, but kept that same general layout and design. It was designed that way because we wanted it to be a Swiss Army knife camper. We wanted it to go on a half-ton truck for sure, but we wanted it to fit on a 5.5-foot bed, a 6.5-foot bed, and an 8-foot bed as well. So we did that. The countertop has shrunk down, the DC compressor refrigerator is still in the same place, and the dinette has shrunk down. You’re going to end up losing some of the dedicated storage that was midships. We’re hoping to get the weight down to between 1,000 and 1,300 pounds,” Waters added.

Like the larger SQ805, the SQ605 will come standard with a 10 gallon fresh water holding tank, 20 gallons of grey, and room to store a portable toilet. It features a 60×80 queen-size cabover bed, a two-burner propane cooktop, a 12 volt refrigerator, an 18,000 BTU propane-fired furnace, a water heater, a 45 amp converter-charger, and a 5-gallon propane tank. A host of options can also be ordered for the mid-size camper, including lithium batteries, solar power, and an 11,000 BTU Coleman air conditioner.

So when will the new SQ605 model be released? Soon. Lance had a prototype at the Elkhart Open House. So far, Lance designers have tested the 605 on the Toyota Tacoma and the Nissan Frontier. Testing still needs to be done on the Ford Ranger, the GMC Canyon, and the Chevy Colorado. Waters doesn’t anticipate any issues fitting on the other trucks.

Naturally, one has to ask if the Lance Mfg Co has plans to rollout additional models for the Squire. A quick glance at Lance’s existing catalog, and the popular 650 model seems like the perfect candidate.

“We have three models that we have either in development or in production right now. Past that, it’s still a little bit up in the air based on what’s going to be the next priority. I think the next floor plan that we’re going to talk about “Squire-izing” is probably the Lance 650 model. When that camper was first released, it was like 1,640 pounds, and it did really, really well, but as we added features and content to it, it got heavier and a weighed a bit more than what people were comfortable putting on a half-ton truck. And so now I think that there’s a lot of credence offering a Squire-ized version of the camper,” Waters said.