Thirty years ago, a small shop in Pflugerville was building office trailers and camping shelves and fixing up the occasional RV. Nobody walking past it would have guessed it was the start of anything. There was no grand plan, no blueprint for what Princess Craft would become — just PJ and Richard, a building, and the willingness to figure it out as they went.
This year, PJ hits thirty years with Princess Craft RV. We wanted to mark it, not with a sales pitch, but with a simple thank you.
If you’ve spent any time around here, you know Princess Craft has a reputation. As PJ puts it, we’re “known as being the quirky place.” She says it with a smile, and she means it as a compliment. Quirky is what happens when a business is built around people and curiosity instead of a formula. It’s the reason a former bowling alley on I-35 in Round Rock became a home for truck campers, teardrops, and lightweight trailers — and for the folks who love them.
What makes the milestone worth writing about isn’t the number of years. It’s what PJ has said about them. She’s honest that the beginning wasn’t all confidence: “The first 10 years, I thought there was a right way to do this and I thought that I didn’t know it. I thought there was something that I didn’t have that everyone else had.” Anyone who has ever started something from nothing knows exactly that feeling.
And then, somewhere around year ten or fifteen, the realization: “there isn’t a right way. That everybody else didn’t know something that I didn’t know. They just had a different vision or a different process.” That’s a hard-won kind of wisdom, and it’s stamped all over how Princess Craft operates — the patience to teach a first-time buyer everything their camper can do, the willingness to do things a little differently than the big lots down the road.
Ask PJ what the next thirty years should look like and she doesn’t lead with sales figures. “This is a place to learn, to grow, to contribute, to be part of the team,” she says. “If that doesn’t happen, then it’s not Princess Craft and it’s not worth doing. Then it’s just a business, and you can find that anywhere.”
That’s the part we keep coming back to. Plenty of places will sell you an RV. Not many are trying to be something more than a business while they do it. Thirty years in, PJ still wants Princess Craft to be full of joy “whether we’re making a ton of money or not, whether it’s a great time for the RV industry or a terrible time.” She’ll be the first to call that idealistic. As she says, “everybody’s got to have a dream.”
So here’s to thirty years, PJ — to the office trailers and the bowling alley, to the employees who came and stayed, to every customer we’ve watched drive off toward something fun. Thank you for building a place worth being part of, and for keeping it quirky.
Here’s to the next thirty.
Come say hello in Round Rock or Katy, Texas — or catch PJ’s full reflection on our YouTube channel.
