Six years in. Four phases done. Here's what I've learned

Six years ago, we started with a question rather than a product: what would a transport refrigeration unit look like if the people building it came from automotive, aerospace and motorsport - industries that had spent decades engineering precision into things that couldn't afford to fail?

When we started designing Endurance, there was a version of this company that could have taken the easier path. Take a diesel unit, strip the engine, put a battery in, and sell it as an ‘electric unit’.

But we didn’t. We sat down and re-designed a system, built specifically for what operators running refrigerated transport needed, today. Looking back today, I can see four distinct phases of Sunswap’s growth clearly. With the benefit of hindsight, they look more like a logical sequence, even if at the time they felt like the next challenge in front of us.

Phase one: design

The first phase was almost entirely about engineering. Nikolai Tauber, our CTO, has an approach to design that I'd describe as obsessive, and I mean that as a compliment. Every component, every system, every watt interrogated. That turned out to be the difference between a product that works in the field and one that doesn't. He wouldn't let things go. He still doesn't.

The result is a unit that runs frozen goods for 24 hours on a single charge and chilled goods for up to two months. Those numbers really count when you get out onto the road. That's what Nikolai's team spent years getting right.

Phase two: commercialisation

Getting Endurance into real operations changed what we knew about the product. There's information you can only get when a unit is on a trailer, running loads for Tesco, DFDS, Samworth Brothers. Direct feedback from people who run fleets for a living, hey told us what mattered. But critically they were introduced to a fully-electric unit that defied their expectations.

Phase three: production

In the summer of 2024, we started building at scale in our facility in Leatherhead, Surrey. Making the transition to consistent, repeatable manufacturing required a bigger team. We brought in engineers from automotive, from aerospace, from motorsport backgrounds. People who understand what it means to build something to a specification, every time. It also meant you have people who had gone from building F1 cars to a fridge.

That combination of cold chain knowledge and high-precision manufacturing discipline is something I'm genuinely proud of. We are now a manufacturer in the full sense of the word.

Phase four: scale

We are operating on three continents. Units run in the UK, across continental Europe, in Australia, in Chile, in Spain. We are actively developing further markets. Five years ago, Sunswap occupied a fraction of our current physical footprint. Today we are 200 times larger by square footage, and the organisation has grown to match.

Geography is the real test of a product. Endurance has run Australian summers without fault. It has conquered heat and distance. These case studies teach operators that it can handle their routes too.

It's why we now have distribution partners like Protran Solutions in Australia and Trailer Logistics in Chile who have built their own service operations around offering Sunswap.

Aftermarket is the piece I think matters most in this phase. An operator putting Endurance on their fleet is placing trust in us. When something needs attention at a depot on a Tuesday morning, how quickly we respond is what determines whether they order their next unit from us.

We've built our aftermarket operation deliberately, and we take it seriously. That’s why we fundamentally reimagined how your classic repair and maintenance works – Sunswap has the capability to spot problems before they arise, fix them remotely, or send an engineer rapidly to the unit with the kit needed. All that means more time on the road. As the industry says, if the wheels aren’t turning, you aren’t earning.

What comes next

Transport refrigeration manufacturers have always done one job. Build fridges that keep goods cool. Sunswap came along to disrupt the space. We started by building a more efficient fridge that runs without a drop of diesel.

Now we have an opportunity to change what transport refrigeration is about. The team is uncovering insights on how customers use Endurance that can improve the operations of our customers fleets. Endurance is about to become a fridge that is always thinking, always improving, and offering insights into your wider operations. We are at the begging of what that actually means for our customers and its one of the more interesting things I can see shifting.

The cold chain has run the same way for a long time. I think that's about to change, and I think the operators who move first will be glad they did.

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