PaulCamper Brand Guidelines: A Berlin VW Bus Called Paul & a Camplify Takeover

One van, rented to friends, became a platform.

PaulCamper is named after a van. In an October 2017 interview with the Berlin start-up site deutsche-startups.de, its founder Dirk Fehse was introduced as a keen camper who had discovered the habit during a semester in Australia. Back in Berlin he bought a Volkswagen bus, a “Bulli” in German, and named it Paul. When he began to travel less, he rented Paul out to friends and acquaintances, and that, the article said, is how PaulCamper came about, “so the legend goes.”

The platform went live in 2013 in Berlin, a date the company still uses. Its website calls PaulCamper a camper community “since 2013” and says it comes “directly from Berlin.” Fehse told deutsche-startups.de that he had started alone, that there were two of them by the end of 2013, and that after the first year 43 campers were listed on paulcamper.de. By the time of the interview, he said, the team had grown to 35 people and the platform listed about 1,700 campers, motorhomes and similar vehicles, up from 500 private vehicles in the summer of 2016.

The idea is the one the name suggests. PaulCamper is a peer-to-peer marketplace: private owners list their own campervans, motorhomes and caravans, set their own prices and availability, and rent them to other travellers through the platform. promobil, the German motorhome magazine, summed it up in November 2022 as a sharing portal on which private individuals offer their camping vehicles for hire, and Fehse was described there as the managing director who had founded it in 2013.

Growth needed outside money. Fehse said in 2017 that an investment from BFB Brandenburg Kapital the year before had given PaulCamper its first marketing budget and its first office of its own, and had let it begin expanding into other countries and build up the team.

Private vans, with cover built in.

From the start, PaulCamper’s pitch rested on cover as much as on vans. promobil wrote in 2022 that one reason the model had worked was that users were offered insurance packages directly on the platform. The company’s own page today says it developed a special policy for rental periods together with Allianz, combining motor liability, comprehensive and partial cover with Europe-wide breakdown assistance around the clock.

That cover business later travelled. When Camplify bought PaulCamper in 2022, it also acquired PaulCamper Insurance Brokers, and Camplify said in August 2023 that it was turning that unit into a managing general agency called MyWay, the name its member cover in Australia and New Zealand now carries.

The voice is informal. The German site addresses readers with the familiar “du” and calls PaulCamper “your” starting point for camper trips. It speaks to two audiences at once: travellers who dream of a road trip but have no camper, and owners, who are invited to rent theirs out and give other people an unforgettable trip while they take a break themselves. Owners register, describe their vehicle and set their own terms, and the site presents the whole arrangement as joining a community rather than signing up to a service.

Its markets are German-speaking at the core. Camplify’s August 2023 results named Germany, the Netherlands and Austria as the PaulCamper markets and counted 13,316 vehicles on PaulCamper’s platform at that point. promobil reported in 2022 that, together, the two platforms would serve seven countries: Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia and New Zealand, and Fehse told the magazine that hirers would in time be able to book vans in Australia, New Zealand and Spain through PaulCamper.

Fleets, marketplaces and owners.

Campervan and motorhome rental is sold with pictures of the open road, but two different kinds of business sit behind those pictures. Some companies own and run fleets of their own vehicles from depots; others are marketplaces, on which private owners list their own caravans, campervans and motorhomes and the platform handles the booking and the cover. Camplify, launched in Newcastle, New South Wales, in 2015, and PaulCamper, launched in Berlin in 2013, are marketplaces of the second kind, and since December 2022 both have belonged to the same group listed in Australia.

This guide looks first at the vehicle as each company publishes it: in a company livery or paint scheme, photographed against a landscape, or listed as an owner’s own van in that owner’s own photographs. Where a company describes its vans, its colours or its paintwork, the guide gives that as the company’s own account, with the date of the source.

Names come next. Rental firms give names to their vehicle ranges and models, and marketplaces give names to their memberships and cover products: Camplify sells a premium membership called Club Camplify and member cover under the name MyWay, while PaulCamper says it built its rental cover together with Allianz. Bookings are made online, and some companies also offer an app, as Camplify does on its website; this guide describes such apps plainly, from what the companies say about them.

Finally, there are the owners. Some names in this category belong to larger groups, and corporate pages, annual reports and stock-exchange filings show who owns what and since when. This guide follows those documents and dated press reports, gives fleet, depot and country counts only as a dated source states them, and treats the colours and typefaces shown here as an unofficial interpretation rather than official brand values.

An Australian owner, a Berlin name kept.

PaulCamper changed hands at the end of 2022. promobil reported on 3 November 2022 that the Australian group Camplify Holdings, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, was taking over the Berlin company in a deal settled partly in cash and partly in shares. Camplify’s results for the 2023 financial year counted PaulCamper from 2 December 2022, the date it joined the group.

The name survived the sale. Asked by promobil whether PaulCamper would soon be called Camplify, Fehse, who was staying on as managing director, said that for its community nothing would change at first: “PaulCamper bleibt PaulCamper,” PaulCamper stays PaulCamper. Camplify’s 2026 annual report still describes the group as made up of Camplify and PaulCamper, and the German site still trades under its own name at paulcamper.de.

Behind the scenes, the two businesses were joined. Camplify said in 2023 that it planned to move PaulCamper’s customers onto its own platform. Its 2025 annual report said the final stage of that migration had been more disruptive than expected and had cut trade in the German-speaking markets, and its 2026 report said the group now runs on a single global technology platform while describing European markets as subdued.

For a design guide, PaulCamper shows how a founder’s story, one van with a name, can become the name of a whole marketplace and outlast a change of owner. Compare Camplify, its Australian parent, and Roadsurfer, another German campervan name. For this guide we use a forest green, a cream and a mustard yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep PaulCamper’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.