Bean Trailer is a vehicle and trailer brand founded in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2017.
The factory that builds Bean Trailers started out making ATM enclosures, a business whose orders rise and fall with bank mergers. Mark Harling co-founded that company, Sterling ATM, in 2002. He has said he loves Salt Lake City but hates it in January and February, when he escapes with his wife to ride southern Utah trails. Shopping for a small teardrop, he found that "everything I looked at was built to be disposable."
So he pointed Sterling's fiberglass plant at the problem. Design began in early 2017, and the first trailers sold that year. The teardrops are built around a one-piece fiberglass shell that Harling compares to an upside-down boat hull, so washboard roads find no seams to rattle open. The original owner gets a lifetime structural warranty on it. Three years in, Bean was Sterling's biggest customer.
Bean is still a subsidiary brand of Sterling ATM, and two of its models, the Bean Squared and the Bean Pod, do without the one-piece shell. In 2019 Harling's daughter nominated Bean for the first Coolest Thing Made in Utah contest. It beat 221 other nominees, and a transcatheter heart valve in the final round.
Bean's revenue grew 1,000 percent from 2018 to 2020, and in 2024 trailer number 1,000 went to Drew Hansen, host of the small camper YouTube channel Playing with Sticks.
