HISTORY LESSON
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The family business he company now known as Stas began by repairing wooden cart wheels in the town of Stasegem, in the Flanders region of Belgium, in the 1930s. By 1948, it was exhibiting its farm trailer range at the Brussels Agricultural Show; and by 1960 was building steel trailers for road transport.
It opened its current factory in 1974, by which time it was using aluminium to make a full range of road trailers, including curtainsiders and reefers, but the company eventually chose to concentrate on all-aluminium tippers, and in 1990, moving-floor trailers.
The current structure dates back to 2002. Still owned and run by the founding Heyse family, the expanded Waregem factory now focuses on aluminium tipper trailers. Now, 230 staff are making around 10 trailers a day.
Twenty kilometres away, a separate division, AluTrailer, was set up to build moving floor bulk trailers up to 82m3, for a market motivated by their greater flexibility and need for a safer alternative to tipping.