In 2018, Tiffany Markofsky, along with Ben and Nikki Kaufman founded CAMP, a family experience company that creates enriching moments for families everywhere. CAMP offers magical experiences that blend play with products in its stores, in communities, and online.
The concept’s inception lay in the search for a play/product hybrid model of retail specifically geared to young families, initially in New York, but also in any densely populated community where young families were looking for things to do.
Over a short period, CAMP crystallised as the answer to the perennial question of, ‘What should we do today?’
The business model is rooted in rotating themed experiences of constant, always-on, fresh content. At the same time, it is a destination for young families, a community to be visited several times a month, even several times a week. This sets it apart from a typical retail experience and from immersive pop-up-type experiences.
It is a place where young families might drop in on one day to see the experience, and on the next to do a craft activity, shop for a gift, attend a birthday party, or just come and see a live performance.
A place for the whole family
The founders observed that while there is no shortage of places for parents to take their kids, very few places nourish the whole family.
Accordingly, CAMP is imagined as a family experience. The stores are designed to appeal both to children and to the adults accompanying them, in terms of the merchandise selection and the way that the stores are designed. The merchandising is thoughtfully imagined, with nostalgic toys that parents remember from when they were young and will want to share with their own children. CAMP’s aim is to be a place where families create memories together.
CAMP established itself from the start as ‘The Store with the Magic Door’. Thousands of people would stream through the stores on any particular day. When COVID hit, the stores had to close. On reopening, the idea of ticketed experiences was introduced to bring customers back safely.
Now, CAMP consists of immersive experiences behind the ‘Magic Door’, and a mix of free and a la carte crafts and experiences in the ‘Canteen’ at the front of the store. This is sufficiently spacious to allow for different types of interactivity.
CAMP comes to Chicago
On 19 August 2023, CAMP made its debut in the Midwest as its newest immersive adventure, Doodles x CAMP opened in Chicago’s Lincoln Park Neighborhood. This real-world shop-and-play experience teleports families into the rainbow world of multimedia brand Doodles.
Guests are invited to experience this all-ages, 5000-square-foot experience. They can crawl through tunnels into the glowing, mushroom-filled Lost Caves, zip down a rainbow slide and kick it in the fluffy pink Cosmic Clouds, or make an arts and crafts masterpiece under 12-foot-tall daisies in the Flower Forest. They can also jam on interactive synth noisemakers and alien arcade games in the Mothership and create their own Doodles character in Rainbow Valley.
Visitors will be able to shop exclusive Doodles x CAMP co-branded apparel and accessories, and can dance and play at special, grown-ups-only, nighttime Doodles events.
This new CAMP store also contains a Canteen, 2,000 square feet of retail space filled with toys, clothing, and accessories. Plus, there is a slime creation station (“The Schmutz Bar”), a Splatter Room, a CAMPitheater (a performance space for live events), and party rooms for youngsters’ birthdays.
Inspired by Doodles’ candy-coloured cartoon aesthetic, CAMP and Doodles introduce an exclusive co-branded collection of apparel and accessories available in the Canteen, online, and in other CAMP stores nationwide.
Doodles x CAMP will be in Chicago for a limited time before moving to another CAMP location.
The evolution of CAMP
Arik Lubkin is VP of experience design at CAMP. He spoke to blooloop about the company, its inception, evolution and journey, its unique business model and vision, its partnership with Disney, and the newly-opened Doodles X CAMP ‘Magic Door’ shop-and-play retail experience.
“Since we’re a family experience company, I’ll talk a little about my family,” he says. “I’m the youngest of 11 kids. As the youngest, I was basically watching my siblings. You always look up to your older siblings and want to do what they do. I first got into theatre because my oldest brother Adam went to NYU Film School. For me, that was translated through design. Even starting in high school, I was taking odd jobs doing graphic design, and in college doing web design.”
His career began in theatrical scene design:
“When it was time to go to grad school, I still wanted to do everything. I hadn’t really settled on one thing. I had done some industrial design, some web design, some graphic design, and some material design. If ends with design, I had done a bit of it. I felt that architecture was the path to designing everything.”
Experience design
Accordingly, he got his master’s degree in architecture, which led to a traditional, if brief, career in architecture:
“My focus in grad school was on phenomenological architecture and the primacy of experience. If you go to a traditional firm with that, they look at you like you have a third eye.”
In the event, his architectural career was focused on the hospitality sector:
“I was designing restaurants, bars and nightclubs in Chicago, where I lived for five months. Looking back, a move into experience design seems like a natural one, since we were designing worlds. But at the time, looking forward, I had no idea that’s where I would land.”
Then he and his wife moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he connected with Meow Wolf:
“I became the design lead for Meow Wolf, Las Vegas, and the in-house project architect for that project.”
Creating worlds at CAMP
Lubkin remained with Meow Wolf for a few years. He then moved back east, where, he was recruited by the Museum of Ice Cream. He became head of design at the Museum of Ice Cream, which then opened venues in Austin, Singapore, Shanghai, and Chicago:
“Then this opportunity with CAMP came along. My daughter is now five, and that idea of fun first, play first, was ideal. One thing that’s really fun about CAMP is we are working on different themes all the time. So, we get to jump from one world into a completely different one.”
This is in contrast to institutions like the Museum of Ice Cream:
“There, you’re evolving a very strong brand identity. But with CAMP we’re making Encanto one day, and Little Mermaid or Doodles the next. We get to immerse ourselves in completely new worlds.”
Disney experiences
The partnership with Disney, he says, was a really special opportunity:
“We all grew up on Disney’s films, Disney’s IP. Getting to create Encanto, which is my daughter’s favourite film in all the world, was particularly special. I’ve heard this from a ton of kids, but it means even more coming from my daughter. She didn’t go to an immersive experience; she went to Casita, and she met Mirabel and Bruno, and magic is real.
“The Disney partnership is amazing, in terms of Disney’s impact. If you go to Fifth Avenue on any given day, you will see dozens of little perfectly decked-out Mirabels coming out of our stores. It’s a special thing to be a part of.”
Two years into the Disney partnership, CAMP has brought three very diverse Disney experiences to life. The first was Mickey, the iconic foundation on which everything else was built. It was joined, a year after the pandemic, by Encanto – a current and relevant IP greeted with great excitement, brought out at a point when those with children of a certain age had been stuck at home quite probably watching the movie on a loop.
Most recently, Little Mermaid opened, timed to the theatrical release of the film. All the parents who had grown up with an earlier version flocked to share the experience with their children.
Bungalow Scenic Studios, a one-stop design shop for innovative experiences within the themed entertainment industry, was the fabrication partner for Disney Encanto x CAMP.
Mickey and Friends
Lubkin comments:
“The Mickey and Friends experience in particular is kind of neat. That was the first one I designed at CAMP. If you go to Encanto, you’re at Casita; if you go to Little Mermaid, you are under the sea and become a mermaid.
“With Mickey and Friends, it’s neat because Mickey is everywhere. Mickey is the character, so in our Mickey and Friends experience, we are at CAMP celebrating Mickey’s birthday. The first room you come into is our classic CAMP cabin, and you’ll see on the wall there is a calendar that has Mickey’s birthday. Then Goofy mishandles a shrink-ray camera and drops it, and everyone gets shrunk.”
“As they emerge from the cabin, there is huge grass around them. The world has transformed around these kids, who go through the experience as if they were tiny, before climbing into the shrink-ray to fix it and returning everyone to their proper size. Kirk Larsen, our chief creative officer, and Avery Monsen, our senior writer put together these amazing narratives.”
CAMP x Doodles
He turns to the subject of the Doodles collaboration:
“Doodles is a pretty neat thing for everyone involved. Bringing the very cool two-dimensional illustrative style into a three-dimensional physical environment is fun.
“I think that Doodles and CAMP have a lot of overlap in this sort of silly, fun, irreverent narrative storytelling style. At CAMP we do it through immersive experiences; Doodles do it through a short animation. Doodles has talked about the irrelevance of the platform; they’re telling a story across all media.”
“They have done different activations in the past like DoodlePutt and Doodles at NFT.NYC, and are doing a much larger scale thing here focused on fun and really getting into the play of it all has been really exciting: developing this narrative along with the Doodles team that takes us through a bunch of the environments that we’ve seen in the different media that they’ve released. Now, you get to go and be a part of it.”
Bringing Encanto to life
The process is different from creating a world rooted in Encanto, for instance:
“If you look at something like Encanto, it has a previously-existing narrative and an entire behemoth of a world behind it. With Doodles, we had a great opportunity to work closely with them in developing how that comes to life at CAMP, how we stay true to Doodles, and how we stay true to CAMP with our family experience and mission to make lasting memories.”
When CAMP began, it was with the lofty vision of becoming a national retailer almost out of the gate, an aspiration rooted in the fact the model was predicated on a rapid expansion to a number of markets.
It was also a vision that appears to have been justified. This year, growth and expansion are up again, with a significant number of regional stores having opened over the last two years. Now, CAMP is opening in Atlanta and Chicago as well as opening in another big market this year. Through the pandemic, new customers came on board through CAMP’s online content.
Co-founder Markofsky comments:
“By the end of this year, if you were to see us on the map, I think we’ll feel very well represented.”
The future of experiential retail
Concerning the future of the sector, Lubkin says:
“Pulling away from the pandemic we have seen that people are itching to get out there and to have experiences. The growth in the entire sector seems inevitable. CAMP is an immersive experience in the truest sense: you’re going to another world.
“One thing we saw previously was the rise of a lot of selfie-type venues: places that are not really engaging with experience beyond a visual. Now, I think people are hungry for something beyond a visual, Instagram-worthy experience. They are looking for something that they can engage with, that will make memories, that they can take home beyond a visual souvenir.”
CAMP, he emphasizes, is more than a kids’ experience company. While its focus is on families with children between two and nine, it is a family experience company.
“As a parent, the one thing I’ve become increasingly aware of is that play is awesome. As you go around the CAMP offices you’ll hear more fart jokes than in any other office in America, probably: we’re a bunch of kids, and I hope that everybody can be kids.”
Grownup evenings at CAMP
On the other hand:
“We are also going to start hosting some grownup evenings at Doodles CAMP experience. It’s something we’ve done, but not exclusively around an experience. There will be a series of regular evenings designed for grownups, which will be fun as well.”
In terms of retailtainment, there is a range of clothing and CAMP accessories.
Markofsky adds: “When creating a brand and connecting with our consumers, we are a store, at our core. We are very proud of our Doodles exclusive line. It’s going to be beautiful. Just as people are looking for unique experiences, they’re also looking for merchandise that can’t be found anywhere. It’s just another way to interact with the brand and bring that experience home.”
All images kind courtesy of CAMP
