‘A retail media company’: How CAMP wants its online content to eventually drive customers back to stores

By Kayleigh Barber

CAMP was built to be a kid’s paradise — think toy store meets indoor activity hub. But like other in-person concepts, that came to a screeching halt last year and the family-focused retailer had to shift its strategy into one that now more directly resembles a digital publisher with a penchant for e-commerce.

That makes sense when you consider its CEO — Ben Kaufman, previously the chief commerce officer and chief marketing officer at BuzzFeed behind the brand’s buzzy forays into retail that further wooed over millennials.

But CAMP, founded in 2018, was going to be different venture as it was created with a brick-and-mortar-first strategy — a “conscious choice because we felt like that was the harder thing to do,” Kaufman said.

By the end of 2019, the toy store company had five locations between New York, Connecticut and Texas that collectively saw an average of 50,000 visitors per month. The company had pre-pandemic plans to build five to 10 more, but Covid-19 proved to be a mass blow for a retail store chain built on the premise of offering a space for children to play in-person around purchasable toys.

Despite that, CAMP’s overall revenue increased by 300% in 2020 compared to 2019, though exact revenue figures were not provided, and plans to open new locations will resume this year.

Ticket sales, in-store events and toy sales, were the primary sources of revenue in 2019, however, only 20% of the company’s revenue came from the actual sales of toys, according to a report by Digiday’s sibling site Modern Retail. And pre-pandemic, Kaufman said he classified CAMP as a consumer-facing business. In 2020, however, that shifted to a more B2B model that championed digital sponsorship deals with brands like Walmart (which partnered on a virtual summer camp) as well as Apple and Ally Bank — both of which sponsored a series of virtual birthday parties.

At the end of November, Kaufman said the company finally invested in creating a new, editorial-driven identity by building out an editorial arm led by editor-in-chief Tanner Greenring, who previously spent 11 years at BuzzFeed holding several different senior editorial and strategic positions. His team is now developing a more robust online presence that includes the shop as well as a virtual events business.

Because of this, Kaufman said that the company’s revenues are starting to revert back to being a customer-first company. And its a digital game plan Kaufman, and others, expected for the company, but one that was accelerated by the pandemic.

The new look of its digital operation mimics the quirky playfulness of the in-person stores. And it boasts products its selling as well as other fun-filled activities. While the Shop tab on the CAMP homepage is a pretty standard marketplace selling everything from an action figure of Vice President Kamala Harris to a handheld Oregon Trail game, the website is populated with content around art, cooking and other activities that don’t …read more

Source:: Digiday