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Episode Transcript

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of StoryTelling. It's a pleasure to have you with me today. If this is your first time listening to the FoST Podcast, welcome and if you're a returning guest and enjoy the show, please consider telling a friend and leaving us a five star rating wherever you get your podcasts. I grew up in New York City and used to love walking around the streets where there were so many different types of stores to browse and explore. But now I do almost all of my shopping online, and that's true for many of us, which is why so much of brick and mortar retail is struggling. After all, how can a physical store compete with the ease and comfort of online shopping?

I wonder what motivates somebody today to leave the comfort of home to go out to a store to shop. Our guest today, Ben Kaufman has come up with an innovative new model that completely reinvents the retail experience. Ben knows a thing or two about running a successful business, having been the CMO of BuzzFeed and the founder of the startup Quirky. His latest venture is CAMP, the revolutionary retail concept for families with young kids. CAMP creates stores unlike any other. They combine theater, activities and shopping, allowing families to not only find and purchase products that they love, but to spend quality time together.

By uniting merchandising with hands-on storytelling and play, Ben's created something with CAMP that even the most popular online stores can't replicate. Not just a place where you can go to buy things, but one where you can go and create memories. With nine CAMP locations across the country and more coming, partnerships with some of the biggest brands and IPs in the world and countless families returning regularly to his stores, Ben truly understands the potential of immersive retail. I'm delighted to have him on the podcast today to share his insights from the front lines of the experience economy. Please join me in welcoming Ben Kaufman. Ben, I'm so excited to have you on the FoST Podcast. Welcome.

Ben Kaufman:

Thank you Charlie. Good to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

So for those who have not had the pleasure of getting to go to CAMP, can you describe what it is?

Ben Kaufman:

When your parents just had enough of you and they just want to get rid of you for the summer, they send you to a place called... No. Our CAMP is a new kind of retail experience. We build 10,000 square foot stores that are kind of broken into two distinct areas. The first area, which makes up about 20% of the store, functions much like a regular general store vibe, toys, gifts, apparel. People should find themselves in the front of the store regardless of age or interest. The second part of the store, which makes up the majority of our footage, 80%, is kind of like a black box theater and it's accessible through a magic door. Families push the magic door open and what lies beyond the magic door is a different show that kind of comes in and rotates through your local store every four months or so. What we've done at CAMP was we've kind of combined play, product and programming into this ritualistic destination that's attempting to do for families what Starbucks did for professionals, kind of create that third place.

Charlie Melcher:

And how did you come up with the idea for CAMP?

Ben Kaufman:

That one's a hard one to answer because it was kind of... Unlike other startups that I had been a part of which were kind of like a stroke of an idea that just became very clear in an instance, the journey to CAMP was a bit more a kind of parts where there were lots of little insights and lots of little things that wound up being amalgamated to become what the idea of CAMP was. Some of those things relate to my own personal life with having kids in New York City, some of them relate to really macro things like realizing that in order for commercial real estate to survive and malls and lifestyle centers to survive, they need young family traffic and there were no tenants that can reliably drive young family traffic. On the surface level if you walk in as a customer, it all makes sense and it's clear, but as you start to unravel it, there are so many little component parts and pieces and insights that went into the day one story.

Charlie Melcher:

So what is the big problem you're trying to solve for families?

Ben Kaufman:

The whole thought experiment of "how do families answer the 'what should we do today' question?" is what instigated this. And there's lots of different answers. Some answers could be, "let's go to the park or a museum," or obviously sporting practice and things like that, but where do you go for a real adventure? Where do you go, maybe not every day, but once or twice a month to really treat each other. We're trying to bring a little bit of that merchant magic back while also providing an entertaining venue for merchandising to happen. So those are the two vectors. Number one is what's the reason to leave your house and spend a day with us? And the second is, well, once you're there, what would compel you to complete a purchase on our floor versus buy the same or very similar products on Amazon?

And those are the two things like number one is provide entertainment, that's what the shows are for. And number two is when we do think about product and when we do think about merchandising, we're really trying to do it in a very old school manner.

Charlie Melcher:

I appreciate that in a way you're doing something that relates to an older time, earlier time of retail, but the idea of putting on a show in what at first appears to be a store, you've described it to me as you've got nine stores that are black boxes with retail fronts. So really it's almost more a series of places for experiential storytelling for families. So tell me more about the shows, that seems to be the thing that really is cutting new ground.

Ben Kaufman:

It is, yeah. If you think about the store as a venue and the shows as the performances, we have basically two different types of shows. We have shows that we write and develop on our own as CAMP and then shows that we write and develop with partners. And when we started, we did it on our own just because sometimes these big studios, big companies take a while to get situated. But now we have shows that are live with Disney and others. The whole idea is that instead of just watching a movie like a kid watching Encanto for the first time, the promise of CAMP is instead of that kid watching Encanto and then going to Walmart or Target or name your retailer and seeing an Antonio doll on the shelf from the film, instead, what if we allowed the kid to actually walk into the Encanto? To feel like they were in the movie, feel like they were one of the characters, or in our case one of the townspeople and enter the Casita and roll around in the rooms and sing songs with the villagers and so on and so forth. These are the worlds we try and create. So that when that fandom is sparked by watching a film on Disney+ or in a theater, the fan journey continues into an immersive experience that allows the kids imagination and frankly, the parents imagination to further take hold and not just be relegated to a plastic item on a shelf.

Charlie Melcher:

And how do you develop a show like this?

Ben Kaufman:

Every show's a little different. With Disney, we've done two shows now. We've done Mickey and Friends and then we just launched Encanto last week. Encanto was a really special development experience because we actually got to work with the filmmakers. We basically tried to merge how our venues work with all of the story beats that are in the film, all of the major kind of iconic visuals that people see in the film. Mickey on the other hand, was a little bit more interesting because as Disney says, Mickey can exist at any place at any time and do anything. Which on one hand is amazing, on the other hand, what do we latch onto? And for the Mickey experience, we actually had to write a story from scratch about how you're at CAMP to celebrate Mickey's birthday and something goes horribly wrong and you have to kind of unwind the problem as you continue on through the experience. And what we found, at least in our early findings here, is that latching onto big iconic visuals like Casita in Encanto is definitely a bit of an easier development process, although that comes with more scrutiny because there's more kind of reference materials. But at the same time, being able to write a narrative for Mickey himself is equally as fun. So each of these processes is a little different. And generally the way we go about it is we try and we actually just make a grid, literally a table. And if you close your eyes and imagine just a simple table, the rows are the different story beats. So kind of narratively, what a customer will encounter in each room. And then the columns are: what is the scenic environment? What is the story being told? And then what merchandise coincides with it? And then the play moment also is another-- the interactive play moment. So those are the four columns and then the rows are just the different rooms, the different story beats throughout the experience.

Charlie Melcher:

That's really unusual. I've certainly heard about story development where you're thinking about the narrative beats, where you're thinking about the environment for the set, or the scene and you're thinking about in immersive, certainly the play, the interactivity, what's happening physically for your guests in each of those spaces and moments in the story. But the idea that you're also thinking about what's the merchandise for each of those beats, places, and activities or play-- I haven't heard of that done before. What do you mean when you're saying merchandise? You are literally designing products for that moment in the story?

Ben Kaufman:

Yeah. Usually, and this is I think, something that we've talked about in the past 1-on-1 together, but usually in most companies the story people lob stuff over to consumer products or consumer products have come up with some big thing and they're  trying to post-rationalize a story for it, and it usually goes one of those two ways. Very rarely do you put your story people and your product people in the same room, give them equal weight and equal footing and let there be a give and a take. And my favorite example recently, not to keep referencing Encanto, but it's fresh on my mind and we just opened it. So we're sitting there thinking about the experience and where merchandise will sit inside of Casita and so on. And then we had the idea of actually just creating like a Columbian town square.

And so when you come in to Encanto CAMP, you come through the tunnel instead of being thrust right into Casita, you feel like you're in a little Columbian village and you see Casita out in the distance and there's actually vendors with carts, like traditional merchandise carts that you might see on the street in a town square. And one vendor is selling flower crowns and garlands and so on that you could make yourself with your family, another vendor's selling embroidery services on these custom garments that we created, that had to happen in the design of the experience, meaning the merchandise kind of came out of the fact that there were going to be these carts and didn't come out of the fact that we have X amount of linear feet to sell. We really thought about what would there be? Of course there'd be a flower cart there, of course there'd be a...

Charlie Melcher:

It struck me that when we've talked about this in the past that in a way the product purchase at that moment is a way of taking home a memory. It's about a physical, tangible reminder of this thing that mom and I did together in that experience. And that seems like a very different way of thinking about creating product than how most people do.

Ben Kaufman:

Yeah, it's a token. I mean, the word souvenir for some reason is a little bit taboo. You hear souvenir, you're like, "It's a souvenir." But when you think about what that word means and what it means in relation to a thing you did with your family, it could be really powerful. And when we develop this stuff, we try and not make it some stupid key ring you're going to forget about or whatever, but something where when you look at this thing or you hold it or you wear it or whatever, you're going to remember that two hours you had with your mom spinning on a flower.

Charlie Melcher:

I relate to that again because at Melcher Media and FoST, we make many books and often we're doing books tied to say Broadway musicals and people will go to the musical of Special Night Out and then they take that book home. Yes, they'd like to read about it. Yes, they're interested in the content, but it's also, as you said, a souvenir, a way to remember, to memorialize this evening and bring it back and keep it alive. So how do you also think about your product development and your product mix in the store?

Ben Kaufman:

One thing that's the biggest, I would say misconception about CAMP is that we're a toy store. I work really hard not to sell too many toys and we do sell toys. You can buy lots of toys at CAMP, but that's not the space we're trying to fill in the market. Our assortments are pretty diverse. We'll sell everything from gourmet food to apparel to pajamas to toys to gifts to novelty items to things for adults, and we're very much narrative merchandisers. We're not trying to fill category space or SKU counts. "We need 30 SKUs in accessories and 12 SKUs," this is how retailers operate. We are merchandising to the story that we're telling.  

Charlie Melcher:

And more and more you are creating your own product. So more and more percentage of what's for sale is CAMP generated.

Ben Kaufman:

Yeah. That's the long term project, is we want about half of our products in our store to be CAMP branded products. And right now we're kind of in the 25, 30% range and expanding that as we head into next year.

Charlie Melcher:

When you're organizing a show, are there different types of narratives that you think about when you're building a show?

Ben Kaufman:

Yeah. It's really a multi-part problem because on one hand we're trying to tell a story, on the other hand, we are trying to move people through a space and get them out in a certain amount of time because in the world of this stuff, that's the inventory. The inventory is the amount of space you have left in the venue. So there's a lot of vectors. One is how quickly do we need people to roll through? Number two is how do we tell the story most effectively? Number three is kind of really layout, and in order to tell the story visually, do they need to go room by room or could they explore on their own in a non-linear fashion and so on? And this really kind of boils down to a couple of different formats, at least in our own work so far. One is a straight kind of narrative show where you go into the first room, you finish that room, you go into the second room.

This is something you see a lot of say at experiences like a Color Factory or a Museum of Ice Cream where the one thing they tell you on the way in is, "This is a one way street. Don't go backwards." The other method, which is what Encanto is, is kind of a hybrid where you enter into the space and then you're kind of let loose and you can choose your own adventure and roll into whatever rooms. But our characters, our counselors, our cast, are kind of lightly gating you into different rooms at different times throughout the course of your experience. You might want to follow them, you might not want to follow them, but you should probably follow them. And that's kind of like a bit of the Sleep No More type of approach to this kind of thing.

And then the third, which is to me the most interesting is hub-spoke where you bring them into kind of a central area, set the stage for the story, let them touch rooms and then come back, touch rooms and then come back, and that's another format that we're exploring. And all of these have their different pros and cons. We've also started to implement little timekeeping instruments to let families know, again, ever so gently, we don't really ever want to kick a family out, but ever so gently like, "Okay, your time here is up."

What we did with Encanto is we created... The movie of Encanto centers around the magic of a family that was just stored inside of a candle. And so when you come to Encanto Camp, you're actually given a candle and the timer on that candle is set to about 55 minutes. And when the candle time is up, it just starts to kind of ever so gently flicker. And our staff members are trained that if they see a flickering candle, they are kind of guiding you towards a finale moment, which will then tell you that you need to vacate.

Charlie Melcher:

That the story's over, yeah. What are a little bit of the pros and cons of each of those?

Ben Kaufman:

With the narrative people, the room by room people always feel rushed and they are rushed because there's another group right behind them and they got to get into that room six minutes after you get into that room. And what that doesn't allow is it doesn't allow kids and families to find themselves in the show. Meaning if they're really into one room, they still only have six minutes in that room and they're never going to see that room again unless they do the whole show again. I like the narrative shows, the room by room shows because the throughput's amazing and you could fit a lot of people through, but I don't love it because it doesn't let families do what families do, which is find their identity inside of one of these stories.

Charlie Melcher:

And tell me about the evolution of the ticketing for the experiences. At first, you didn't charge for that separately, if I remember correctly. And now that's a ticketed event.

Ben Kaufman:

When we opened the store December of 2018, it was free to go through the magic door. There was a ticketed paywall in the very back of our store when we first opened, which was kind of a theater space where we did crafting and music classes and kids yoga classes and things like that. So we always had a ticketing aspect at CAMP, but it was always free to go into the experience. And then we realized that people were comfortable paying for an experience, that they found value in the shows that we were delivering. And it's a big part of our business now. It's about 30% of our business is basically people paying to come into our store, which is weird to say out loud.

Charlie Melcher:

And by the way, what is an average ticket price for?

Ben Kaufman:

It depends on the show, but anywhere from 20 to $45 per person. We do charge for both kids and the adult.

Charlie Melcher:

And so that gets booked in advance and then they show up, do the experience, and then there's additional purchases of merchandise when they're there. How are you thinking about that? You actually taught me a phrase I'd never heard before, which was "fresh wallet." What's that?

Ben Kaufman:

Yeah. It's a funny little term, but basically our point of view is that when you've spent the money a week or two weeks, three weeks in advance booking your reservation, that money's spent, it's out the door already. When you're shopping the venue, when you arrive, you're thinking about it as a net new spend versus if we were charging you for everything at once, you'd look at the bill and maybe think a little differently about it. Our job as merchants is to make sure that they're buying the coolest, best stuff they could possibly be buying so that they don't just remember it as an experience, they remember it as an experience where they also got some cool stuff.

Charlie Melcher:

It's a way of taking the experience home, as we were saying before. It must be very expensive to develop one of these experiences, one of these shows and take a real period of time. Many pop-up immersive experiences are actually being thrown away after a weekend or a week. Your intention is to travel them. Is that right? To build a show and then be able to take it from venue to venue?

Ben Kaufman:

That's right. Yeah. We try and standardize our venue builds and what goes along with that is that every one of our experiences, our shows are kind of designed and engineered like traveling theater or a trade show booth might be so that they can break down and pop up in another venue, another store that we own. And yeah, it is expensive to build a show. It's definitely millions of dollars to launch a show. And we launched three plus shows a year at CAMP. The thing that's funny to think about though is that these popups that you see happening all over costs just as much and then they're gone.

And that's our business model, is making sure that we get in front of these brands and IP holders and so on and say, "Hey, you could hire your experiential agency and go that route and have your own venue and have a store for a few weeks. You could partner with us, we'll build your show out and we'll tour it for three to four years. As the experience travels, we'll optimize it, we'll get it a little bit better, we'll flow in the right merchandise and so on." And it's hard to find either a marketer or an IP holder that you make that pitch to that isn't at least intrigued.

Charlie Melcher:

And tell me about the experience of working with big brands and IP holders. How does that work and who are some of the ones that you've worked with?

Ben Kaufman:

We've worked with the biggest of the big. At this point, we survived the pandemic in a deep partnership with Walmart. We've obviously built two experiences with Disney, Paramount and Spin Master. We have a show with Paw Patrol. We really have grown this company in partnership with big brands, which was always the design. And working with brands is something you get used to. It's not the easiest path to grow, that allows you to learn from each other. They learn from us as a scrappy startup that makes agile quick decisions and we learn from them in terms of what it's like to be a retailer or a consumer product company at scale. And usually it's mutually beneficial.

Charlie Melcher:

And so sometimes they're actually underwriting the entire show, other times maybe it's just more like product placement inside of a show.

Ben Kaufman:

All of the above. All of the above. We're pro-partnership so it's like when we sit at the table with a brand, obviously our first instinct and the thing we try to do the most of is build shows together, but those are expensive and take a long time. So sometimes we start out with product placement opportunities or eventing and things like that. But ultimately, the goal is to do big fun immersive shows with everybody.

Charlie Melcher:

I just want to say Ben, I spend a lot of time in this space of immersive entertainment and a lot of people who are in that space are still struggling to figure out how to make it sustainable? How to find the right kind of retail? For example, immersive theater companies are always struggling to find just the perfect unique piece of architecture that they can build a piece in, that they can afford the lease or get an option to extend and not so far out of town that no one will come. And what I've come to realize or to think of what you're doing at CAMP is that you're really building a network of theaters around the country to be able to rotate your own shows through or shows that you do yourself or with partners and that it's kind of complete in that way, it's a complete reinvention of retail as immersive experience and a kind of maybe roadmap for other people interested in finding sustainable ways to do immersive entertainment.

I should mention for example, also just the multiple revenue streams even, we talked around that. But the idea that you're selling tickets, you're selling merch, you're doing special events, you're doing partnerships and product placements, most people are lucky if they have two revenue streams and you've got half a dozen easy.

Ben Kaufman:

Thank you. And to add, I think one of the unsung benefits of this is constraining the show to whatever it is, 8,000 square feet with an 11 foot theatrical grid in the ceiling. And the fact that the show needs to fit in this box in order to pick up and lift into the next box really provides, I think a more creative canvas than sitting down with an immersive creative group and say, "Okay, we want to do an Encanto show." I mean, you could spend a million dollars on Encanto or you could spend 30 million. On all of these shows, you could spend as much money as you want to spend. And one of the things we talk about a lot is will the customer know the difference between the two million dollar budget and the $2.6 million budget? 90% of the time, the answer is no. That we as the creatives will know the difference because we are sitting in a room together but the customer will feel the same thing walking into the show.

Charlie Melcher:

I think many creatives would absolutely agree with you that having some frame, some constraints is actually a boon to creativity. It keeps you from spinning out. I mean, you've established, if you will, a canvas for immersive entertainment for families, that's really wonderful. And I think you'll have a flowering of creativity. It seems like every show you do, the bar rises as you learn more and understand the full parameters of what you can do in those spaces.

Ben Kaufman:

Thanks. We got a long way to go to crack this thing. But the thing that keeps us going is walking into stores every day and seeing those smiles and seeing the kids having fun. And we had a big weekend this past weekend. I sent the team a little note on Saturday morning and I was like, "Let's go make kids cry today." And the whole notion of that joke is that our stores keep track of how many kids are crying on the way out of the store because they don't want to leave. We definitely don't want to make kids cry for any other reason other than making them not want to leave the store. And it's really great because that's literally an emotion that we see so much of every weekend.

Charlie Melcher:

Ben, thank you so much for making the time and sharing your hard earned wisdom from a few years of doing CAMP and can't wait to come see the most recent show. And also so excited to see you continue to multiply and bring this experience to families across the country. So more power to you friend.

Ben Kaufman:

Thank you and I appreciate you doing this.

Charlie Melcher:

My sincere thanks to Ben for being on today's podcast. To learn more about CAMP, please visit the links in this episode's description. Thanks to you as well for listening. You can stay updated on the new episodes and become part of the Future of StoryTelling family by signing up for our free monthly newsletter at fost.org. The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partner Charts and Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.