Ben Kaufman, CEO of experiential toy retailer CAMP, tells Veronika Sonsev and I he's not in the business to sell, he's in the business to create wonderful family experiences that happen to result in a product sale. That being said, Kaufman and his team have created innovative marketing and merchandising programs that are getting attention in the crowded toy industry world-wide
Welcome to the Conversations with CommerceNext podcast, I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with CommerceNext and presented by Wunderkind.
Ben Kaufman, CEO of experiential toy retailer CAMP, tells Veronika Sonsev and I he's not in the business to sell, he's in the business to create wonderful family experiences that happen to result in a product sale. That being said, Kaufman and his team have created innovative marketing and merchandising programs that are getting attention in the crowded toy industry world-wide.
With a entrepreneurial career and a relentlessly customer focussed orientation, he takes us through the genesis of CAMP, how he flexed the concept and the organization through the COVID era, and his latest thinking on both the purpose of retail, and the people and strategy to build an organization as agile and nimble as many of his guests.
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Thanks for tuning into this episode of Conversations with CommerceNext. Please follow us on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast platform where we’ll be sharing career advice and marketing strategies from eCommerce and digital marketing leaders at retailers and direct-to-consumer brands each and every episode. CommerceNext is a community, event series and conference for marketers at retail and direct-to-consumer brands. Through our online forums, interviews, webinars, summits and other in-person events, we harness the collective wisdom of our community to help marketers grow their businesses and advance their careers. Join CommerceNext events to meet other industry leaders and learn the latest ecommerce and marketing strategies. You can find upcoming events at CommerceNext dot com
Have a fantastic week everyone!
ABOUT US:
Scott Silverman
An ecommerce veteran, Scott Silverman has been active in the industry since 1999 and is passionate about digital retail and the innovation driving the industry. Scott Silverman is the Co-Founder of CommerceNext. Previously, he spent 10 years as Executive Director of Shop.org where he launched the Shop.org Annual Summit. Scott co-invented “Cyber Monday” in 2005 and was the founder of Cybermonday.com in 2006, a shopping site that has generated more than $2.5 million for Shop.org’s scholarship fund.
Veronika Sonsev
Veronika Sonsev is the Co-Founder of CommerceNext. She also leads the retail practice for Chameleon Collective and is a contributor for Forbes on how to grow retail and ecommerce in the age of Amazon. Having spent the last 10+ years working with some of the largest retailers and direct-to-consumer brands, Veronika has intimate knowledge of the challenges facing retail and ecommerce today. She is also an advocate for women in business and founded the global non-profit mBolden, which is now part of SheRunsit.
Michael LeBlanc is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada’s top retail industry podcast, The Voice of Retail, plus Global E-Commerce Tech Talks and The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois. You can learn more about Michael here or on LinkedIn.
About CommerceNext
CommerceNext is a community, event series and conference for marketers at retail and direct-to-consumer brands. Through our online forums, interviews, webinars, summits and other in-person events, we harness the collective wisdom of our community to help marketers grow their businesses and advance their careers. Join CommerceNext events to meet other industry leaders and learn the latest ecommerce and marketing strategies. You can find upcoming events at https://commercenext.com/commercenext-webinars/.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
camp, store, families, commerce, focused, retail, brand, product, people, experiential, toy, business, buzzfeed, kids, pandemic, ben, built, quirky, retailer, open
SPEAKERS
Veronika Sonsev, Michael LeBlanc, Ben Kaufman
Michael LeBlanc 00:05
Welcome to the Conversations with CommerceNext podcast, I'm your host Michael Alon. This podcast is brought to you in conjunction with commerce next, and presented by Wunderkind.
Michael LeBlanc 00:12
Ben Kaufman, CEO of experiential toy retailer CAMP, tells Veronika Sonsev and I he's not in the business to sell, he's in the business to create wonderful family experiences that happened to result in a product sale. That being said, Kaufman and his team have created innovative marketing and merchandising programs that are getting attention in the crowded toy industry world-wide.
Michael LeBlanc 00:32
With an entrepreneurial career and a relentless customer-focused orientation. He takes us through the genesis of CAMP, how he flicks the concept in the organization through the COVID era. And his latest thinking on both the purpose of retail and the people in strategy to build an organization as agile and nimble, as many of his guests.
Ben Kaufman 00:49
We, we think of our stores as theatres and our themes as shows, and the show changes every every quarter. And so that drives repeat traffic it keeps, it keeps the store fresh. And it also gives us a dimension to our business model, which I can talk about later. And we do lots of programming, not just at the theme level, but also at the event levels.
Michael LeBlanc 01:12
Let's listen in now.
Veronika Sonsev 01:15
So, welcome to Conversations with CommerceNext. Ben, thank you so much for joining us today.
Ben Kaufman 01:21
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Veronika Sonsev 01:22
Well, I'm joined here with the producer and co-host of Conversations with CommerceNext, Michael LeBlanc.
Michael LeBlanc 01:28
Hi, Ben, how are you doing?
Ben Kaufman 01:30
I'm fantastic.
Michael LeBlanc 01:32
Excellent. I was in I've had the pleasure of being in your Hudson Yards store. I think it was like just literally weeks after it opened up. It was January 2019. So, I've had a taste of the CAMP experience. But I'm really looking forward to learning a lot more
Ben Kaufman 01:45
Before the world ended.
Michael LeBlanc 01:46
In the before time, as I like to call it.
Ben Kaufman 01:48
Yes, yes, good.
Veronika Sonsev 01:49
Well, Ben you have a real entrepreneurial spirit, having been at the helm of some pretty amazing companies, including CAMP, talk to us about your career journey and how it prepared you to start and lead CAMP.
Ben Kaufman 02:02
Yeah. So I started, my first company is called Mophie, it was named after my two dogs, Molly and Sophie. And it was an Apple accessory company. Most well-known for the Mophie juice pack, which is an iPhone case, with a built in battery behind it. You know, funny thing happens when you make a consumer product is people start coming up to you with their own product ideas. And I was inspired by you know, what was going on in social media at the time, Facebook was first starting, and so on. And, I thought it'd be really cool to make a social media site like a community based site where people could share their product ideas. And we brought the best ones to life and the sold Mophie and started a company called Quirky, which was an invention platform that did just that. And that company made hundreds of consumer products sold it to, sold it to retailers around the world, but ultimately died a pretty quick death in the summer of 2015. For a number of reasons, largely we were making more products, then we were able to market and find distribution for.
Ben Kaufman 03:00
So it was, we were really good at making stuff and we weren't great at selling stuff. And so after that company died, I was very focused on trying to, you know, I spent the first call it 10 years of my career making things. And I was very focused on, kind of, switching gears into, okay, let me get, let me get really good at selling things, and did a number of small kind of product companies that were less focused on the innovation of the actually individual item, but more focused on the innovation or on the marketing of an item. And that led me to become the initially the Chief Commerce Officer at BuzzFeed. And then ultimately the Chief Marketing Officer of BuzzFeed, where I helped them diversify their revenue and become more than just an advertising-based business model. We were really focused on direct consumer product innovation, partnerships with brands and retailers, and so on. Really, kind of, connecting, you know, media to direct consumer monetization. So, that was like life pre CAMP, and then CAMP came along and we started CAMP in, in June of 2018. It's been, it's been a fun ride.
Veronika Sonsev 04:03
And, I actually, I remember Quirky because I still have the scissors I bought from Quirky that were like,
Ben Kaufman 01:48
Those scissors are great.
Veronika Sonsev 04:08
the, right, they're, they were amazing scissors.
Ben Kaufman 04:11
I still use those scissors. I still use those scissors like every day.
Veronika Sonsev 04:15
Yeah, because you could open boxes or cut paper. They serve both purposes. They're brilliant.
Ben Kaufman 04:20
It was called the Quirky Sheath. You could still find them around if you look around. And yeah, I use them to open an Amazon box almost every day.
Veronika Sonsev 04:28
That's so great. So, well, you know, one of the interesting things about your, your background is that you create or you align yourself with experimentation and experiential retail. We talked about some of those businesses in your background. How did they help you imagine the concept that became CAMP?
Ben Kaufman 04:47
Yeah, I mean, so as a marketer at BuzzFeed, I was, you know, often in a room with other marketers, who spent a lot of money on experiential, experiential marketing, whether that be a pop-up or an event or so on. These things really had very little to do with transactions, very little to do with kind of a lower-funnel conversion. And it was kind of really, really inefficient. Like I always I was, like, confused, like you know, pe4ople were doing these big experiential stunts, like it was cool for the brand, but it didn't really have anything to do with the product. And it felt to me that like the future of everything was doing experiential at a point of sale. And, and that was part of the early inspiration for CAMP was, at the time I had a one-and-a-half-year-old and another kid on the way. Toys R Us had just went out of business. And it felt to me that the world of family was an untapped market, an underserved market, in terms of national coverage, and, and in order for real estate centers to survive, they need to drive traffic of young families, and no one take space focused on families. And that was the beginning.
Veronika Sonsev 05:54
Do you think the idea for CAMP came from this need to have a place for families to gather as opposed to like the need to sell things, is that right?
Ben Kaufman 06:01
Yeah, we're not a transactional brand at all. We're a retailer, we're not a transactional brand. We want to help families have fun together. And ultimately, more often than not that results in a transaction. But the purpose of CAMP is to help families have fun together.
Michael LeBlanc 06:15
I helped me for our listeners unpack CAMP a little bit, for those maybe who haven't experienced it, maybe heard of it, but don't really understand you describe yourself on the, you just describe yourself basically, as an experienced first retailer, I guess you could say family experience company. As I said, I've been to your store and, and Hudson Yards but a, for the folks listening just tell us about CAMP, how much, like how many stores you have, and a bit of the sense of the physicality of it and, and the concept, and then we'll kind of get into, you know, the before time CAMP, and then how you've morphed CAMP through the COVID era.
Ben Kaufman 06:49
Sure, yeah. So, we, we started the company with the intent of being a national retail chain. We, we currently have six stores open, we'll have nine open by the end of the year. The general concept of CAMP is that we want to help families answer the question, what should we do today. And our physical concept is pretty simple. You walk into a store, it feels like a small-town, cozy old-time, general store. And it sells toys and gifts and apparel and kind of looks like a small little cozy, cozy old-time toy store. But the secret to CAMP is that there's a magic door. And behind the magic door, kids push it open. And there's an 8000 square foot black box theater in the back. And this space, it transforms every quarter or so with a different theme that marries play product and programming. So the three things play, it's kind of like an indoor playground, but product. So, it's shoppable. And then the programming is that theme is kind of like traveling theater. So, we, we think of our stores as theatres and our themes as shows. And the show changes every, every quarter. And so, that drives repeat traffic it keeps, it keeps the store fresh. And it also gives us a dimension to our business model, which I can talk about later. And we do lots of programming not just at the theme level, but also at the event level. So, in the mornings, we'll do things like yoga for the toddlers or music class. And then in the afternoon, it's after-school programs. For, for school-aged kids and nighttime, we do things like date night drop off, where you drop your kid off at 6 and pick them up at 9. And you can go out to dinner. So, we really are there to serve local families. And again, answer that what today, question by being kind of like what Starbucks did for professionals we try and do for families give them a place to hang outside of homework and school.
Michael LeBlanc 08:41
Interesting. So, this isn't a history podcast. But let's talk about how you adapted the concept for the COVID era, which is put some big constraints on in the, in the short or medium term. What did you do with the online part of the business and Veronica was telling me about this really interesting application or process you built so that the kids could actually participate in at a transactional level. So, tell us a bit about how you, how you flexed over the past 18 months?
Ben Kaufman 09:07
Yes, if you rewind the clock to March of 2020, we had gone from one store to have to five stores in the 60 days prior to the pandemic. So, we had just opened for stores. We had exactly zero e-commerce business, frankly, our website was basically just like a place where you can find the hours for our stores. And we were really focused on our brick-and-mortar growth. Now, all of our team's background at that point was on was internet. We were all Internet people. We know nothing about brick-and-mortar retail. So, when March 15 came along, we all had a leadership gig and we're all kind of reversals in the eye.
Michael LeBlanc 09:42
We’re ready.
Ben Kaufman 09:42
and we were like, oh, we know how to do this. We know how to do this, we don't know run retail stores and we know how to do this.
Michael LeBlanc 09:42
That’s funny.
Ben Kaufman 09:48
And so, we did a number of things. First thing we did was we realized that my son's birthday was March 15th. And we realized there were gonna be a lot of kids celebrating their birthday in a pandemic. So, first thing we do is launch virtual birthday parties. We launched virtual birthday parties like 24, 48 hours into the pandemic, we held over 50,000 kid’s birthdays last year. This started as a free thing where we would hold a big end-of-day birthday party at 5 pm every day for any kid to chime in and do things. And we started getting sponsorships, sponsorships is a big part of our business model. And then we started doing private birthday parties for friend groups and, and families. We also then decided that the summer was going to be weird in 2020. And we wanted to create programming to keep families having fun together online and answer that what should we do today question in the virtual world. So, we partnered with Walmart and a company called Eko and build something called CAMP by Walmart, which was 150-episode interactive program that had celebrity involvement like Neil Patrick Harris and LeBron James and Drew Barrymore, and Jennifer Garner. And we produce over, yeah, like a couple 100 episodes of interactive content that was not just like fun things for families do together, but things that can be shopped. So, that really like, played well into our play product and programming, kind of, mantra. And then, then, as Christmas came along, we did something called the CAMP White Elephant party. You know, e-commerce was always something we struggled with at CAMP. Because we are not, as I said, a transactional brand and e-commerce has no soul, it has no heart, it is purely, this is the product, this is the price, and this is how quickly you're going to get it.
Michael LeBlanc 10:05
It’s very efficient.
Ben Kaufman 10:05
And that, that's just not us, that's not us, right.
Michael LeBlanc 11:27
Yeah.
Ben Kaufman 11:27
And so, we had this idea of turning a secret Santa party or white elephant party into a virtual platform, and basically making gift-giving among friend groups or family and so on, into a virtual game. So, you were able to go on camp.com, buy a product, start a game room, invite your friends or family or colleagues in and then you would unwrap each other's gifts, steal gifts from one another, and then we ship the right gift to the right person. So, we really event ties, you know, gifting and this was, this was like an "aha" for us. This was like, oh my god, e-commerce can be fun. E-commerce can be just as fun as what we do in our stores. And so, then we started building out more experiential e-commerce products. And I think the thing you were hinting out is called the CAMP Present Shop, which is the first place kids can shop online. For kids, you know, kids make up over 25% of the internet is under the age of 16. But they can't shop online because of regulations like COPPA and other things. And so we built a little platform where kids can shop online parents put in a budget, kids drag and drop products into there, drag and drop products into their cart until they're out of money. They get to design a card, and then we wrap it all up as a gift and ship it out as, like, a good way to put kids in the driver's seat. They're kind of enabled e-commerce for kids for the first time online.
Michael LeBlanc 12:49
Did you ever have during your journey, whether it's even in the before time, you know, the toy category, did you ever have any, any second thoughts about the industry that you're getting in the sector of the retail mean, the toy category was really struggling, when you are opening your stores just trying to find itself, I guess this, in other words, what it was its answer, as you mentioned, Toys R Us has just gone under, FAO Schwarz, which was a lot about experience, had struggled
Ben Kaufman 13:16
Sure.
Michael LeBlanc 13:16
The category itself was down double digits. Did you ever think twice about how that blend of retail because you know, both the sponsorship and the retailer going to pay, pay a few of the bills? Did you ever have second thoughts or was it always we are so sure that there's an opportunity for a family-focused theater entertainment experience that, that there is never a second thought?
Ben Kaufman 13:38
No, I don't even think very hard about it. To be honest. We were just like, people have kids. That's not going away. People, people need to get their kids out of the house.
Michael LeBlanc 13:47
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Kaufman 13:47
I mean, that still proving to be true even though people need to stay home for safety reasons. But like we never, like, we don't consider ourselves a toy store. We sell a lot of toys. And we'll continue to see a lot of toys moments there's also a toy store. And if anything, we think we'll help define the future of the industry in the sense that, like, it's less about the things and it's more about the feeling you have when you, when you buy the thing. The example I give is I grew up in New York. My favorite thing to do was get my parents bring me to FAO Schwarz, the old FAO Schwarz, not the zombie FOA Schwarz.
Michael LeBlanc 14:23
Sure, sure, yeah.
Ben Kaufman 14:23
And I can tell you everything about that store. I can tell you different times I went I cannot tell you what I bought. I don't remember, I don't remember what I walked out of there with I remember some candy or some whatever. Like it wasn't about the thing like sure. I'm sure at the moment as a kid, I was like, I want the, you know, the Hot Wheel.
Michael LeBlanc 14:41
Yeah, right.
Ben Kaufman 14:41
But, like, that, that isn't the memory that is ingrained in my brain and I, any parent I talked to who I'm like, remember the toy store when you're a kid remember going to it be like yeah, do you remember the things that you bought? Like, maybe, like, maybe, like you remember that hit toy over Christmas or thing there. But like, you went to that store, and you remember going to a store, you love that store, and the store is more implanted in your brain than the thing and that's, and that's why we're building the brand we're building.
Veronika Sonsev 14:49
Ben, you mentioned, you know, when you, when after Quirky, you joined BuzzFeed because you were interested in, in figuring out how to kind of sell products. I'd love for you to dive into the tradecraft behind the mark your marketing and merchandising strategy. And how do you generate excitement around the brand? I mean, CAMP is an exciting brand. And how do you successfully market the combination of experience product and e-commerce together, because it, you know, all of those businesses, you describe present shop, the stores, they have a common theme, but they're still quite different?
Ben Kaufman 15:44
Yeah, I don't, I don't have it all figured out. You know, we're still, we're still early in our journey. And our journey has been, been, you know, a windy road with COVID and everything. But I'll tell you, like, we've been really lucky to align ourselves with, with brands that customers already love, right. And the sponsorship part of our business well, great for the economics of what we're doing, also has allowed us to act a lot bigger than we are, you know, having CAMP by Walmart, in the middle of a global pandemic. And having names like the ones I mentioned previously, in our videos like that was because we aligned ourselves with Walmart and other partners. And, you know, letting our, letting kids take over the store and run the store in April of this year, which was a great event for us. It was because we had a great partnership with Ally Bank who wants to teach financial literacy to kids. And we thought that was cool. And so well, sponsorship is a part of our model. And it's, it's not just retail media in the traditional sense, as you may think of it, it's also a way for us to get our brand out there in a way that's, that's unique and it forces us to find unique messages that resonate with parents. But I will tell you, above all, being a usually free indoor climate-controlled place for families to you know, hang out together and, and make some memories is like, is the thing you don't have to do too much aggressive marketing around.
Michael LeBlanc 17:06
We'll right back with our interview with Ben Kaufman, right after this message.
Michael LeBlanc 17:10
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Veronika Sonsev 17:47
Yeah, the product is so good that it kind of markets itself in some ways.
Ben Kaufman 17:51
Yeah, as we say, mommy-gangs run strong, you know, we, we if we please them, if we please, customers that come in, you know, every, every mom that's happening is going to tell at least five other moms, that's happy, that they were happy. And the, and the thing builds and builds from there, it really, just like a great article and a company like BuzzFeed where, you know, you read it, and you'd like text, message it to a group of friends, they text message over their friends, it grows a life of its own. And we think our concept, you know, has that built into it.
Veronika Sonsev 18:23
So, I want to switch gears for a second and talk about career advice. We'd like to talk about that on Conversations with CommerceNext. I want you to share kind of how you see the progression of your career. You know, in many ways, you've created a lot of your own opportunities, which is not a path that everyone can or will take, what are the key characteristics that our listeners should think about when they consider new ventures?
Ben Kaufman 18:46
Yeah, I'm not, like, an advice person. I don't, like famously don't give career advice. But I will tell you that every time I go into something, I go into it fully. You know, when I started Mophie, I wanted to do Mophie for the rest of my life. When I started Quirky, it was because I felt like it was just an evolution of Mophie and when Quirky ended, I had no choice but to be done with, with Quirky, but I kind of, like, continued on the journey and tried to figure out what was wrong with Quirky, it was the sell side, let me focus on that. I joined BuzzFeed, I had the intention of being there for a long time. This one was will, just kind of willed itself into fruition. And I intend to do it for as long as I can. And so, you know, as some people think of me as like a frenetic you know, serial entrepreneur-y person, but I'm not like I'm very much like, single focus thing, but stuff happens and that, that happens in an entrepreneurial career, but it also happens in a corporate career. And my, my, my suggestion to anyone doing the thing is, like, let those things happen. Like, let the path deviate and, like, become like willed in to, forced into whatever the words you want doing, doing things that you didn't necessarily think you were going to want to or need to do. Because those are the moments that like, I think, open up interesting opportunities.
Veronika Sonsev 20:16
Absolutely. And we've heard that a lot from, from focus on Conversations with CommerceNext, where its a combination.
Ben Kaufman 20:21
Thats, why don't you give advice, you know, because you heard it already, you know, you heard it.
Veronika Sonsev 20:23
No, no, no, it's a, it's a different twist on something similar, I think it's always, the theme that, the connection that I was going to try to make is that it's a combination of kind of identifying the gaps you have in your own experience, and being open to new possibilities that generally kind of lead the path. Now, the specifics are always a little different. But I think part of the advice that I think can that can be given is, is just be open to opportunities and look for gaps that could be filled by like taking on a new, a new role.
Ben Kaufman 20:28
Right on.
Veronika Sonsev 20:28
I want to just flip the tables just for one second because we talked about kind of your career progression. Now I'd love to hear kind of what you look for when, when you hire someone to join your team. how important our education experience in retail or retail-related industries, you know, what essentially makes a successful hire for you.
Ben Kaufman 21:20
None of the, none of the things you just mentioned. I am I think generally people, I value people that come out of retail, I do because there's a lot of like knowledge there, but also like, there's a lot of pre-existing bias around what's possible and what's not possible and we like to hire people who think anything's possible. If, if there's a great team focused on it. So, that, you usually don't find those people in retail, to be honest, unfortunately. So, when we have hired people from retail, like our Director of Stores, for instance, who ran you know, a big part of Disney's retail fleet and Apples and so on, like, they come from very show focused retailers that aren't necessarily focused on like, closing list opening list, you know, check the box sales goal, but they're more focused on like, what does someone feel when they're in the store, so, we have hired retail people, we don't look for retail people. We more than anything, we look for people who believe that crazy sh*t possible. And that and are motivated by that, motivated by like the hunt of, of trying to, trying to thread the needle and do, and do weird stuff.
Michael LeBlanc 22:37
If you're enjoying this interview, you may want to join us for CommerceNext IRL on September 28th, 29th. At the New York Hilton Midtown. Some of the speakers you'll be seeing including Noam Paransky, Chief Digital Officer at Tapestry, Ekta Chopra, Chief Digital Officer at ELF Beauty, Matt Gehring, GM of eCommerce at Everlane, Alex Waldman, Co-Founder and Creative Director at Universal Standard, Jennifer Patrick, Global Branding and Packaging Director at Patagonia, and many more. CommerceNext IRL will cover themes such as the resurgence of brick-and-mortar retail and its impact on eCommerce, and how to prepare for a cookieless future. We can't wait to get the CommerceNext community together in person. And hope you'll join us. Learn more and register now at CommerceNext.com.
Michael LeBlanc 23:21
You know, listening to your description of of the past 36 months, it reminds me of something we talked about here, in Canada, we talked about portaging and, you know, you get in the canoe and you go down fast-moving water, but then you hit a dry patch, you got to pick up the canoe and kind of port it over to the next fast-moving body of water. Put yourself five years into the future in terms of, whether it's leadership, not really trends, but really your role as a leader. Do you imagine a different in five years? Are there, are there things that have happened, or do you see yourself now set in the way your leadership style is talk about that a little bit.
Ben Kaufman 24:02
No, I mean, that's like in the startup world, like my job is completely different every six months, not because of, not because of pandemics but just because of like, the needs of the business are different, right,
Michael LeBlanc 24:13
Right.
Ben Kaufman 24:13
There's more executives that are hired, there's more processes that are in place, there's more, you know, there's just, there's a different, completely different business and every six months and that's, that's outside of extraneous circumstances, like pandemics, it's, it's really, it really has to do with who are the other people are on the table.
Michael LeBlanc 24:31
Right.
Ben Kaufman 24:31
When you start a company, you know, that's you and a couple other people. And then you know, you're three years and you have a little bit more infrastructure in place. Five years from now CAMP, if, if things are going, going well CAMP will have, you know, dozens of more locations probably more than that, hopefully, more than that. And, and much more, you know, robust leadership team and so my job becomes more focus on the future and less focused on the day to day blocking and tackling. So, you know, we'll see everyone day at a time.
Michael LeBlanc 25:10
Right on, well, I think I think both your career, your, your orientation, and your team, if anything can be such, was kind of built for the agility needed for these times. So listen, congratulations on, on everything you've accomplished and your success and, and I'm sure it's going to be and continue to be a success. And thanks so much for joining us on the Conversations with CommerceNext podcast and sharing your insights and professional journey. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that you are speaking at CommerceNext IRL on September 28th, 29th. In New York City where you are today, your session is optimizing the customer journey, e-commerce experience that delight customers, you could certainly got a unique and fascinating perspective on that song. Really, looking forward to that. So,so, Ben, thanks again so much for, for taking time to join us.
Ben Kaufman 25:57
No problem, don't cancel that conference. Okay, we got to start doing this in person stuff.
Veronika Sonsev 26:01
Oh, we're all in. We're all in.
Ben Kaufman 26:03
All right, good, good. All right, we'll see you there then.
Veronika Sonsev 26:07
Awesome, thanks so much. Take care, Ben.
Ben Kaufman 26:09
Thank you.
Michael LeBlanc 26:10
Thanks for tuning into this episode of Conversations with CommerceNext.Please follow us on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast platform where we’ll be sharing career advice and marketing strategies from eCommerce and digital marketing leaders at retailers and direct-to-consumer brands each and every episode. CommerceNext is a community, event series and conference for marketers at retail and direct-to-consumer brands. Through our online forums, interviews, webinars, summits and other in-person events, we harness the collective wisdom of our community to help marketers grow their businesses and advance their careers. Join CommerceNext events to meet other industry leaders and learn the latest e-commerce and marketing strategies. You can find upcoming events at CommerceNext.com
Michael LeBlanc 26:51
Have a fantastic week everyone!