Camp Innovation

For every time someone has said, “There’s got to be a better way,” someone else has said, “I’ve got an idea…” 

With that tirelessly optimistic perspective, we’ll be featuring new ideas on this blog for most of the foreseeable future. 

We became aware of this first one from a mailer we received in the US mail (those paper things that get delivered to your door). It’s a brochure for Steve and Kate’s Camps, a series of new summer camps with locations in California, Illinois, and Washington.

From the looks of it, a parent (Steve?  Kate?) got plumb tuckered out by his or her kids complaining about camp and decided to invent a better one. 

Steve and Kate’s camp gives kids the ability to…well…just about anything.  It’s proof that ideas can swing from trees, pop up online, and be the icing on the cake.  Literally.  As it says in their little brochure:

“Instead of a rigid structure, we give our campers choice. Instead of teaching kids the typical way, we give them tools and gentle guidance to help them become autodidacts.” (Yes, I had to look up autodidacts; it means a self-taught person.  I hope Steve and Kate use smaller words with their campers).  

While I’m all for kids staking out their own independence, I also hoped to find cool-as-heck activities.  No disappointment here.

They do all the usual stuff like soccer and tennis, but they also have filmmaking and six specialty studios with activities from animation to style to food (actually, they call it culinary, furthering their penchant for multisyllabic words), plus amazing stage shows with violin prodigies and Cheetahs.

Not at the same time, I hope.

They claim 480,090,240 ways for kids to design a day at their camp.  Whether that’s true or the product of a marketing department that likes big words and big numbers, their approach alone is different.  It solves a problem in a highly creative, and productive way.

And the world could certainly use some more autodidacts.

Where there’s craft, there’s loyalty

In the city in which I grew up, there was a two-block downtown strip with a bakery, shoe store, drug store, sport shop, bookstore, and clothes store.  Everyone who owned and worked at those stores knew your name and vice versa. 

Business was personal. You wouldn’t think of going to the next town over to buy what you needed. 

People cared about what they made and sold, and they cared about the people to whom they sold it.

I was reminded of that little strip of care and connection when I went to a meeting in the Monadnock building in Chicago.  It’s a grand old building, designed by Burnham and Root at the turn of the century.

In the lobby, between the local watering hole and other small businesses, there’s a row of three shops that might make you think you’re back in the late 1900’s.

One is a shoe repair shop that could double as a Hollywood movie set.  The machines look like they should be a couple miles up the street in the Field Museum of History.  There’s the unmistakable smell of leather and a whirlwind of activity as men with dirty hands and aprons practice their craft and customers kibbutz and wait in line.

A haberdashery next door couldn’t feel more different.  A white-glove-clean shop with windows on every side, filled with endless glass-shelved rows of knobby wooden hatholders on metal stands.  One woman sits with perfect posture at a table with a laptop open in front of her, talking on her cell phone. She could be part of a global haberdashery operation. It feels highly polished.

A bespoke clothes store that falls somewhere between the technologically-inclined hat store and dirty-work shoe store has the uber-orderly feel of a Saville Row tailor shop. The walls are covered in different cloths and samples.  Old-school measuring devices are paired with laptops used by a couple of perfectly dressed gentlemen to make sure they outfit their customers properly.   Their concern for their craft is unquestioned.

Among those ancient and futuristic machines, there’s a lesson to be learned for marketers.  Where there’s care and craft, there’s loyalty.  And where there’s loyalty, there’s life. 

I’ve never seen a corporate brand team take a field trip to the Monadnock building, but they should.  Pull out your calendar and block out an afternoon to head down there.  Marvel at the architectural wonders of the building itself. Breathe in the craft.  

It looks amazing.  And it smells like leather.