In this episode
Mollie Hansen, Chief Marketing Officer at Airstream, and Chris Pendl, founder and principal at Nomadics, explain how Camp Airstream — three- to seven-day owner experiences at destinations from Yellowstone to music festivals — was built and funded as an ongoing product rather than a marketing campaign. Hansen took the idea to the business with a promise to break even; the first year beat that, and the program now runs as a profit center measured on sell-through rate and NPS instead of impressions. Pendl describes the program design decisions that make it work — arrival rituals, shared meals, deliberately unstructured time — and the operational realities behind scaling it: campground partnerships, a product-style budget cycle, and camp hosts drawn from the owner community who turned out to be the single biggest determinant of how a week lands.
Key takeaways
- Camp Airstream is structured as a product, not a campaign. Three to seven days at U.S. destinations, designed for existing owners, with five to six instances running in calendar year 2026 — including pop-ups around a New York music festival.
- The internal promise was break-even, not profit. Hansen pitched it as something that “won’t cost the company more money”; year one did better than break even, which is what bought the program permanence.
- Moving from cost center to profit center is what unlocked scale. Pendl: being able to say “this isn’t costing any money, and in fact, it’s delivering meaningful income to the business” created the agency to try more.
- The program was designed for connection, not spectacle. Most brand experiences are built for a photo moment and FOMO; Camp Airstream is built around arrival rituals, shared meals, and “enough unstructured time over the course of either three to seven days for people to really connect.”
- The real success signal is what happens after people leave. Fifteen to twenty strangers arrive each week and end it starting text groups and planning travel together independently of the brand.
- The metrics changed from impressions, CPA, and CAC to sell-through rate and NPS. Post-departure survey scores hover “north of seventy to, to eighty” depending on location, with verbatims themed and reported to the management team.
- Camp hosts were the variable nobody fully scoped. Real Airstream owners on site as facilitators proved “very instrumental in how the experience goes” — and are the through line that keeps the program coherent as campgrounds and partners change.
- Owner-made content outperformed paid content. Recap reels from each location rank among Airstream’s highest-engagement organic posts, and Pendl attributes it to real owners rather than influencers.
- The origin was retention, not acquisition. With pandemic-era sales at a peak and the used market looming — “one of the largest competitors [is] ourselves” — stickiness became the strategic problem worth funding.
Chapters
- 00:00 — What if your most valuable brand asset is something customers pay to attend
- 01:45 — Mollie Hansen (Airstream) and Chris Pendl (Nomadics) on their roles
- 02:45 — Airstream at 95: Wally Byam’s caravans as the original experience marketing
- 05:11 — What Camp Airstream actually is: 3–7 days, owners, iconic destinations
- 05:56 — Designed for connection instead of spectacle
- 08:00 — The internal pitch and the break-even promise
- 09:23 — Year one beat break-even, and created advocates you don’t pay for
- 11:04 — Why this needs a product organization, not a campaign organization
- 12:41 — Authentic content as a byproduct of putting owners together
- 14:02 — Operational hurdles: partners, campgrounds, and carving out brand space
- 15:36 — Camp hosts and boots on the ground
- 16:49 — What owners did that wasn’t designed for
- 19:31 — Sell-through as the first metric that mattered
- 21:09 — Cost center to profit center, and obsessing over NPS
- 22:47 — Scaling without losing what makes it recognizably Airstream
- 24:24 — How Hansen and Pendl stay agile
Why Airstream built an experience business instead of running a campaign
The idea came out of the pandemic, when road travel was one of the few safe options and Airstream’s sales were the highest they had ever been. Hansen was looking past the spike: the company’s biggest competitor is its own used inventory, so the strategic question shifted from acquiring customers to retaining them. An ongoing experience program was the retention answer — a reason for owners to stay connected to the brand after the purchase, rather than a burst of awareness aimed at people who had not bought yet. The heritage argument helped internally too. Founder Wally Byam ran caravans from Cape Town to Cairo and around the world, bringing National Geographic documentarians along; as Hansen puts it, “he was social media before social media.” Selling the lifestyle by staging it is the company’s original marketing model, not a new one.
What “belonging infrastructure” had to promise before it got funded
Buy-in for stickiness was easy; buy-in for becoming an experiences company was not. Hansen’s commitment was financial, not emotional: the program would break even and not cost the company more money. Making money was, in her words, “my little cherry on top” and never the stated intention. That framing matters because it set a bar the program could clear quickly. It cleared it in year one, and the result is a program the company now treats as something to continue “long past an advertising campaign.” The secondary payoff was advocacy — the kind Hansen contrasts with her previous experience of brands “where you had to pay for love.”
Why a campaign organization can’t run an always-on experience
Marketing teams are structured around launches: annual funding, a defined end date, and a known point where the money stops going out the door. Pendl’s argument is that an income-generating experience belongs in a product structure instead — a product owner, a different budget cycle, and a mandate to keep learning and iterating rather than to optimize creative and move on. The measurement set changes with it. Impressions, CPA, and CAC still get looked at, but the questions that actually govern the program are sell-through rate, NPS, and whether a consistent experience can be delivered across a portfolio of locations with different partners.
The operational work that isn’t visible from the outside
Airstream does not own land or campgrounds, so every location depends on a partner willing to let the brand carve out a section and make it feel like Airstream. Hansen frames it with a retail analogy: a brand taking a defined space inside a department store and building its own environment within it. The harder problem turned out to be human. Camp hosts — passionate owners recruited to be on site, answer questions, and host the week — were not fully scoped at the start and became instrumental to how each week goes. Consumer insights work later confirmed how pivotal those people are to the guest experience.
What owners did that the program wasn’t designed for
Connection was the design goal; the degree of it was the surprise. Pendl describes the program as a container the community ultimately fills: 10 to 15 strangers form friendships, ask each other where they are headed next, and organize independent travel. Observing that in the pilot changed the design. The team became deliberate about the ratio of programmed to unscheduled time and about arrival rituals that orchestrate connection at the start of a week — and then scaled only the elements they could show were driving it, moving from the Yellowstone pilot to three locations plus pop-ups in 2026.
The metrics that replaced impressions
Sell-through came first. Because the program is unusual for the brand, the initial question was simply whether enough people would sign up to fill the spots — and with community as the point, a week with one or two attendees is the real failure case. Airstream tested demand with the owners’ club, a separate entity, as what Hansen calls “a safe playground.” Spots and duration flex within limits, but filling them is the health check. NPS is the second instrument: a post-departure survey to every guest, scores north of 70 to 80 by location, and verbatims themed and reported to management so a program that looks nothing like “make the product, sell the product” still has visible assurance it’s on track.
What keeps it recognizably Airstream at scale
Hansen’s answer is the guest list: everyone attending owns the product and arrives with their own stories about using it, which generates the narrative without the brand scripting it. Pendl’s answer is the host layer. Campgrounds change, partners change, formats change — the constant is the camp hosts and the rituals and shared meals they run, which is what creates continuity across locations rather than a set of unrelated branded events.
FAQ
What is Camp Airstream? Camp Airstream is a three- to seven-day experience program for Airstream owners held at U.S. destinations ranging from national parks to music festivals, with roughly 15 to 20 guests per session and programming built around arrival rituals, shared meals, guided experiences, and unstructured time.
Is Camp Airstream a marketing campaign or a business? It’s run as a product with its own revenue. Airstream committed internally to breaking even, beat that in the first year, and Nomadics’ Chris Pendl describes the shift from cost center to profit center as what gave the program room to scale.
How does Airstream measure the success of Camp Airstream? Primarily on sell-through rate — whether the available spots fill — and on Net Promoter Score from a post-departure survey, which runs north of 70 to 80 depending on location. Traditional impressions, CPA, and CAC are still tracked but are no longer the governing metrics.
What organizational changes does running experiences as a product require? A product-style structure rather than a campaign structure: a product owner, a budget cycle that doesn’t end on a campaign date, continuous iteration on the experience itself, and a measurement set built around sell-through and NPS instead of launch metrics.
What is a camp host and why does it matter? Camp hosts are experienced Airstream owners recruited to be on site for the week — hosting, answering questions, and facilitating connection. They were the least anticipated success factor and are the main source of continuity as locations and partners change.
What surprised the team most about Camp Airstream? How far the community took it. Guests arrive as strangers and leave having started group texts and planned independent trips together, which pushed the team to design more deliberately around unstructured time and arrival rituals.
About Mollie Hansen
Mollie Hansen is CMO at Airstream, where she leads the brand’s approach to marketing, experience and community. Since joining Airstream’s executive team in 2011, Mollie has helped guide the brand through a period of sustained growth and renewed cultural relevance by focusing on the complete customer journey from inspiration to ownership. Her work emphasizes experience as a driver of loyalty and long-term value, while staying grounded in Airstream’s enduring promise of exploration, craftsmanship and connection.
Mollie Hansen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mollie-hansen-5678185/
About Chris Pendl
Chris Pendl is the founder and principal of Nomadics, a strategy and experience design agency working at the intersection of brand, loyalty and live experiences. He partners with premium outdoor, travel and lifestyle companies to turn experiential marketing into measurable growth, designing membership programs, experiential platforms and brand-led communities that drive retention, advocacy and revenue. Nomadics’ work combines strategic insight with real-world execution, enabling brands to move beyond one-off moments and build lasting customer relationships.
Chris Pendl on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrispendl/
Resources
Airstream: https://www.airstream.com
Nomadics: https://www.nomadics.work
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Greg Kihlström: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of the Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. What if the most valuable brand asset you build this year isn’t a campaign at all, but something your customers pay to show up to? Agility usually gets framed as moving faster, but some of the most durable moves a brand makes are slower ones, building something that runs year after year and being willing to defend the investment before the numbers have caught up to it. Today we’re going to talk about why Airstream built Camp Airstream as an ongoing product rather than a campaign moment, the operational work behind delivering a consistent experience and what it took to fund it internally, and how brand affinity and community turn into something with real economic value. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Molly Hansen, CMO at Airstream, and Chris Pendle, founder
[00:01:31] Greg Kihlström: and principal at Nomadics. Molly and Chris, welcome to the show.
[00:01:35] Mollie Hansen: Thank you.
[00:01:36] Chris Pendl: Good to be here.
[00:01:37] Greg Kihlström: Yes. Looking forward to, looking forward to diving in here in a second. Before we do that, why don’t you each give a little background on yourselves and your roles.
[00:01:45] Mollie Hansen: Sure. So I’m Molly Hansen. I’ve been with Airstream for fifteen years. I can’t believe it’s been that long. [chuckles] and in charge of all marketing as well as experiences.
[00:01:58] Chris Pendl: And I’m Chris Pendl. I run Nomadics, which is a strategy and experiences firm. I’ve worked with Airstream and, and Molly for, for ten of her fifteen years. And, and the through line to our work with Airstream and with other partners is turning brand affinity into something that’s more structural. So not a campaign that spikes, but really an experience that, that people turn, return to. So Camp Airstream is probably one of the clearest expressions of that, and we’ll obviously talk more about what that is.
[00:02:27] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. Well, and, and before we do, I wanna talk a little bit more about Airstream. And, it’s certainly one of those iconic brands that I think a lot of people feel they know. Could you set the stage for our listeners? what’s the core mission of the pro- of the, of the company, and who are the primary customers?
[00:02:45] Mollie Hansen: Sure. So Airstream’s almost a hundred years old. we’re ninety-five this year, so we’re looking-
[00:02:52] Greg Kihlström: Wow
[00:02:52] Mollie Hansen: … forward to our 100th anniversary. as far as I know, we are the oldest still in existence travel trailer company in the US. And our founder, his name was Wally Byam. And the thing that’s really interesting about Wally, and he’s, he’s very inspirational for us today, in everything that we do, and experiences, is, is probably where he started. he, when he started the travel trailer company, he knew that he had to, have people experience the lifestyle in order to sign on. he was an avid outdoorsman, wanted to be in the outdoors, and so his wife wanted to get off the ground and get out of a tent. And so
[00:03:37] Mollie Hansen: he used his ingenuity to figure out how to build trailers. And, but he also knew that he needed to show people how to do this. And so he did caravans, many, many caravans, through South America and Canada and Europe. most famous one is Cape Town to Cairo, as well as around the world caravan. And, and I always say that he was social media before social media, so he was bringing, publicists and people, with him from National Geographic to document the trip so he could come back and show everybody the adventures you could have in a travel trailer. And he also wrote a, a beautiful, it’s– we call it the creed. It’s on our website. but we still, our mission today is to o- is part of the creed, part of something that he said, which is to
[00:04:33] Mollie Hansen: open the whole world of new experiences where travel, adventure, and good fellowship are constant companions. So his idea that you had the… Yes, we, we sell a product, but that product enables you to have these experiences beyond maybe where your imagination could go.
[00:04:52] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think, part of that is, something called Camp Airstream. And for those that may even be familiar with the brand, but not necessarily familiar with Camp Airstream, could, maybe give us the, the concrete version. what is it? Who’s it for? And what does a week there actually look like?
[00:05:11] Chris Pendl: Yeah, sure. Happy to do that. The concrete version is three to seven days at destinations across the US, from music festivals to national parks. The program is designed for owners. And the insight that Molly had when we were in the middle of the pandemic and, and sales were the highest they’ve ever been because road-based travel was one of the, the safe ways that you could still get around, Molly was looking around the corner and saying, “Hey, how do we create stickiness? How do we, how do we put programs in place to drive retention?” And the, the program design really, plays a lot into this. So Camp Airstream is really… Yes,
[00:05:56] Chris Pendl: it’s a-around these iconic destinations, and it’s, it’s getting access to really cool experiences on the music festival side or art, but we’re really intentional about the program design- And when I look at a lot of brand experiences today, most of them are really designed for a spectacle or a photo moment meant to be shared on, on social media to create some FOMO, and they’re not really designed for connection and, and community, which I think is a, is a, is a big missed opportunity. So we really designed Camp Airstream around arrival with rituals, shared meals, having enough unstructured time over the course of either three to seven days for people to really connect and to talk. And a success metric
[00:06:41] Chris Pendl: for us is really looking at saying, these people arrived as strangers, anywhere between 15 to 20 a week, and at the end of the week they’re, they’re starting text groups and planning travel, in- independent of us. So, it’s real exciting to see. And just to give you a, a glimpse on, on what a typical week could look like, at Yellowstone it could be a private tour with guides who know the park really well. we’ll bring in a culinary experience, we’ll bring in some live music. We’ll have a wellness component where people can have comp- complimentary massages, and then a, a lot of intentional program design for people to be able to connect with each other.
[00:07:22] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah, love it. So yeah, let’s, le- let’s dive in here, and I, I think, Chris, you j- you touched on one of the themes that I think is gonna be a through line here, which is that, belonging and, and connection, it’s about more than just a, a campaign or, a few impressions. It, it scales through experiences. So, when, Molly, when, when you took this concept and, and this idea to the rest of the business, what did you have to, promise and what were you willing to be measured on to move resources toward what you call belonging infrastructure?
[00:08:00] Mollie Hansen: Yeah, it’s interesting. So when, during that time, as Chris mentioned, we went from acquisition of new customers to retention of customers. we are in a unique position as a brand to have one of the largest, competitors be ourselves [laughs] Which is a unique situation. and so we were concerned about the used market coming out of the pandemic and what that would do. So I think buy-in to make the brand sticky was easy. I think everyone knew that that was something that we needed to focus on, but we’re not an experiences company. Um-
[00:08:37] Greg Kihlström: Right. [laughs]
[00:08:38] Mollie Hansen: And so there was, there was a little trepidation on what does that look like and how much, how many resources is it gonna take? And so we were very fortunate. Chris, I worked with Chris for years and, he’s easy to call up and say, “Okay, I don’t know how this is all gonna work, but here’s what I wanna do,” and he makes it happen. But I think the promise was we can break even. This is gonna be something that won’t cost the company more money. we’ll be able to, plan it, and I’m convinced that we have a community that wants to do things together, we just have to give them access. And so, I was confident that we would at least break even. Um,
[00:09:23] Mollie Hansen: and then my little, cherry on top was, we could make money at this. but that was never really the intention going into it. The intention was all about the customers. It was whether we had the bandwidth, and the stomach to spend the money, on a, potentially could be a risk to the company. I’m happy to say that it wasn’t. our first year, we did better than breaking even, and, and so I think the company now looks at it as something that we can continue to do, long past an advertising campaign. The other thing I’ll say is that brand advocates, I worked for lots of brands
[00:10:08] Mollie Hansen: where you had to pay for love, and this, this particular Camp Airstream creates more brand advocates, not only about Camp Airstream, but also about the brand. And I think for us moving forward is how is that going to incentivize people to buy Airstreams.
[00:10:29] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think that’s, that’s an important distinction because, a, a marketing campaign has a start date and an end date. It’s, a lot of marketing teams are structured around that, that idea of, we work on one thing ’cause it’s the season or, or whatever, and then we move on to the next thing. Chris, as, as someone who’s not only worked with Airstream, but also with other customers as well, what has to change in how a marketing organization is structured before it can kinda handle this thing that’s never really done, right?
[00:11:04] Chris Pendl: It’s, yeah- And Molly touched on it a little bit too with, Airstream is a, is a product company and, and most marketing teams are, are structured around launching things. And, and so this is very, very different when you look at everything from the budgeting and planning that goes into this, right? a typical campaign is gonna get funded annually, and then you know that, you know when the money stops going out the door because it has a defined end date. When you start to look at Camp Airstream and these types of experiences, especially ones that, that generate income, I start to shift it into like, this is a product, and how is a product organization structured, right? You have a product owner, you have a different, budget cycle and, and, and kind of budget, budget approach that is, is different than, than typical campaigns, and you’re also measuring different things, right? So
[00:12:00] Chris Pendl: building new muscle around, hey, we’re used to impressions and, and CPA and CAC and all of, all of these things- And, and we still look at those for Camp Airstream, but really starting to understand, okay, well what is sell-through rate, and what is the NPS on this experience, and how do we continue to create a consistent experience across a portfolio of products across the US with different partners? So it’s, it’s a different, it’s a different set of muscles I think that go into it, but I think it’s most more closely aligned to how you would see a product organization organized versus a traditional marketing organization.
[00:12:41] Mollie Hansen: I think the other thing that we considered was content. we’re all paying for content. We’re all looking for th-authentic content, and, when you get Airstreamers together in an experience like this, a lot of them wanna talk to you about it, and talk about their other experiences. So one of the things that we, going into this, we thought, “We already have to pay for content. We’re just putting people together in a beautiful place, having a beautiful experience. What if we could get content out of it as well?” So that was, an added bonus.
[00:13:18] Chris Pendl: The, the, a build onto that a-and one example is we did, or we do recap reels and, and content for, from each one of the locations, and some of that content from an organic performance standpoint has been some of the highest engaged content that Airstream has, has published. And, and you start to peel apart, okay, what is driving that? And it’s, it’s real customers, real owners, not influencers, who are, who are out doing the thing, and so the authenticity that sits with it has really been appreciated from a performance standpoint. [gentle music]
[00:14:02] Greg Kihlström: Some campaigns it’s like you create some imagery, and the, the products are already there and, and everything. This is, this, yes, there’s, there’s the promotional aspect of it and, and all of that, but there’s also the processes and the operationalizing of this. So, what were some of the operational hurdles that maybe weren’t obvious from the outside, but obviously there’s a lot going on behind the scenes to, to make this happen and to pr-produce that, that content and, and those experiences?
[00:14:32] Mollie Hansen: [laughs] Yeah. going into it, I think we were, we were more concerned about how to architect the experience itself, and again et the right location and the right partners. So because we weren’t going to get into, owning land and campgrounds we, we needed partners on that side of it to give us the location. and my retail background kinda gave me, an idea. in the retail days, you went into a big department store, and you said, “I…” The brand needed to carve out a little space and make it look and feel like their brand and how they wanted to be represented. And so the idea of let’s, let’s, if, if you think about retail space, and we don’t have that. We’re thinking about a campground. So how do we take a campground in a beautiful place and find a partner that’s willing to let us carve out a little section of their campground and create an Airstream experience? So
[00:15:36] Mollie Hansen: partnership was, was really important and then architecting the program was. But the thing that I don’t think we understood completely going into this is how, how important it was to get camp hosts there, so boots on the ground of people that were real Airstreamers, that were willing to help us, be on site, answer questions, and be the host for the week. And so that’s been– We’ve been very fortunate to find, Airstream lovers, who wanted to, take this challenge on, but I think they’re very instrumental in how the experience goes.
[00:16:17] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and when you, when you get, people that are passionate about a, a product or service, also I, I think some, some unexpected things can happen as well, right? So, I’d be curious, as, as carefully as you can plan a, a campaign and, and all those things, this is, more of a, you describe it more as a, a product, versus a, a campaign. What were some of the unexpected things that owners did that, you hadn’t necessarily designed for, and, and how did the, the program change in response?
[00:16:49] Chris Pendl: We knew that people were going to connect, right? We, we designed this whole thing around connection and community.
[00:16:55] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:16:56] Chris Pendl: The, the level to which that happened, I think, was a surprise to us. So the lesson in that is, we’re designing this container with a program, but the community is ultimately deciding what, what happens within that container. And so when we started to observe that people were creating these friendships at, 10 to 15 strangers and, and figuring out, “Hey, where, where are you going after this?” And starting these, these groups to then go travel in independent, we really started to be intentional and s- and understand what, what made the program design work and how much time is unscheduled versus how much time is programmed. What are the arrival rituals? So when people
[00:17:41] Chris Pendl: are, are joining the group, are starting the week together, how do we start to, to orchestrate that connection with each other? So we, we really wanted to be intentional about that. We learned that in– we observed that and learned that in the pilot, and then as we scaled it to three locations in calendar year ’26 with a couple pop-ups in New York around a music festival, so we’ll have, six instances or five instances of it this year. We really want to make sure that we scaled the right thing, and so being mindful of like, okay, how is this happening, what’s making this successful from a, from a programming and, and facilitation standpoint. And I think that’s really, back to this comparison between a campaign and a product. A campaign, for the most part, you p- you push it
[00:18:26] Chris Pendl: out in the world. Yes, you can optimize it, you can change the creative, you can, you can pull some levers to, to do it, but this, this product notion or approaching these as products where you’re always learning and you’re always iterating and improving the experience, I, I think is, is one of the, the shifts for us when we looked at scaling the program.
[00:18:46] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and so let- let’s talk a little bit about the proving, proving the value here, and certainly, that’s, on the, on the tops of minds for, for many in, in the org here. And, we’ve been talking a lot about that, that belonging and, and connection theme, but that’s maybe a little hard to quantify on a dashboard, for a CFO or, or something like that. So, what, what were the metrics that were tracked for success of, of this, of this product? And, what did you decide was, were, were some of those valuable metrics that, that could not only determine the health of the, of the program itself, but also be, be tied to, to economics?
[00:19:31] Mollie Hansen: Well, sell through. [laughs] because if you think about it like a product, we did– we put a product out there, and we needed to see, how many people would respond because it is unusual for us. it wasn’t something that we were… that people knew us for. And so we– Airstream has a club. it’s not ours. It’s owned by– It’s a separate entity. but we knew that there was, enthusiasts about the brand that already had a c- a community, and so we reached out to them first. it was kind of a safe playground, if you will, [laughs] for us to experiment and see, how many people would be interested in coming to an Airstream experience. And so
[00:20:16] Mollie Hansen: that’s, that’s really, from the get-go, the most important to us is how many– what’s the ideal number of spots and people and duration of the program and, how many people want to participate? Because if it is about community, the big risk here is that you have one or two people sign up. [laughs]
[00:20:36] Greg Kihlström: Right. [laughs]
[00:20:37] Mollie Hansen: And you don’t, you don’t, [laughs] you don’t have all those spots filled, and so that’s the risk. we haven’t y- And we can, we can increase and decrease to a certain degree the number of spots and the duration as needed, but I think making sure that most of the spots, if not all of those spots, were full was very important to the program.
[00:21:00] Greg Kihlström: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, yeah, and Chris, cur- curious your, your take on this as well of, how, how to determine value here.
[00:21:09] Chris Pendl: Yeah. The, the, the thing that i- is, is a huge shift, right, is, is shifting– i- is moving from cost center to profit center. I think that gives us a lot of, a-agency to, to scale the program when we can go back and say, “Hey, this isn’t costing any money, and in fact, it’s, it’s delivering meaningful income to the business.” So that as a whole is a shift and, and, and gives us, space to, to go try some things. The, the other piece of this too is we obsess over the, the MPS. So there’s a, a post-departure survey that gets sent to all the guests, and we’re, we’re always going through that and seeing how, how it lands, and it, hovers in, n-north of s- seventy to, to eighty on that, depending
[00:21:54] Chris Pendl: on the location, which is great. And we’re going through and, and pulling those verbatims and trying to understand the, the themes and, and always reporting that out to the management team so they can have the assurance that, that the program’s on track because it is so different. It is so different than make the product, sell the product, and, and, and make more product. So those, those are some builds I’d add to, to Molly’s answer.
[00:22:16] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. And so, la- last question here as we wrap up. the, this program started as a pilot near Yellowstone, and now it’s running multiple destinations throughout the year. How do you think about both scaling, because there’s, there’s value in, in that, but, what keeps it recognizably Airstream rather than, just some branded program someone else operates? what, what keeps it, coherent?
[00:22:47] Mollie Hansen: Well, I think [laughs] the short answer is they’re all Airstreamers. So all the people participating own the product and, and have their own experiences that they wanna share. So, that, that kind of creates the narrative itself, of using the product. Chris, what would you say?
[00:23:10] Chris Pendl: I, I would say the, the host piece, that, that’s one element that has been– We knew that the people who were facilitating the programming that week and, and the connection element of all of this was really important, but to hear how much it came back in the, in the consumer insights work on how pivotal these, these folks were to the experience. So if, if the, the place is changing, if our campground partners are changing, and the people who are helping deliver the program is changing, there are– there’s this host element, and then with that we can, we can orchestrate a through line to all of this if it’s the different rituals that happen, if it’s the shared meals together that bring people together. So the, it’s that, that layer on top between, the camp host and all the, the varied partners underneath that I think enable us to have continuity across, across locations and formats.
[00:24:08] Greg Kihlström: All right. Well, Molly and Chris, thanks so much for joining today. it’s been great hearing about this, this program. one last question before we wrap up here. what do you each do to stay agile in your roles, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:24:24] Chris Pendl: For me, it’s staying close to the, the delivery, right? I’m, I’m always an advocate for voice of the customer, making sure that wherever we’re, we’re, we’re building the next cycle is rooted in, in some sort of, consumer insight. so for us, and as it relates to Camp Airstream, it’s really making sure we’re staying close to the experience and, and going to every one of these, these particular instances and, and staying really… Talk to these Camp hosts every day about what’s going on on the ground, and continuing to optimize the program and build the playbook and, and, and test the operations. So for me, it’s, it’s that. You could do a strategy deck from anywhere in the world, but, but having the connection to what’s, what’s actually happening when the product is in people’s hands is, is key.
[00:25:11] Mollie Hansen: I, I would say the same. It’s really about making myself available to customers, not only to customers that have been to Camp Airstream, but other people who might be inquiring about it. I just got back from a rally of about 2,000 trailers that came together in, in North Dakota. and the number of people who came up to me and talked to me about Camp Airstream, I gave a presentation on what we’re doing and, and there’s lots of people, they had suggestions about different locations. They had, some people, I f- I saw them wearing T-shirts. They’d been to Yellowstone already. So out of a sea of about, 4,000 people, to have, to have that kind of recognition and have people come up to you and ask questions and want to be, want to participate in some way, that’s validation for me, and I think it’s really important that I stay connected.
