FYT
A consulting agency, regrettably
FYT
Five Years Too Early

We build the thing everyone says is too early. Then we wait for everyone. FYTE is a consulting agency for ideas whose time hasn't come yet. (It will. We've checked.)

THE MARKET, NOW YOU, WITH US · +5 YRS
01 / Who we are

Not consultants.
Convicted builders.

FYTE is run by people who build the things big companies talk about in offsites. A retail chain giants paid to be inside of. A media company's commerce arm turned into a real merchant. Interactive shopping live at the scale of the world's largest retailer.

We are not a consultancy in the airport-business-book sense. We're the guys who say "fuck that" and do ground-up construction in a weekend.

The name is the diagnosis. Experiential retail before "experiential" was a budget line. Creator commerce before the term had a conference. Shoppable video while everyone else was A/B-testing thumbnails. Everything we make arrives about five years before the market does.

We've stopped fighting it. Now we sell it. We define what's next in tech, culture, and retail before the world knows what's coming. If you want to know what your industry does in 2031, we're already doing it — first, and best.

On The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
THE TONIGHT SHOW · WITH LENO, 2013
Entrepreneur Magazine cover, August 2011
ENTREPRENEUR · THE COVER, AUG 2011
On stage at LeWeb Paris
LEWEB PARIS · ON STAGE, 2012
Speaking at Fortune Brainstorm Tech
FORTUNE BRAINSTORM TECH · 2015
Premiere night of the Quirky television series
SUNDANCE CHANNEL · OUR TV SHOW PREMIERE, 2011
02 / What we do

Things that don't fit
in your org chart

A
Zero → One Invention
Product, brand, or business unit — from napkin to shelf. We compress the part that takes big companies three years and eleven steering committees into a quarter.
B
Corporate Speed Transplants
Teaching billion-dollar organisms to move like they have rent due Friday. Fewer approvals, faster prototypes, decisions made by people who've met a customer.
C
Marketing & Storytelling
Campaigns, manifestos, launch films, brand worlds people actually repeat at dinner. We once turned a bank collapse into a national ad moment in a single night — story is the product's second job.
D
Digital Strategy
Where the brand lives online and why: platforms, content engines, commerce funnels, community. Built by people who ran a media company's commerce arm, not by a framework slide.
E
Retail as Theater
Stores people cross town for. Physical experiences that generate content, community, and — quaintly — revenue. We invented the magic door. We'll invent yours.
F
Commerce Content
Shoppable, interactive, measurable media at catalog scale. Hundreds of thousands of SKUs, each with a story. Yes, we've done it at the world's largest retailer.
G
Adult Supervision (Optional)
Founder-grade operating help for teams mid-leap: negotiations, partnerships, launches, and the weeks where everything is on fire and the deck won't help.
03 / Who we roll with

Small teams.
Enormous logos.

Teams assembled for bespoke projects

FYTE has no headcount and likes it that way. For each engagement we assemble a crew — engineers, industrial designers, showrunners, toy makers, set builders, negotiators — from a bench of people we've shipped with before. They show up, build the thing, and disband like a heist crew.

You don't pay for our overhead, because there isn't any.

Big brands, trying to act fast & small

Our clients are giants who remember being scrappy and want the feeling back. Fortune 50 retailers, hundred-year-old entertainment houses, brands with more lawyers than we have collaborators.

They come to us when the innovation lab produced a lanyard and a pilot that never shipped. We ship.

Walmartinteractive commerce, at scale
Disneyimmersive retail experiences
NikeNike Kids CAMP
Starbucksloyalty experiences & in-store tech experiences
GEco-branded invention platform
BuzzFeedcommerce from the inside
Scotts Miracle-Grolawn care, but interactive
Bluey x CAMPyes, the dog

* Work performed across FYTE engagements and founder-led ventures (CAMP, BuzzFeed, eko, Quirky). Logos belong to their owners, who have excellent lawyers.

04 / Founder

Ben Kaufman

Ben Kaufman builds companies that teach giant ones how to move. He founded CAMP, the family-experience retail chain behind the magic door on Fifth Avenue, and ran it through five cities, four Disney worlds, and one very public bank collapse it out-marketed overnight. Before that he was BuzzFeed's CMO, building the commerce machine everyone else now copies. Today he's President of eko, running interactive shopping at Walmart scale.

The credentials go back further: mophie, founded at 18 and sold at 20. Quirky, founded at 22 — youngest ever on Inc.'s 30 Under 30, a CBS Sunday Morning profile, a GE partnership, and yes, the flameout. He'll tell you about it before you ask. That's rather the point.

The through-line: an allergy to waiting. FYTE is that allergy, invoiced.

CERTIFIED PREMATURE SINCE 2005
Inc. 30 Under 30 — youngest ever, at 20 Fast Company Most Creative People CBS Sunday Morning Tribeca Disruptor Honoree NYT · WIRED · BBC · CNBC
The record

Every era, every swing. Batting average: early.

NOW
FYTEFounder
This agency. Bespoke teams, enormous logos, ideas five years ahead of schedule. You're soaking in it.
2025 →
ekoPresident
Interactive, shoppable content for hundreds of thousands of products at the world's biggest retailers — and teaching machines to understand products the way barcodes taught them to identify products.
2023
BANKRUNCAMP × SVB
Silicon Valley Bank collapsed with CAMP's cash inside. By morning, a national campaign with promo code BANKRUN was live. Forbes made a documentary about it. The FDIC was still in meetings.
2018–23
CAMPFounder & CEO
A family experience company disguised as a toy store: the magic door on Fifth Avenue, rotating themed worlds, counselors instead of cashiers, five cities. Collabs with Disney (Mickey & Friends, Encanto, The Little Mermaid), Nike, Bluey, and Paw Patrol. Retail as media, media as retail.
2020
Camp by WalmartCAMP × eko × Walmart
100 interactive episodes built in a pandemic sprint — Neil Patrick Harris as head counselor, LeBron on sports, Drew Barrymore doing makeup blindfolded. Shoppable end to end, inside the Walmart app.
2015–18
BuzzFeedCMO / Head of Commerce
Turned a media company into a merchant: Tasty cookware in thousands of Walmart stores, the Tasty One Top smart cooktop synced to 1,700 recipe videos, Product Labs, a cheese gun that sold out twice. "Creator commerce" before the term existed.
2016
HomesickCo-founder
Candles that smell like the state you grew up in. Nostalgia-as-product, scaled on pure internet emotion, before DTC discovered feelings.
2014
Winkvia Quirky
Smart-home platform on shelves at Home Depot and Best Buy while "smart home" still meant a Clapper. Early by five years, minimum. Ask your smart speaker.
2013–15
Quirky + GEPartnership
Co-developing 30 connected products with a 130-year-old industrial giant — Aros the smart AC, Pivot Power Genius — years before anyone's fridge had opinions.
2009–15
QuirkyFounder & CEO
Made invention accessible: a million-inventor community shipping new products weekly, $185M raised, every big-box shelf in America, a Sundance Channel series — then a bankruptcy loud enough to earn business-school case studies. Scar tissue is a credential.
2007–08
KlusterFounder
Crowd decision-making platform that built a product live at TED in 72 hours. Robin Williams played with it on stage. Community-powered everything, before crowdfunding was a category.
2005–07
mophieFounder
Founded in high school on the parents' home equity. Best in Show at Macworld 2006, sold in 2007, lived on in everyone's backpack. The origin story.
05 / The tapes

Roll the archive

Played from our own tape library — no buffering, no takedowns, no permission slips.

"Quirky, the mother of online invention"CBS Sunday Morning
Retail Media 2.0: content is the new merchandisingBoF VOICES · 2020
CAMP comes to Burlington MallCBS Boston
Robin Williams plays Kluster at TED2008. Yes, really.
06 / Contact

Call before
it's obvious