CAMPER: Talking about brand extension!?

"Europe’s craziest company has just opened the world’s weirdest restaurant. But being completely cuckoo is still second-placed to making lots of money. "
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On the menu: nuts
Europe’s craziest company has just opened the world’s weirdest restaurant. But being completely cuckoo is still second-placed to making lots of money.
Barcelona has a new restaurant. Which isn’t a restaurant.Not because it doesn’t serve food. It does.

Not because it doesn’t have tables or chairs. It doesn’t. Not because you can bring your bicycle in. You can. And not because – while you eat stuffed rice-balls with your fingers – you’re offered big screen images of, say, sports events or pop concerts. You aren’t. Diners are treated to pictures of donkeys in Majorca. While listening to soothing sounds of the sea.

The owner of the new non-restaurant, the Fluxa family, also owns Camper, whose 3.5m pairs of shoes sold in 60 countries last year have become such a revered brand that Nicole Kidman celebrated her divorce in them and British rockers Noel and Liam Gallagher appeared on an Oasis album cover wearing them.

Miguel Fluxa, aged 28, is the latest family member to enter the Camper management. It’s tempting to tell him that he is a bit bonkers. His inclination is to agree. “We have a history of it in the family,” he says. “We have to live with it.”

Camper is, undoubtedly, Europe’s craziest company. It decided to go into food after its in-house think-tank concluded: “Today, we have lost our culture. We live in a new era of culinary insecurity. People lack the basic understanding of food. Cooking is no longer taught at home or in schools.”

To put the world’s kitchens to rights, the Fluxa family has launched the first Camper FoodBALL in Barcelona’s Raval district. “It is not a bar or a restaurant,” says Fluxa. “It’s a way of understanding food culture.’

The venture appears to lack any business imperative. But the fact is that Camper is crazy about preserving the double-digit percentage profi ts it made on its sales worth €170m a year.