Why We Go to Camp Every Year

The story behind Kumbaya and how it keeps the Peak Design magic alive.

By Peak Design

November 24^th, 2025

At the end of October, Peak Design held our annual company offsite (or ‘Kumbaya’ as we call it) at Fallen Leaf Lake, about a mile southwest of Lake Tahoe. The following Field Note was written by our Head of People, Jen Flaxman, as she reflects on our yearly tradition of getting weird in the woods together.

I went to summer camp for a long time. Longer than most people probably should. Over the course of 16 years, I cycled through every phase: camper, junior counselor, full-fledged counselor, color war general (IYKYK), and eventually full-time staff post-college. As a kid, camp felt magical because it was the first place where I got to be independent and try entirely new things. But as a counselor, the magic shifted. It became about the people, a wild mix of humans who somehow shared the same values despite coming from totally different places. You worked at camp because you were up for an adventure. Because you wanted to welcome new friends. Because you genuinely wanted to create something fun and ridiculous and unforgettable for your campers.

Working at camp is also quite strange because you don’t just work there; you live there, eat there, and sleep there. Work-life and life-life become impossible to untangle. Sure, that can get messy, but it also creates these fast-forming relationships, a kind of immediate trust, and this inevitable merging of the personal you and the professional you. Camp was the first place I learned that being yourself, your actual, unedited, authentic self, could be the glue that holds a group together.

Eventually, I left camp and spent the next 15 years working in the People space. Somewhere between facilitating workshops, planning company parties, and designing employee recognition programs, I realized I’ve basically spent my entire life coordinating some flavor of “corporate-mandated fun.” It gets a bad rap, sure, but there’s something truly special about working with people you actually like and can have fun with, because that joy shows up in the work, too. You loosen up. You take creative risks. You bring a slightly goofier, more honest version of yourself to a brainstorm because you just screamed your head off together during a Peak Design Olympics “scream and dash” event.

At Peak Design, we talk a lot about making the best things™️: building innovative products that are guaranteed for life. But just as important as building things that last is building a company that lasts. And part of what makes us who we are as an employer is that we’re not afraid to blur the line between the personal and the professional. The products we make have to be thoughtful and market-ready, sure, but we’re also designing things that we’re genuinely stoked to use ourselves. Our YouTube videos teach you how to use our products, but they also highlight the…strong personalities…and the quirky humor of the people who make up Peak Design. Even our 13 company work principles, like “Have hard conversations,” only truly work if the two people having that conversation are invested in each other not just as colleagues but as human beings, or better yet, as friends. On both the professional and personal level.

As someone whose personality was basically shaped by my time at summer camp, there’s something deeply familiar and meaningful about spending a week surrounded by trees, water, and mountains. So for me, one of the most special aspects of working at Peak Design is that I get a taste of that camp-era feeling of connection during our annual company offsite, Kumbaya, held at Stanford Sierra Camp, right on Fallen Leaf Lake in South Lake Tahoe, CA. Bringing 75 people together for a week is no small feat, but it continues to be one of the most worthwhile investments we make in our culture.

As our CEO Pete said at the start of our 2025 Kumbaya in October: this is our way of pushing back against the natural entropy that sets in when teams are spread across the country and around the world. It’s a pause button. A reset. A chance to look around and remember why we love doing what we do. It’s also our once-a-year opportunity to reinvest in the personal relationships that help make our collective work experience so meaningful.Being on the grounds of a literal summer camp allows everyone at Peak Design to make that reinvestment in their own way. For some folks that's an 18 mile mountain bike ride, for others it’s a peaceful kayak on the lake, or playing ukulele by the fire, or exploring the natural beauty behind a camera lens. And for some - like me - it’s dancing to the new Taylor Swift.

I haven’t been to every Kumbaya, but I feel pretty confident saying 2025 was our best one yet. The weather was perfect, the agenda was thoughtful, the vibes were golden. And most importantly: we had a damn good time together. The whole week had that quintessential Peak Design balance of intentionality and absolute chaos. We deepened our understanding of one another during an Enneagram workshop, and later found ourselves at a surprise DJ set with DJ Eton (who manages our LA store). We asked Pete some tough questions during a fireside AMA, then dove into a highly competitive - and to my knowledge, completely made up - game that truly took teamwork to a new level. And lest we forgot, it was Brooke’s birthday. I would say it was unhinged in all the right ways.

I left feeling deeply grateful to work alongside this creative, unpredictable, endlessly passionate crew, and honored to help protect whatever this weird, wonderful Peak Design magic is.