How a Popup Camper Changed the Way I Think About Ownership

Summer 2012

A few summers ago I bought a popup camper. Brand new, $5,500 USD, and worth every penny — or so I told myself as I signed the paperwork.

My family of five absolutely loved it. Weekend trips, summer adventures, the kids piling in with their sleeping bags and that particular kind of excitement that only happens when you’re sleeping somewhere that isn’t your bedroom. Those were good times. Real ones.

But here’s the thing nobody tells you when you buy a camper: you use it for maybe two weeks a year. The other fifty weeks it sits in your backyard, doing nothing, slowly reminding you of the payments you’re still making on something you’re not using.

I’d look at it out the kitchen window and do the math. The purchase price. The insurance. The maintenance. Divided by the number of nights we actually slept in it. It wasn’t a pretty calculation.

So I did something that felt a little strange at the time — I listed it for rent.

What happened next is the reason Toy & Tool exists.

That summer, while my family was off doing other things, the camper was out making money. Not a fortune — just enough. Enough that when we wanted to go deep sea fishing, we went. When the kids wanted a go-kart track afternoon, we said yes. When my wife wanted a weekend away that didn’t involve sleeping in a field, we made it happen. The camper paid for our summer in ways the camper itself never could have.

But the part that stayed with me wasn’t the money.

It was a message I got from one of the families who rented it. They had three kids, roughly the same ages as mine. They’d never been camping before — couldn’t afford to buy the gear, weren’t sure the kids would even like it. They rented my camper for a long weekend and sent me a photo afterward: three kids absolutely filthy, grinning ear to ear, standing in front of a campfire.

They couldn’t have done that without someone else’s camper sitting available in a backyard. And I couldn’t have paid for our summer without someone willing to rent it.

That’s the whole idea. That’s Toy & Tool.

Most of us own things we barely use. A kayak that comes out twice a summer. A power washer that gets used once a year. A set of tools for that renovation project that’s been “almost finished” for three years. A bike that deserves more road time than it gets.

Those things cost money to buy, money to maintain, and they sit there — valuable, idle, and quietly adding up.

Meanwhile, somewhere nearby, someone else wants to use exactly that thing. They don’t want to buy it. They just want the experience it provides, for a weekend, for a day, for one afternoon.

Toy & Tool is the connection between those two people and how a community was created.