Kim Campbell ’16 had a dilemma. Flying often for work and leisure, the StFX honours finance graduate knew her travels weren’t eco-friendly and she wanted to do something about it.
It was early 2020. At the time, she’d spent about five years working in finance in Toronto, and Ms. Campbell was looking for a creative outlet. She was looking to perhaps expand into her own business.
When her job slowed down that spring due to the start of the COVID-19 global pandemic, she began to research the logistics of starting a business that would meet a need she saw to support zero-waste travel. She started thinking about what small steps she could take to reduce her impact. Six months later, Keepsie Kits was born.
“I realized how unstainable I was. Not only with the flights, but getting takeout, without a cutlery set, not having a tote bag for groceries,” says Ms. Campbell, a Vancouver, BC native who is now living the life of a digital nomad, working remotely and focused on slow travel.
She designed Keepsie Kits to address the environmental impact of disposable, single-use products by offering essential, lightweight, and compact products to make the switch to sustainable travel easy. As a business traveler, she says there is an unwritten rule you only travel with carry-on. She wanted lightweight products that made this possible. She also wanted to educate business and leisure travellers about reducing their environmental footprint.
Keepsie Kits launched in October 2020, and about a year later she quit her job with Canada Pension Plan Investments to run the business fulltime. She also started her journey as a digital nomad.
After four years at the helm, Ms. Campbell decided a few months ago to exit the business.
“The economics of shipping a physical product in Canada eventually didn’t make sense to run it in its current form,” she says.
She has since started her own financial consultancy business with a focus on working with small business. She continues to be a digital nomad, reached for this interview in Mexico City.
Even though she is moving on, Ms. Campbell says starting and running Keepsie Kits has been particularly rewarding and transformative.
An especially appealing factor of becoming an entrepreneur was the flexibility of time and location it gave her. She was able to use this flexibility to travel slowly, to put temporary roots down in places and experience each more fully. She also welcomed the ability to focus on a business that interested her and she was passionate about.
Ms. Campbell says entrepreneurship brings interesting opportunities to learn.
As a finance major, she notes she didn’t bring a sales or marketing background into the business with her—but she certainly learned these skills after launching.
Attending StFX helped equip her with the ability to learn new things, she said. As a liberal arts university, Ms. Campbell benefitted from taking courses both in and outside of the Schwartz School of Business. And she was heavily involved in campus life. “At a small school, it was quite easy to get plugged in outside my pure education and learn a lot about different areas, broadening my perspective.”
While Ms. Campbell leaned heavily into social responsibility in her startup venture, she says she’s not the only StFX graduate to do so. The reason? It could have to do that at StFX you feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself, she muses. “StFX does foster a place where people are more aware of other people, and it fosters an idea of giving back. People want that to continue.”
