Photographs by Shane Van Boxtel, Image Studios  •  Styling by Shalene Enz
Elsewhere Market front window

If “Instagrammable” could be an adjective, apply it to The Elsewhere Collection — a group of hospitality businesses designed by Oshkosh’s Kristen Hoopman, whose aesthetic reflects passions ranging from cozy nooks to thrifting and world travel.

“[Elsewhere] is just a vibe; it’s just cool,” says Discover Oshkosh Executive Director Amy Albright, who has been known to take meetings downtown at Elsewhere Market & Coffee House perched on a leather sofa cradling a cup of New York City-roasted joe discovered by Kristen and her husband, Eric, in Savannah. “[The Hoopmans] are young and hip and traveled, and I think they really try to bring some of that to Oshkosh.”

Rob Kleman, president and CEO of the Oshkosh Chamber, agrees. 

“They’ve always been visionary,” says Kleman, who also happens to be Eric’s uncle. “They’re always one step ahead, thinking ‘will that work?’ and ‘how’s that gonna work?’ They have this uncanny ability to look to the future and then make it happen.”

Gibson Tire Building

Passionate about preservation, Eric and Kristen Hoopman added Oshkosh's historic Gibson Tire building to their portfolio in 2019 and have transformed it into a celebrated event venue.

In the five-plus years since the Hoopmans established The Gibson Social Club — an event and wedding venue in the historic Gibson Tire building — and Elsewhere Market & Coffee House on the 500 block of N. Main St., Oshkosh has become exponentially cooler, Albright says. 

“What they’re doing is incredible,” she says. “It’s everything a director of tourism would want someone to do, right?”

That includes driving wedding and tourism business, which spills over for significant economic impact, Albright says. 

“It creates a ripple effect where people start to say, ‘Hey, if that’s going to be down there, I want to be down there,’” she says. “There’s a lot of momentum, and the Hoopmans are at the heart of that.”

Energy to give

The Hoopmans are enthusiastic world travelers, but Wisconsin will always be home. Eric’s Oshkosh roots run deep, with family members having held prominent community positions and investing in local business and real estate for decades. Kristen is a La Crosse native with a vision for Oshkosh to experience the Main Street revitalization her hometown did. Eric feels similarly inspired by the Gaslight District in San Diego, where he attended college. And though they share a passion for travel and adopted homelands that include Panama and France, they always bring pieces of their travels back to the place where their partnership started.

Eric was minding the counter at one of his many businesses — a downtown Oshkosh women’sfashion boutique he’d opened with an ex-girlfriend — when the woman who would become his wife breezed through the door. Kristen was in town for work from Green Bay, early for a business meeting. The storekeeper looked out of place but was friendly, Kristen says, eager to strike up a conversation that led to the discovery that the two shared a common industry: Eric’s primary job was running his tech startup DealerFire, which provided digital marketing and website services for car dealerships. Kristen was sales manager for Wisconsin Automotive Publishing.

“I don’t know if he was trying to recruit me for DealerFire or if he was trying to date me — he’ll say both,” Kristen says. “We went on our first date in October, and by the next year I was working for DealerFire.”

The company quickly became the couple’s baby, and it grew so quickly it landed a spot on the Inc. 5000 list in 2014. A year later, Eric sold it to California-based DealerSocket. And that, Kristen says, marked a new chapter in their lives.

“It took the sale of DealerFire for us to be like, ‘OK, we have time to do some stuff now,’” she says. “So we got married.”

Today the Hoopmans’ literal babies include son Sam and daughter Lulu, who is named for the boutique where the couple met. The family spends significant time traveling, including winters at their vacation property in Aix-en-Provence, but the entrepreneurial bug certainly hasn’t stopped biting. 

“I felt like we had more, more energy to give, challenges to attack,” Eric says, starting in Oshkosh — which he says he saw, growing up, “move to the frontage road.”

“We lost a lot of great, motivated, creative people to Milwaukee, Madison and Chicago,” he says.

“I just felt a little bit of a push to try and energize creativity in one central city area with historic significance.”

Eric has since started the venture studio Lincoln Labs, the Hoopmans operate a family foundation, and they have continued to invest as a couple in properties and businesses. But their highest-profile project of late has been The Elsewhere Collection, which has been like the Pinterest board in Kristen’s mind coming to life one effortlessly chic spot at a time.

“In the last five years, convincing Kristen to start her business has pushed the whole landscape of downtown forward quite nicely,” Eric says.

Kristen says she’s inspired by beautiful spaces, particularly historically significant ones, and figures out the rest from there. An inspiring work environment is always the place from which she starts.

“It starts out with, how can I make this business make money by hiring … people I want to work with and having it look the way I want it to look,” Kristen says. “It seems kind of simple, but that’s what it is.”

The Elsewhere Collection

While The Elsewhere Collection we know today started with the Hoopmans’ investments in vacation properties, it was the pandemic that shaped the business in many ways. They purchased Gibson, at the time operating as Crescent Moon Antiques, in fall 2019 with designs on creating an impressive event venue.

“And of course, March came, and it was just enough time for us to make our plans and convince a [DealerFire] coworker of ours to quit her job and manage the event space,” Kristen says. 

When mass gatherings fell by the wayside, Eric and Kristen realized their short-term vacation rentals were assets they could leverage. If they could weather the storm, there’d be pent-up wedding and event demand at The Gibson on the other side of the pandemic. This was the genesis of The Elsewhere Collection, bringing the Hoopmans’ rental properties under one neat, well-marketed umbrella. And when the time was right, The Gibson Social Club would become part of the collection, too.

Jessie Krusick, a former DealerFire employee who who serves as The Elsewhere Collection manager, has no regrets about taking a leap of faith to work with the Hoopmans on Elsewhere. Dating back to the DealerFire era, she says, there has always been something special about their leadership.

“The way they treat their people isn’t just like a boss; it’s really like a family member,” Krusick says. “They have so much experience, so much inspiration. They push me to want to do more and they make me feel good about the work I’ve done.”

Elsewhere Oshkosh interior

Elsewhere Market & Coffee House has become a downtown Oshkosh mainstay, especially during the weekly farmers market.

Krusick says the Hoopmans are hands-on leaders, the kind who would never ask someone to do something they weren’t also willing to do. But because the Hoopmans are pretty much willing to do and learn anything, Krusick says, that encompasses a lot: including a crash course on espresso, which she knew nothing about when the Hoopmans decided to open the market and coffee house. The 23,000-square-foot building next door to The Gibson had landed back in their care after the new owners made DealerFire’s employees permanently remote during the pandemic. Krusick says she bought into the vision, rolled up her sleeves, and learned the coffee business.

Elsewhere Jessie Krusick quote

“Kristen and Eric have always been that way. Like, we’ll figure it out. I have an idea; let’s just do it,” she says. “Grab a tool. How hard can it be?”

Thanks to a vision and some elbow grease, Elsewhere Market & Coffee House has quickly become a downtown mainstay, serving coffee and food in a cozy, charming setting that blends seamlessly into a shopping experience filled with treasures like linens and coffee table books inspired by Elsewhere vacation properties, jewelry and perfumes made by Wisconsin artisans, antiques, dried flowers and Ukrainian leather goods. The second floor of the building houses a co-working space, and Lincoln Labs occupies the third.

Gibson Wedding – Paige

At The Gibson Social Club, weddings were, as predicted, booked solid for the first two years after it finally opened. The space is a relatively neutral but elegant canvas for events, punctuated by a jaw-dropping, gleaming wood bar that is another Kristen creation. It started with a reclaimed piece of furniture from a hardware store that was already in the building, she says. “I loved it so much, and honestly, no one wanted to move it, so I redesigned it and had our carpenter turn it into the bar,” Kristen says. 

The Gibson has also started partnering on events with charities like the Oshkosh Art Collective and Christine Ann Center as well as hosting its own events like German Beer Hall nights with authentic music.

“One of [the Hoopmans’] strengths as entrepreneurs is all the different things they’re trying,” Albright observes. “They don’t get stuck in a rut; they try things they think would be fun.”

‘We bought a camp’

Of all the things Kristen has always thought would be fun to try, perhaps the most ambitious yet is bringing to life her vision for a glamorous Wisconsin summer camp. 

“I romanticized summer camps,” she says. “I went to summer camp as a kid; I just loved this idea. Eric really loved the idea of investing in Wisconsin in some land that was going to be part of our family’s legacy we could hold onto forever — but if we could make some money while holding onto it forever, that’d be good, too.”

The process of finding and buying 60 acres on Gooseneck and McLean lakes in Waupaca was not a quick one, but once it was theirs Camp Elsewhere became an all-encompassing project. 

The 2011 film “We Bought a Zoo” chronicles the renovation of a dilapidated zoo as a family’s livelihood. Kristen likens the story of Camp Elsewhere to the film: “Hey, we bought a camp.”

Elsewhere Kristen Hoopman quote

“That first summer, like, I pretty much lived there — painted and did all kinds of jobs I did not know I would ever do, from taxidermy to sealing up mouse holes and blowing in insulation,” she says. “I can’t say why I had this dream, other than this very romantic idea of a camp, and

I would say the reality matches pretty closely to the dream. It feels not like the summer camp I did as a kid, but it is the summer camp I enjoy as an adult, that’s for sure.”

Laura Brackley is Camp Elsewhere’s venue director. A Wyoming native with a hospitality background, she connected with Kristen through a friend and one day found herself at Camp Elsewhere helping screw together 100 chairs while chatting with Kristen about her vision.

“And [the conversation] just kind of snowballed into, do you want to run the joint?” Brackley says. Now it’s the most diverse, exciting and engaging job she’s held.

Camp Elsewhere opened in 2023 as an Instagrammable lakeside paradise featuring a rec hall, main hall that seats 100 for dinner, a party tent for larger gatherings, six cabins and a chapel as well as glamping tents for couples, family tents, and a charming vintage trailer camp featuring refurbished 1970s Shastas. For a destination wedding, the campground provides accommodations for guests and ample amenities for the bridal party. Each space at Camp Elsewhere bears Kristen’s design signature as well as her blood, sweat and tears, and Eric regularly comes to Waupaca to chop wood and do odd jobs.

Camp Wedding canoe

Weddings have been the backbone of Camp Elsewhere’s business, Brackley says. The camp operates pretty seasonally — the tents come down when the weather turns, and the Shastas get winterized — but they are experimenting with the concept of winter weddings. Last year, Krusicks was the first. Growth opportunities for Camp Elsewhere include booking more midweek stays, including corporate retreats, couples’ or family getaways, or possibly expanding food and beverage operations in the main hall.

Right now, Brackley says, a visit to Camp Elsewhere sells itself.

“Everyone who comes here, they’re like, thank you so much for the tour,” Brackley says. “They’re like, the photos are good but they don’t do it justice. There’s something about all the components; Kristen has created such an aesthetic that makes it feel rich or generous, in a way.”

Kristen says she hopes Camp Elsewhere is not just a legacy, but an inspiration to her children.

“You can be successful and run successful businesses, and you can do it another way,” she says. “A lot of people think you can only find success in the big cities with flashier jobs. I hope they’re learning that’s not necessarily the case.”

Elsewhere Collection bio