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On any normal day, we're five competing agencies. But when it comes to Mage Camp, we set that rivalry aside to build something rarer: a not-for-profit, no-pitch growth event for eCommerce merchants. Here's the story of why five rivals decided this was worth building together.
If you've ever sat through a conference talk that turned out to be a product demo in disguise, you know the feeling: you came for advice, you got a pitch. We wanted to build a day that never does that to a merchant. A room where every talk earns its place because it's genuinely useful, not because someone paid to be on stage. So we built Mage Camp.
Mage Camp isn't a startup idea we dreamed up over a slide deck. It's a name with history. Back in 2009, Mage Camp launched in London as the first English-language Magento event anywhere in the world, at a time when "eCommerce conference" barely existed as a category. It became significant enough that Magento itself chose that stage to unveil Enterprise Edition, the product line that would eventually become Adobe Commerce, in front of a room of early adopters and a live-stream audience watching from around the globe.
That event was built by people in the ecosystem, for people in the ecosystem, not as a vendor showcase. After years away, we're bringing it back with the same spirit, just rooted in Manchester now and rebuilt for merchants dealing with AI, composable commerce, and a far more competitive online landscape than 2009 ever saw. The name hasn't changed. Neither has the mission: community over competition.
"We" are five agencies who, on any normal working day, are competitors. On Tap, PushOn, GENE Commerce, Foundation Commerce, and Monsoon Consulting pitch against each other, and we definitely don't share client lists over coffee. But when it comes to Mage Camp, a one-day Magento and Adobe Commerce growth event returning to Manchester on 14 October 2026, we set that rivalry aside. Here’s why.
No single agency sees the whole picture. One of us might be deep in retention and lifecycle work, another in performance marketing, another in platform architecture or international expansion. Between the five of us, we cover the full spread of what actually drives eCommerce growth, decades of hands-on experience across acquisition, conversion, retention, and operations, and that breadth is exactly what makes Mage Camp's programme stronger than anything one agency could put together alone.
It also means the event doesn't skew toward one specialism or one client type. Build something with only one agency behind it, and the agenda quietly bends towards that agency's services, its partners, its point of view. We didn't want that. So instead of one of us running it, we pooled people, time, and kit, five agencies who are supposed to be rivals, so a merchant sitting in the room hears from people who've solved genuinely different problems, not one agency's narrow view of what "growth" means. No single agency owns Mage Camp, either: the effort, and the credit, is shared equally across all five of us.
We also don't run this alone in spirit, if not in ownership. Magento Association, the official non-profit trade body for the global Magento and Adobe Commerce community, and Manchester Digital, which roots the event in a thriving local tech scene, both back Mage Camp with their reach and credibility.
This didn't start as a fully-formed plan. It started as a conversation between people at five different agencies who kept running into the same frustration: the best eCommerce events had quietly become sales floors, and the merchants who needed honest advice the most were the ones being pitched to the hardest. Somewhere in that conversation, an idea took shape: what if we built the event we wished existed, one where no one was selling anything, and it belonged to the community instead of to us?
"I remember what Mage Camp meant to this community back in 2009. Bringing it back wasn't about nostalgia; it was about giving merchants something that genuinely doesn't exist anymore: a day with no catch." - Dan Garner, Founder & Managing Director, On Tap.
Turning it into 14 October 2026 has meant plenty of unglamorous work behind the scenes, agreeing on a shared programme when five agencies all have opinions, sourcing a venue, chasing down speakers who've actually got something honest to say. None of it happens by accident, and none of it happens because it's easy. It happens because we kept coming back to the same answer: if we didn't build it, who would?
It's why Mage Camp is, first and foremost, a non-profit event. We aren't here to generate leads or host disguised product demos; we are here to support growth. That distinction shapes everything, from how we pick topics to who ends up on stage.
We hold ourselves to a strict standard: if a session doesn't provide direct, practical value to a merchant, it doesn't make the cut, no matter who is proposing it or how big their brand is. There are no pay-to-speak slots and no hidden agendas, just people who've actually done the work sharing what worked and what didn't.
And it's not something we get to claim once and coast on: every year, every programme, we're re-earning the right to call this not-for-profit. That's exactly how we think it should work.
This same standard shapes the day itself:
If you run an online store, get your free merchant ticket here and come see for yourself.
That's the whole idea behind Mage Camp: a room built for learning, not selling, run by agencies who'd normally be pitching against each other and choosing to put the community first instead. It's taken a fair bit of stubbornness to get here, but we wouldn't have it any other way. We hope you'll be there on 14 October 2026.
We don't want to guess at what you need, though; we want to hear it from you. If there's a topic, a problem, or a format that would make Mage Camp genuinely valuable for your store, tell us. Answer a quick survey and help shape what actually makes it onto the schedule.
Whichever way you want to be involved, we'd love to have you: Get your ticket · Submit a talk · Explore sponsorship
Meet GENE Commerce, one of the five agencies organising Mage Camp 2026. A specialist eCommerce agency focused exclusively on Adobe Commerce and Magento, the company has spent more than a decade building on, contributing to and helping shape the platform, from creating BlueFoot CMS to becoming the UK's only Platinum Member of the Magento Association.
Meet Foundation Commerce, one of the five agencies co-organising Mage Camp. They built the UK's first Hyvä project and now hold Hyvä Platinum Partner status, one of only a handful of agencies to do so. Led by Magento veteran Ryan Copeland, the team focuses on commercially-sequenced growth roadmaps over technical projects for their own sake.
Meet PushON, one of five competing agencies behind Mage Camp 2026. Since 2005, PushON has built a reputation as an enterprise commerce systems integrator, engineering high-performance Adobe Commerce and Magento architectures for complex, high-volume brands. Here's why that engineering-first approach is exactly what it's bringing to Mage Camp.
