Pop-Up Shop Video

3 Reasons Why Pop-Up Shops Work

3 Reasons Why Pop-Up Shops Work

Pop-up shops are a big deal these days. You’ve been seeing them everywhere.

I believe I first experienced pop-up shops back in the early 2000s. After the dot-com bust in San Francisco, there were a ton of empty storefronts and spaces and they needed something to do with those empty spaces. Then I started to see a lot of little shops and little types of short-term events popping up all over the city. I really think this craze started back then, which is a long time ago, and is now catching up.

Now, you see e-commerce stores launch pop-up shops as well as brick-and-mortar stores. You also see other retailers using pop-up shops to get themselves into other markets, do marketing activations, and really to do one big thing – get in front of their customers.

In this digital age, where customers can buy anything online, they still look for customer-facing sellers and products they can see and touch. In fact, customers get digital marketing fatigue, especially if you see all of these targeted ads running everywhere. With pop-up shops, the brand owner is able to touch base with customers and get an amazing opportunity to test a variety of different strategies to help enrich and improve their brand.

Here are the 3 reasons why I believe pop-up shops work.

1. Pricing & Merchandising Insights

Pop-up shops get you feedback from customers and help you analyze if pricing and merchandising strategy are working. The first factors that you get to test are pricing and merchandising. Pricing is critical and essential to the longevity of your business. You want to understand how people are responding to price points, how they feel and understand the collection, what your merchandising strategy is, and if that’s really getting across. There is no better way to get that information than to actually hear it from your customers. I don’t want you to be following your customers around the store, just have your sales associates get the information for you. At the end of the day, it will prove how helpful getting this feedback from your customers really is.

2. Closer Access to Influencers & Customers

Pop-up shops give you closer access to influencers and potential customers. The second reason you need to be doing these pop-up shops is because they give you an access point to create the world of your brand for influencers, editors, stylists, potential consumers, or anyone that’s going to be consuming your content. In essence, the pop-up shop becomes another media touchpoint for your business. This is very, very, very important. It takes, on average, about six different touchpoints to get a customer to buy. How amazing if you can create those touchpoints digitally, drive them to a pop-up shop, and close the sale at the store.

3. Additional Revenue

There is a great opportunity to earn big from well-planned pop-up shops. There is an opportunity to make a huge amount of revenue at a successfully planned pop-up shop. The key operative word is “successfully-planned” pop-up shop. You certainly need to spend some time developing your sales strategy, meaning, inventory quantities, the price points…. If the goal of the event is to do something such as a sale, holiday event, or new collection-based pop-up, you’ve got to align your vision and strategy to make sure you plan with success.

  • Find the right location
  • Understand sales-per-square-foot (how much money you need to be bringing in for every square foot of the space in order for it to be profitable)
  • Have a good understanding of what marketing drivers you’re going to use to get people into the store

To successfully plan a pop-up shop takes a little bit of time and planning. It also takes some resources – whether you are launching for one evening, over the weekend, or for a three-month-long event. All of these things are going to take the right amount of resource partners to be able to successfully get off the ground.

Pop-up shops are not going away. This is not some kind of marketing fad. In fact, as we start to see brick-and-mortar stores evolve and take on new shapes and forms, you’re going to see even more pop-up shops within other shops. Pop-up shops are where it’s going.Your customers want to engage with you, engage with your product, and they want to be able to experience what it is you want to show them and take them into that world.

I hope I inspired you to take action to think about including pop-up shops as part of your marketing strategy this year. Head on over to scalingretail.com. We have a lot of great blog information, topics on pop-up shops, and more resources for you.