How can a pop-up store help you improve your retail business?
The idea of a pop-up store (or, in a wider sense, pop-up venue, whether it be a store, a club or a theatre) dates back to the beginning of the Third Millennium: it’s between 2005 and 2010 that in London and other England’s big cities, the first temporary short-term stores came over. The idea of pop-up venues for temporary commercial or cultural events is still persisting in the whole of UK, and occasionally it invaded the rest of Europe, in particular the northern countries (Germany, Belgium, Netherlands). But it’s in the United States, and in particular in New York, that this peculiar trading strategy has settled down in the most successful and profitable way. Today, a big part of the notorious Fashion Center in Manhattan (which is not just a collector of fancy showrooms, but also the homeland of many fine sewing artisans) is occupied by pop-up stores: and if a newcomer wants to get his Garment District showroom, he will probably choose this kind of logistic solution.
If we focus on the pop-up stores phenomenon, we can realize that it goes along with the persistent crisis that is affecting the real estate business in the U.S. way before the pandemic. Using a pop-up store is basically the simplest way to cope with this crisis (sometimes in addition to some of the most unconventional solutions that the business galaxy has ever known): instead of owning a permanent shop, many retail business operators prefer to exploit a temporary selling point, trying to optimize their time and energy. The vantage points of this choice are several. Here below we have listed the main ones.
1. You can optimize your resources – Not only time and energy, like we said before, but also labor force and money to invest in your enterprise. A temporary selling point reduces your financial exposure to the strict minimum necessary: you just have to identify the best conditions for your business in terms of location and time frame, and focus all your energies on this short period of time, in order to achieve as much as possible.
2. You can create small events – Not just one, but a series of events on a regular basis, with the frequency you think is more appropriate. This will give the potential buyers the idea of something that they couldn’t miss, and create a sort of hype around the items that you are going to put on sale.
3. You can enhance your own motivation – Having a relatively small-time frame to exploit will force you to put all your motivation in your sales activity. Many studies confirm that, when it comes with retail, a positive pressure can increase the volume of transactions: in this case, having a shop that is bound to close by a certain date should push you – and your coworkers – to give your best performance as salespeople.
4. You can work without a stockroom – One of the main vantage points of a small-time shop is having the chance to expose all the goods that you have on sale, without keeping anything behind. No warehouse leftovers, no extra charges for an external storehouse: what the customers see is what you want to sell them. And this will further enhance this “now or never” feeling that you want to create and transmit to your client base.
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