High rents and the increasing popularity of online shopping have together created a perfect storm of trouble for the traditional brick-and-mortar retail space. But these very same trends are helping a non-traditional kind of retail space to thrive: the pop up store.
Pop up stores are simply temporary freestanding shops which remain at a single site for a period of anything from one day to two or three months. Originally regarded almost exclusively as a marketing tool for launching new products, they’re now being used in wider variety of locations and forms (such as portable kiosks, thematic cafes and shop-in-shop) in a wider variety of roles, such as complementing online promotions as part of an O2O strategy.
Places like Macau are leading the way in exploring – and expanding – the limits of what pop ups can do. In Macau’s case, its status as a “pop up lab” owes much to the sheer volume and variety of visitors to the city – all potential consumers representing a very broad cross-section of the upper reaches of the market from places like Greater China, Japan and Korea. It’s fertile ground for testing the latest ideas and technologies, and not surprisingly, pop up stores are proving successful there.
What the first wave of pop ups is showing is that for brands, the stores’ appeal is all about “bang for the buck”: a pop up store can create immediate connections with customers, increase sales, raise brand awareness, and/or test a new market or product – and all for as little as 20% of the cost involved in launching a traditional retail space. The physical presence of a well-planned and creatively branded pop up can combine with digital marketing and social media to increase both awareness and footfall.
In other words, a well-executed pop-up can be an ideal O2O solution, offering more revenue and higher margins.
A different experience for shoppers
But as with any retail proposition, success for the pop up store depends largely on being in the right place at the right time, with something consumers actually want. And what do they want? Because the pop up is a different kind of shop, consumers expect them to offer a different kind of experience.
This can mean more specialised shopping – perhaps a more seasonally or locally fine-tuned assortment of products or services than that found in traditional stores, or a selection centred around an entirely new and novel product. Polls have also found that consumers expect pop up stores to offer “optimal pricing”, greater convenience, and more fun than conventional shops.
One-stop shops for pop up shops
With pop up stores being such a retail and marketing phenomenon, it’s no surprise that an entire industry has sprung up behind the scenes to offer all the services necessary to create them. Some companies, like Storefront, has been called “the Airbnb of Pop Up Space”, and works as a market platform that connects brands like Chloé, Giorgio Armani, L’Oréal and Maje, with pop up store spaces in cities across the globe.
