Advent Blog

A new arti­cle in Business Week notes the rise of ‘Pop Up Shops’ around the coun­try. Ever watch­ful for a new way to con­nect with audi­ences, brand mar­keters have devel­oped the con­cept of the ‘Pop up Shop,’ (a short run­ning retail space strate­gi­cally placed to be most acces­si­ble to the store’s core demo­graphic). Mixing the cen­tral ideas of a tradeshow (show­case new prod­ucts to the most enthu­si­as­tic of con­sumers) and a retail space, pop up shops are the newest and bright­est of expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing efforts.

Pop up shops are about sur­pris­ing con­sumers with tem­po­rary ‘per­for­mances.’ In effect, retail­ers guar­an­tee exclu­siv­ity of prod­ucts because of the lim­ited times­pan in which they are avail­able. Retailers from Brazilian cos­met­ics firm Oceanic to low end chic retailer Target have opened such shops across the world tar­get­ing their own spe­cific markets.

Oceanic didn’t have the funds to build a brick and mor­tar store­front but wanted to have a real world pres­ence for it’s busi­ness. As such, they decided to go mobile, equip­ping most of their fran­chisees with Fiat Doblo mini­vans, which are both deliv­ery vehi­cles AND shops. These mobile stores make it easy to tar­get prime con­sumer loca­tions such as uni­ver­si­ties, schools, hos­pi­tals, parks, and trade shows. Not to men­tion cus­tomiza­tion: the mobile store’s inven­tory can be cus­tomized for dif­fer­ent loca­tions (i.e. if a frachisee parks near a beach, he or she’d bet­ter stock up on sun­screen and sun­tan lotions!).

Target, on the other hand, wanted to pro­mote the launch of Isaac Mizrahi’s new wom­ens cloth­ing line with the fran­chise. To do so they opened up a tem­po­rary 1500 sq. feet store in Rockefeller Center to cel­e­brate Mizrahi’s styl­ish new looks. The glossy store was open from 4 September to 15 October 2003 only. Further, last year, Target actu­ally housed a tem­po­rary float­ing store on the Hudson River for the Christmas season.