These are our top five tips for pop-ups:
Know Your Location
Whether you’re in Boston, MA, or Brevard, NC, creating a pop-up shop can be successful as long as you consider a few things. Although online shopping is stronger than ever, brick-and-mortar retail isn’t going anywhere. However, it’s essential to know what your location’s strong points are when considering the best approach to opening a pop-up shop.
Knowing your location also means knowing the timing of when will work best for your pop-up. If your business has holiday-themed items, hosting a pop-up shop to coincide with your city’s holiday decorations can be an easy way to draw customers in for their holiday shopping. If you’re in Boston, chances are you can find a play on the area’s love of lobster if that’s your goal. The possibilities are truly endless. You could create your event around an art festival, concert, special event, a food festival, or even time of year. Knowing how to best align your business and brand with the work that’s already in progress be an easy way to create added publicity.
Create Pop-Up Partnerships
Thinking about publicity brings us to partnerships. The best in partnerships create experiences that you can’t find anywhere else. The same applies to creating a pop-up shop. A modern décor retailer may partner with an online-only beauty brand, or a brand only available in a specific geographic location, to allow customers to try new looks while showcasing unique storage solutions. Retailers could also partner with a local artist to create one-of-a-kind modern décor home accessories available at a Boston pop-up shop but nowhere else. This helps add the “fear of missing out” aspect to your pop-up, which is never a bad idea!
In addition to providing a way to cut costs, joining forces with another brand can help bring added publicity to your pop-up shop and brand by exposing your items to new customers. Take time to share ideas with your partner or partners on how your brands can make the most of their shared space for increased growth, revenue, and popularity.
A great example of this is the FRIENDS Pop-Up Shop that has taken the country by storm. Arriving in Boston at the end of 2019, this sitcom-themed pop-up has brought to life the sets that millions of viewers fell in love with. For the sake of notoriety, you can’t beat it. But we guarantee you there will be pop-up shop owners taking advantage of the publicity — as well as the partnerships to be made!
Excite Without Overwhelming
There’s a difference — and a very fine line — between going overboard and creating a space that’s fun and unique. Refinery29 created a masterful demonstration of the complicated relationship between excitement and sensory overload with its funhouse tours. It’s essential to strike a balance between your products and the space that houses them, which means knowing your goals. If selling a product is the most important to you, you’ll want to design a space that encourages your visitors to follow through with their retail desires. If you want to promote your brand, you can take more risks in creating a space that makes people want to stop and Instagram the mix of modern décor in your pop-up shop and share it with their friends.
Blast Your Brand
A pop-up shop is a fantastic way to boost your brand’s visibility. Whether it’s using a custom hashtag for visitors and shoppers to tag when they share their photos on social media or offering a branded geo-filter on Snapchat to boost your brand’s presence on that channel, there are so many different ways to accentuate who you are and what you can do with a pop-up shop.
It’s also important to know who your target audience is and where they invest their time. If you’re selling high-end modern décor designed for people surviving the cold Boston winters, encouraging your shoppers to share their photos on VSCO with summer-themed filters probably isn’t going to get you the return on investment that you’re hoping for. Tagging you on Instagram and Facebook, mentioning your website, and using winter-themed overlays, however, is a great way to increase visibility and engage people in the future.
Welcome Feedback
If you’re new to the pop-up shop world, engaging your customers to encourage them to share their opinions on the successful parts of your event is crucial to learning how to improve in the future. Did you pick the right location? Did your theme fit with the vibe felt in the northeast and the Boston area? Do enough people shop for modern décor in the way you presented your products? How did your customers find your pop-up shop? Asking these questions and more can provide essential insight to help you hit the ground running for your next event.
Another great way to incorporate feedback is to offer an incentive for those who participate. Whether it’s a discount on future modern décor merchandise or a drawing for a basket of items local to Boston, rewarding people for their time is more than just recommended, it’s essential.
One more extra tip? Take notes on the different brands that market a pop-up shop in Boston, what they sell, how their pop-up has evolved if they’ve completed multiple shops, and if you’re comfortable, reach out and offer to buy them a beverage for any recommendations they may have. You could also ask about creating a partnership between your modern décor items and whatever their brand has to offer!
Whether you’re looking to take your pop-up shop to the next level, or you’ve never dabbled in pop-up shops before, there are plenty of inventive ways to bring new and creative ideas to the Boston area! Shopping for modern décor gifts or deciding between modern and contemporary design for your home and want a visual?