Pop-Up Business For Dummies
Overview
Whether you’re just starting out and want to test the viability of your business, or you’re an established business looking to expand your reach, pop-ups offer an exciting and flexible opportunity. They’re a great way to try new business ideas, experiment with a new product, location or market, gain exposure, and learn about your customers - all with limited risk and financial outlay.
Inside Pop-Up Business For Dummies, you’ll find:
- Planning your pop-up venture - whether
it’s a shop, studio, gallery, or community hub.
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About The Author
Dan Thompson is an artist, writer and founder of the Empty Shops Network. An expert in the creative use of empty shops, Dan has pioneered the use of shops as community hubs and has written about the problems facing town centres for The Independent and The Guardian.
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pop-up business for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Creating a pop up business embraces a new, nimble way of working that’s perfect for the 21st century. Pop ups aren’t just a temporary use of space because there’s a recession; they’re a new way of using town and city centres, and they match the needs of a new generation of entrepreneurs.
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Pop ups are fast, furious, flexible and fun. Planning is essential to success, but plans for pop up businesses are living, working documents, not set in stone. Aim to use agile methods (an idea taken from a type of software development), and make sure that you:
Aim to be up and running as early as possible.
Welcome change.
Your pop up may be a chance to catch up with valued and trusted customers, or it may be about building a longer, deeper and more meaningful relationship between them and your brand. Find as many ways as possible to capture useful information from your customers when they visit your pop up:
Ask them to leave their email address so that you can add them to your own mailing list.
Spotting a pop up space you like is easy enough, but finding out who owns the space and then winning them over to let you use it can be harder. The key to success is to start early and to network.
Networking isn’t something you do once a week at a breakfast meeting. It’s something you can do all the time.
Get a meeting with the pop up space owner
You’re asking the person who owns the property to do you a favour by giving you a short let (lease) probably at low cost.
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Besides basic financial issues, like budgeting and funding, you need to consider other risks inherent in running a pop up venture. Carrying out a risk assessment will help you do so.
When you’re assessing risk, you need to look at three areas:
Fire safety
Health and safety
Security
The following sequence of questions makes risk assessment really easy:
What is the hazard?
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When planning your pop up, be clear about what it does. Pop up businesses use an empty or underused space to do something exclusive, distinct or special. They have a clear start and end date, and don’t aim for permanence. Use a pop up to:
Provide a space for a seasonal sale or event.
Offer a chance to test or prototype a new business.
One of the key indicators of the success of your pop up is the number of customers. This number may not necessarily be a high target; for some high-end products, you may only want to invite a few carefully chosen people.
For example, shoe manufacturer Converse created a pop up in central London. The number of customers wasn’t important; in fact, general customers weren’t welcome.
Your pop-up project needs a clear, defined purpose – an aim. Your aim must be clear enough to focus your activity and easy to explain to other people. In addition, you need to make sure that you either have or can find the people and the resources to meet your aim.
If you’re adapting an agile way of working, a clear aim ensures that, as you respond to opportunity or change, you’re still achieving what you set out to do.
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Printed materials reach a different audience for your pop ups than social media campaigns. They’re also a good way to start conversations with staff in businesses that might become keen supporters or even partners in future projects.
As well as marketing, you need to use print in your pop up. Open signs, hanging price labels, menus, point-of-sale displays and carrier bags are all printed items.
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Pop ups offer many benefits over traditional premises to lots of types of businesses. Although artists were the first to recognise the benefits of pop ups, all business sectors, from small and home-based businesses to global brands like Reebok and Disney, widely use them.
Taking on any commercial premises comes with certain responsibilities, so why choose a pop up over more traditional locations?
Time spent on researching your future pop up shop isn’t wasted; it means less time correcting mistakes in your plan further down the line. When a big company does something wrong, it has time, resources and finance to carry on. If your time, resources and finance are more limited, mistakes may mean the end of everything you’ve worked for.
After your pop up business closes, remember that you need to get the space you used ready to hand back to its owner. The space you used was absolutely essential to the success of your pop up business. You got that space because you invested time in building a relationship with the owner. You don’t want to damage that relationship right at the end.
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When you close your pop up project, you need to store everything you’ve made or used for future use or find it a new home, and return anything borrowed to its owner. Throughout your pop up, you’ll have made all sorts of things, from logos to leaflets and branding to banners. And you’ll have gathered all sorts of useful things, too, from shopfittings to teaspoons.
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Sometimes your pop up business comes to an emergency stop, usually because of a change of circumstance that’s outside your control. Don’t panic; closing early is quite common. An early closing may occur because of a lack of funding or funding allocations change. Or perhaps the building is let unexpectedly to a long-term tenant, or an unexpected issue, such as a problem with the building’s structure, occurs.
Making sure that your pop up is open at the right time is for fairly obvious reasons very important, but this detail is often overlooked. If your opening times are right, you’ll be able to attract the highest number of visitors, in the shortest possible time. This means the highest profit at the lowest cost, of course.
You must engage with your customers. Assume your pop up has all gone according to plan. You’re open, the shop looks fabulous and, even better, you have customers coming in through the door. What can go wrong now?
Well, you can completely fail to engage with those customers. Ever walked into a shop and not felt welcome?
To find the perfect place for your pop up, you have to do some footwork and visit potential locations. But the first step in finding a pop up actually takes place before you set a foot outside. The following questions help determine the places you look at so that you’re not running around on a wild goose chase:
Does a local space particularly match your pop up?
Managing your pop up's staff can seem intimidating. Whether they’re friends you’re sharing the space with, a team pulled together from partner organisations, volunteers keen to support your cause or people you’re directly employing, putting systems in place makes your job easier.
Timetables
Draw up clear timetables of all the times your pop up needs staff.
You see pop up cinemas and pop up cafes, pop up shops and all types of pop up businesses everywhere you look. What’s going on with this pop up phenomenon?
So what separates a pop up from other projects? To truly qualify as a pop up, a project should:
Use an empty or under-used space.
Be time-limited, with clear start and end dates.
After you attract customers to your pop up businesss, you need to keep in touch with them. You can use social media to keep up the engagement with your customers.
Consider whether you could email, message or tweet them in the week after your pop up, thanking them for visiting. This process may be time consuming, so consider sorting your friends and followers into lists.
The ‘Open’ sign that hangs in your pop up shop’s doorway is one of your most important bits of kit! Make sure that you buy one or, better yet, custom make one that reflects your pop up’s branding.
The pavement immediately outside your shop is an important bit of property. It’s where people choose to visit your shop .
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However you approach them, all branding and marketing must contribute to the overall aim of your pop up. They must make it sparkle and shine, but they also need to be honest about what you’re doing. If your marketing is just hype or it oversells a simple pop up, your customers may be disappointed.
A brand is bigger than simply creating a logo and a strapline (slogan).
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Managing the risks and the health and safety requirements of a pop up largely comes down to common sense and being careful without being overly cautious.
Risk assessment isn’t static and as you now have the keys to your shop, you can carry out a more detailed assessment.
After this assessment, you need to make sure that everybody working in your pop up is briefed about the risks and how you’re managing them.
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What does a successful pop up business look like? It may be achieving a high volume of sales or just one or two really important ones. It may be attracting thousands of visitors or just ten. It may have nothing to do with numbers. Or perhaps success is simply a good experience for visitors or new skills learned by your team.
You must carefully monitor sales for your pop up business, particularly where multiple partners are involved in the pop up, such as a shop shared by artists and makers.
Producing a clear sales sheet at the end of the pop up is essential, to set out your opening stock, any sales and what stock is left at the end.
Before you start on your pop up's media plan, be really clear about what you hope to achieve. Overall, your campaign must further the aim of your pop up. But in more detail, it may well be that your media plan helps you achieve individual objectives, too.
For example, you can use part of your media campaign to recruit volunteers to help staff your pop up or find local producers whose goods you can stock.
Start-Ups
Creating a pop up business embraces a new, nimble way of working that’s perfect for the 21st century. Pop ups aren’t just a temporary use of space because there’s a recession; they’re a new way of using town and city centres, and they match the needs of a new generation of entrepreneurs.
After your pop up's brand is ready and your designs are created, you can move on to printing. The type of print you use depends on the print run – that is, the number of items you need to have printed.
Don’t go to print until you’re sure that you like the designs and be careful to proofread everything carefully.
If you’re doing something interesting with your pop up business and it has some social, community or ethical benefits, you may be able to harness the power of volunteers. Volunteers provide an obvious benefit to your pop up, thanks to extra staff and more support. And, of course, any social, community or ethical benefits help your pop up get even more media profile.
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Pop ups are an incredibly useful tool for doing business; they’re like a Swiss army penknife, which pops out in all sorts of useful ways. So what you do with your pop up is entirely up to you. The only limit is the edge of your imagination. Following are ten common pop up themes.
Have a message
Whether your pop up is testing a new idea, giving something special to valued customers or has a social purpose, make sure that your message is clear.
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If you’re a pop up, you need to mobilise supporters and customers quickly, keep them talking and grow your reputation quickly while you’re open. Social media channels are perfect for that, and it’s no coincidence that the boom in pop ups has happened at the same time as a rapid growth in the number of people using social media services.
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Every pop up needs to have some things – besides the big things, such as an idea, great branding and so on. Pop ups need several smaller, more practical items that you can easily overlook.
Make a coffee machine or teapot available in your pop up
Ideally, have both a coffee machine and a teapot in your pop up. The presence of tea and coffee transforms your pop up.
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When designing and kitting out your pop up shop, you need to create an interior that looks smart and professional, but is functional and helps you achieve the aims of your pop up. Don’t forget that whatever you do, it must help you get to the end point that you’re after, not divert you from it!
Your pop up's signs
Signs are important.
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Finding a pop up venue can be great fun; you get to explore your local area and spot all sorts of spaces you’ve never noticed before.
Does a local space particularly match your pop up? Sometimes, a particular building or a public space seems ideal for a project. The perfect space increases customer interest, brings the media along and ensures your pop up is talked about after it’s closed.
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Most people who’ve run pop ups are more than willing to talk and share their experiences. If you find a pop up shop that’s similar to your idea, get in touch and ask for advice.
A number of organisations have been working with pop ups for a while, and they all try to provide help and support to people starting their own pop ups.
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The agile philosophy is perfect for pop ups because the simple idea behind the agile philosophy is that it’s more important to get something up and running so that you can test and refine it with real people using it instead of planning it to the finest detail before launching it.
If you plan for too long, you may be too late, you may be making something nobody actually wants or you may find that your competitors have got there first.
Before working out exactly what staff you need for your pop up business, you have to figure out when you need them and what they do. People can agree to work with you more easily if their roles are clearly defined. In addition, when they know what they’re supposed to be doing, people will deliver far more!
In terms of staff, consider your:
Management team: Helps you make the planning decisions as you develop the project.
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