Pop-Up Business For Dummies
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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. Kitted out as working offices with a reception area, the entire pop up was designed to show off the next year’s Converse range to prospective retail buyers.

As another example, painter Adrian Crick creates the most intimate pop up, when he opens a bi-annual art gallery in his front room. It’s not open to the public, but is an invite-only event for his mailing list of regular buyers and collectors.

Whether you’re after a large number of visitors or a very select few, you’ll need to keep a record of visitor numbers.

Create a tally sheet. Break the times you’re open into shifts, such as morning, lunchtime and afternoon. Record the number of visitors during each shift. Also, record the total value of sales during each shift. (This number can be a rough amount; you don’t need a complete breakdown in these figures.)

You can now identify your most successful periods when open. If you’re really agile, you can even adjust staff levels accordingly so that you can ensure that your customers always get the best experience! You can also use this information to measure not only the success of your pop up, but also to inform future pop ups.

If you have huge numbers of visitors or you’re open for weeks on end, it may not be possible to count everyone in and out. Count visitors for an hour a day, multiply by the number of hours you’re open and use this number to estimate footfall.

About This Article

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About the book 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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