Pop-Up Store
A pop-up store is a temporary physical point of sale where customers can view and purchase a product for a short period of time. This format is used to test the attractiveness of a product and the willingness to pay before launching it on the market.
Pop-up stores are physical shops, mostly rented for a short time or built into an already existing shop, where you can showcase your finished or unfinished products and get direct feedback from customers. Used at a late stage in the development of an offering, it helps you interact with potential customers, learn from them, and get a feel for the appeal of your offering. This helps you to get a better estimate of the necessary quantities you need to produce when you fully launch your product while at the same time marketing your product. It is also a helpful way to test different prices and better understand the willingness to pay of your potential customers. For this type of test, you will need considerable financial and time resources, thus it is highly important to plan and prepare the appearance of the store(s) and its location well.
Helpful Tips
Instruct and interact: The focus is to interact with customers, let them interact with your offering, and learn from that. To achieve this, your sales personnel needs to know what to ask, how to interact, and how to gather that knowledge. You need to prepare them for this or do it yourself when possible.
Showcase your product and combine with Pre-Orders: Sometimes it’s important to have customers interact with your product early on. Pop-up Stores offer you the ability to achieve this with existing MVPs and prototypes that can be used to generate pre-orders at your offline location as strong indicators for the attractiveness of your offering.
Excite customers but focus on testing: As pop-up stores are often used as a marketing concept, it is important to (over-)fulfill expectations and deliver a well-crafted experience. But do not forget that here, the focus is on testing your hypotheses and last unanswered questions before launch – focus on preparing, testing, and validating your hypotheses!
Target correctly: Make sure you target the right customer groups that you identified based on the right store location, appearance, and surrounding population.
How to Guide
Create a store and promotion concept. Define your budget, time period, and success metrics as well as hypotheses that you want to test.
Identify potential venues, pick one or more and execute the promotional campaign. Train the personnel to make sure that your hypotheses are being tested.
Run the store. Make sure to gather feedback from the customers. Reflect on the feedback and improve where needed. Utilize the created hype to promote and market your offering.
Tools & Guides
There are a multitude of pop-up store offerings, such as gopopup, brickspaces, thestorefront and others. They offer full-service solutions and an easy access to set up your pop-up store.
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