Pop-up shops give consumers ‘taste’ of retail experience
Changing a store’s window display regularly is good retail business sense. But for Bref MTL, changing the display is the business.
The Mile End shop is an art gallery-store hybrid whose name is exactly right: Bref, or en anglais, “brief ” — as in: in four to six weeks’ time these products will be gone, replaced by an entirely new assortment of curated goods. As the artisans and collections change, so do the theme and the shop’s decor. It’s like Etsy or Instagram came alive, opened a store and stocked it with highly photogenic items.
The concept captures what it is about pop-up shops that consumers like: A limited time to buy specialty items made by craftspeople and artisans. The ephemeral nature of Bref MTL is a motivator for shoppers to buy quickly — because once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.
“Today people want these kinds of products,” said Cynthia Moreau, who owns Bref MTL with Maude St-Louis. “They want to be the first.”
Consumers are attracted to oneof-a-kind items, and the billiondollar craft industry is just the place to find them. But it’s more than finding the perfect hand knotted macramé plant hanger or a wine rack made of salvaged wood from an old barn. People are seeking authenticity, according to a report from market-research firm Euromonitor.
“They want authenticity in what they buy and expect elements of personalization in mass-produced as well as upscale items,” the report reads.
And the Internet-driven craft industry doth provide. Since the 2005 arrival of U.S. crafts marketplace Etsy, the demand for artisanal, handmade and specialty items has exploded. According to Etsy’s latest seller census report, Etsy vendors worldwide generated US$2.8 billion in gross merchandise sales in 2016.
Authenticity on its own is not a good business hook, though; you have to be authentic about something. For Myriam Belzile-Maguire, a shoe and handbag designer who recently started Maguire Boutique, her path to authenticity is transparency — i.e. openly telling customers her production costs, where her items are manufactured and what she does with the profits. She uses small-batch manufacturing to produce limited runs of her items in some of the same factories used by famous fashion labels. Those labels sell their handbags for 10 to 20 times their cost, says Belzile-Maguire.
She sells her handbags for $180, less than six times her cost. She can afford to because she sells direct-to-consumer, meaning there are no stores to pay rent on and no middlemen grabbing at her margins. “I think that’s why a lot of people are organizing these pop-up shops — because they’re trying to cut out the middleman that takes a huge amount of their profits,” says Belzile-Maguire.
The problem for craftspeople, though, is that having even the best practices doesn’t guarantee stellar sales. You have to get noticed — and with 1.6 million active vendors on Etsy alone, it’s getting harder to rise above the noise. At the same time, consumers are completely overwhelmed by choice.
That’s why, said Christian Lefebvre — owner of small-brands distributor Lef Industries and the creator of former Quebec surf-lifestyle retail chain Arsenic — consumers tend to seek out brands they have an emotional connection to: “We don’t sell products anymore. We sell stories.”
Connecting customers to a brand is about storytelling, expressing passion and rallying a community, Lefebvre added. Part of this can be done online; for example, posting a video or photo series documenting the journey of a product from ideation to completion. But from brands’ perspectives, getting customers to develop personal connections to you and your work cannot be accomplished online only. You have to have a physical presence to help breed loyalty and community. Yet commercial rents are prohibitive to most artisans and small-batch manufacturers.
Meanwhile, technology like smartphone credit-card reader Square and tablets loaded with sales-processing software have helped to make business far more mobile than ever before. You’d be hard-pressed to find a vendor who doesn’t accept credit cards at a pop-up or craft fair like Puces Pop, Souk@SAT or Toronto’s One Of a Kind.
“That’s a big reason why the popup shop is so enticing,” says Rachel Dhawan who, with partner Aaron Reaume, makes home-decor products from recycled materials under the name Blisscraft & Brazen. “It gives people a taste of the retail experience without the full commitment.”