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NEW YORK—Earlier this year Macy’s rolled out its take on Story, the curated concept retailer that it had purchased in May of 2018. Thirty-six Story locations opened within Macy’s existing stores across the US, featuring “Color” as its inaugural theme. Essentially, customers were to explore and experience color through “a rainbow of curated products.” More than 70 small businesses featuring more than 400 products participated in the event. Macy’s plans to launch new themes every few months at its Story locations.
If this sounds similar to a pop up retail strategy that is because it is. Specifically, what Macy’s did was establish a pop-in—a temporary store in which a concept takes space within an existing retailer’s store. Department stores are leading the charge in this area, according to a new Cushman & Wakefield report, with nearly every major department store chain in North America currently experimenting with them in one format or another.
But pop-ins are more than just another variation to the concept of pop-ups, another short-term leasing strategy that has been around for years but recently became invigorated by a new breed of retailer as well as a soft retail market.
Rather, pop-ins also represent one of the many directions that the future of pop-ups are taking. In short, pop-ups are becoming mainstream and likely permanent fixtures to the retail landscape–and along the way they are stretching their retail concepts and store designs to create some of the greatest innovations in space, C&W says. “If you want a quick idea who some of the top tenants of tomorrow will be, look at pop-up space today.”
Pop-up stores have been around for years of course, the purview of seasonal retailers that needed temporary locations for Halloween or Christmas offerings. The business model has clearly changed though. Since 2018, C&W has tracked over 300 pop-ups in the New York City market and only a handful were traditional seasonal users. Today, it says, short-term utilization of retail space comes from a variety of sources, including a large contingent of non-traditional, even non-retail, users.
Another change: the many nuances that the term “pop-up” can mean. While the term pop-up still refers to those instances in which a retail or restaurant temporarily uses an otherwise vacant storefront, it is now also increasingly used to describe a few other variations of temporary space usage, although there is significant overlap with many of these terms, C&W says. Here are some of these new categories.
Pop-in Stores
Macy’s provides an excellent example of a pop-in, in part because of its outreach to non-retailers. Facebook, for example, has brought around 100 digital native brands and small businesses that operate on its platform to pop-ins within nine Macy’s department stores across the US, C&W reports. “Emerging brands benefit from greater exposure and foot traffic while existing retailers get the upside of the buzz (i.e., increased foot traffic and sales) from hot upstarts,” according to C&W.
Experiential Pop-Ups
All successful pop-ups are designed to be an experience. But one boost to the retail space that did not exist in meaningful numbers until recently is that of the purely experiential pop-up, C&W writes. Namely, this is a space crafted purely for the experience itself. C&W points to San Francisco-based Figure8—which operates the Museum of Ice Cream—that initially started as pop-up events in Manhattan, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami in 2016 and 2017. Figure8 has since leased permanent space in San Francisco and recently signed a 10-year deal for 25,000 square feet of space in a vacant H&M store at 558 Broadway in SoHo.
Likewise, the Toys ‘R’ Us Adventure is a new experiential pop-up that recently opened in Crate & Barrel’s former Chicago flagship store on Michigan Avenue.
Media/Entertainment Pop-Ups
One of the strongest new categories of pop-ups is the experiential media/entertainment pop-up, C&W reports. One example of this are the pop-ups that opened across the UK last year, inspired by the Netflix program “Black Mirror” and the network’s interactive streaming television experiment, “Bandersnatch.”
Also, this past summer, inspired by yet another Netflix show “Stranger Things,” Baskin Robbins teamed with the production to redesign a location in Burbank, CA as the Scoops Ahoy ice cream parlor from the series. “So far, most of these media-driven pop-ups have come from popular television shows and the worlds of film and music,” C&W says. “However, we anticipate an immense opportunity far beyond that in the pop-up space.”
Hospitality Pop-Ups
Hospitality (including hotel, restaurant and bar) popups can take the form of a space user taking formerly vacant space on a temporary basis. But more often than not, they are about short-term collaborations that are mutually beneficial or that may feature temporary re-branding around an event, C&W says in its report.
For example, in August 2019 the V Hotel in Palm Springs partnered with Yum! Brands to rebrand itself for one weekend as the “Bell Palm Springs—A Taco Bell Hotel and Resort.” Nutella plans on launching a similar pop-up in California’s Napa Valley in January 2020.
And right now with the 2019 holiday season in full swing, there are a proliferation of hundreds of holiday-themed bars across North America.
But not all hospitality pop-ups are about food and beverage or hotel users, C&W notes. In October 2019, Nike, which is a leader in the pop-up movement, transformed Lulu’s Hot Dogs in Chicago into “Nike’s World-Famous Chicago Style.” Footlocker recently launched a pop-up restaurant, “Rival’s Café,” at its Hollywood & Highland flagship in Los Angeles to celebrate the launch of its Jordan Rivals line.