On Monday, 7 July 2014, We Are Pop Up launched Shared Spaces, bringing collaborative consumption and the sharing economy to retail, restaurant, and event spaces around the UK and Eurozone.

Sharing and collaboration is the cultural and economic story of the decade, with AirBNB, Kickstarter, and Uber reshaping hospitality, creative production, and taxi services.

We Are Pop Up’s Shared Spaces brings collaborative consumption to retail and restaurant property. We’ve built a platform that operates in both £ and €, and today Shared Spaces is available to over 300M people across the Eurozone.

“Dear Sir, please bring We Are Pop Up to…”

We Are Pop Up has always been global in design. And so far this year, we’ve already seen cross-border flow. British fashion brands going to Berlin. Italian retailers heading to London.

Over the past two years, heaps of people have called and written, asking us to bring We Are Pop Up to countries around Europe, from the Netherlands to Greece.

Shared Spaces brings new possibilities to every existing retail space and restaurant in 19 countries. We’ve launched with dozens of shared spaces in London and are looking for new spaces in both the UK and Europe.

How we got here

Fundamentally, collaborative consumption platforms directly connect buyers and sellers, through community, trust, and transaction mechanisms. With AirBNB every house is a hotel. With Kickstarter, every person is a patron of the arts and design. With Uber, every car is a taxi.

Now, We Are Pop Up reinvents retail and restaurants. Every shop is a concession space, and every restaurant is a community kitchen.

Why is this important?

Consumers have seen the cultural power of collaboration, and sellers have seen the economic power of it. From titans like Harrods and Selfridges, to the scrappy hip-hop fuelled partnerships of the Odd Future, collaborative concessions are the future of retail.

Consumers love pop up retail and restaurants. They delight in shopping centres and high streets that change and respond to trends. They are loyal to the champions — to shops that started humbly, and to restaurants that began as food trucks.

Pop up grows up

Since launching 18 months ago, We Are Pop Up users have launched over 350 new shops. The majority of these have been in London, with handfuls now in Brighton and Berlin.

Rent ranged from £50 for a day to £30k for three months. Those shops have reached over half a million consumers, and generated hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling in rent for UK landlords.

Before We Are Pop Up, people easily spent eight weeks looking for a pop up space. In May 2014, two users traded a space in less than 24 hours. Many of our contracts are £10k+ and represent a significant investment for one party, and a significant revenue stream for the other.

And we’ve done hundreds of those.

Collaborative retail

We’re super-proud of those hundreds of shops, and what they’ve brought to London, Brighton, and Berlin.

But put simply, those hundreds are not enough, because hundreds of shops is less than 10% of literally thousands of the ideas that people bring to us.

Over the last six months, we spoke to the We Are Pop Up community and they overwhelmingly asked for more spaces. Great spaces, in great locations, for great prices.

We spoke to retailers and landlords from Notting Hill to Paris. The majority said they would love to collaborate with new brands. Menswear shops wanted barbers. Design shops asked for coffee bars. Art galleries offered fashion concessions. Fashion boutiques sought furniture designers.

What they all want is to collaborate and share space — to offer consumers truly unique and exciting destinations.

This model works, and we know the world is ready for it. In April 2014, San Francisco-based Storefront raised $7.3M to expand to Los Angeles and other cities in the United States. They forged the path for shared shops in one country.

Today, we bring Shared Spaces to every city in the United Kingdom and the Eurozone.

What happens now?

You are free to create your own retail story through We Are Pop Up.

Whether you’re the marketing director of an SME, an entrepreneur with a great idea, or a corporate brand manager. You can build something entirely new, and take it out into the world.

Collaborations come from new connections — and those connections have never been easier to make. Everyone is interested in this, from startup retailers, to multinational landlords. We all see the same thing — the future of retail lies in the the power of collaboration.

We Are Pop Up has always connected retail and property in an entirely new way. Now, we connect people in an entirely new way.

Shared Spaces. Now at We Are Pop Up.