How to Create a Practically Perfect Pop-Up

Three years ago, we started miLES — originally Made in the Lower East Side — as a way to help designers, artists, and entrepreneurs find vacant storefronts and create dazzling pop-up events and experiences right in their own backyards. There are a lot of empty spaces in the Lower East Side, we realized, and we wanted to give local creatives a way to use those spaces to experiment with new ways to work, shop, play, and collaborate.

In late 2013 we ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund our Storefront Transformer, a set of modular furnishings that could help transform a range of underused storefront spaces. Since then, we have facilitated more than one hundred pop-ups, including a sewing workshop, a mini film festival, a design-thinking workshop masquerading as a taco joint, a gelato shop, a brunch club series, a museum of beautiful people, the genius bar for a tech company, a hydroponics farm, a youth art salon, independent galleries, a museum for comic artist Jack Kirby, and much more. Our clients were as diverse as the pop-ups themselves: emerging artists, youth, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, chefs, educators, branding agencies, and established corporations.

Earlier this year, we wrote the Pop-Up Primer, a distillation of best practices and how-tos for popping up. And for those of you thinking about taking your ideas out into the real world with the agility and physicality of a pop-up, here are a few essential tips for you.

The What and the Why

What is a pop-up? The term can take on different meanings for different people, but most broadly, it means to appear in a space suddenly or unexpectedly, usually for a short period of time.

A pop-up can be a chance to roll out your brand and wow customers, clients, partners, and press. It can serve to prototype a new product or service while getting feedback from customers. Or it can act as a way to launch your product once it’s been polished to perfection — an opportunity to make a splash and generate some organic buzz. Most importantly, a pop-up is a great way to create an in-person experience that exudes your brand’s unique persona or values, bringing a refreshingly genuine burst of individuality to the commercial urban landscape.

Location, Location, Location

First things first: if you’re planning a pop-up, you need to find a space to pop into!

Via pop-up platforms. This is our suggested channel for finding and approaching pop-up spaces. Pop-up platforms have existing relationships with landlords and others who might like to host a pop-up, and can connect you with spaces that are already open to pop-ups. This is one of the services miLES provides — we keep tabs on spaces that are open to collaborating with pop-ups.

Via brokers. Some brokers are open to connecting pop-uppers with landlords who are amenable to pop-ups, but there’s not much financial incentive for them to do so. However, if you’re looking to use space for a whole month or more, this could be worth pursuing. Connecting with a landlord directly is a better approach than going through a broker — but note that these arrangements usually require a long and dreary process of pitching to the landlord. (In general, landlords are just looking to lease to Starbucks or Pinkberry.)

Via existing shops. If you’re confident that your product or event could enhance an existing shop, you can pitch your pop-up idea directly to them. Picture those cute coffee shops that also sell knickknacks, accessories, and apparel from local vendors and artisans — that’s a type of pop-up, too.

Promote Yourself

Once you’ve found a space for your pop-up, you’ll need to promote yourself like crazy on social media and align yourself with press and partners who can spread your message.

Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Eventbrite, and newsletters) is the most affordable and effective way to promote an event. Your messaging should raise overall awareness of your brand and your event, highlight a specific call to action — the what, when, and where — and create content. If you have the time and the resources, document your pop-up rigorously. Live blogging or Instagramming, for example, creates content that you can broadcast on different channels for ongoing and future promotion.

The yearly NYC festival Out to See, for example, leverages the social media followings of their sixty-plus merchants and uses specific hashtags to brand their events. With each of the merchants sharing to their own networks on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, the festival unites these audiences to boost their reach and presence, online and off.

Reaching out to press and bloggers and building a solid relationship with them is key. As your brand grows, keep them in the loop about your progress, invite them to events, and let them know when your brand is doing something special. If you don’t have an existing relationship with press, draft a press release. Publish your events on blogs and sites that have event listings and calendars — some sites have an open call for event listings and are happy to publish them when relevant.

While general outreach may cast a wide net, direct and personalized outreach tends to be more successful. Do your research: What blogs or publications would jive with your pop-up? Who’s written about topics or events relevant to your pop-up in the past?

The Jack Kirby Museum, for instance, used the power of the press to attract more than two thousand visitors to their week-long pop-up celebrating the work of the artist and co-creator of comics like Thor and Captain America. The folks behind the museum reached out to blogs and writers within the comics world, who they already knew because of their presence at Comic Con.

And Miista, a footwear brand from London that has a huge social media following, leveraged their international fans to drive people to their three-day sample sale in New York. Fashion blogs like Racked covered the event, and a few hundred people visited the sale — effectively bringing their huge online following together offline. When you have a strong social media following, you can get a lot done! The folks at Miista were so pleased with the event that they’re returning to the same spot this year.

Pick the Right Partners

Partnering with collaborators and sponsors is a way to share the effort of organizing your pop-up, cut costs, build community, increase exposure, and reach new audiences.

Collaborators are partners who share your vision for what you want to create and achieve and want to participate in it. You may work together to develop the idea, create the invite list, and explore what other people or companies you’ll want to involve. Collaborators are great for early-stage entrepreneurs and creatives, as the partnership allows you to pool resources and people power to form a larger team.

This can lead to some really interesting, innovative, and unexpected collaborations. Kiddie Riders, for instance, united a video art installation with a playful food pop-up. During the pop-up, artist Alina Landry-Rancier screened videos from her three-part experimental film series Ice Cream, Hotdog, and Lollipop, while gallery-goers interacted with the pieces and noshed on event-appropriate goodies from ice cream and hot dog vendors.

In-kind sponsors give you goods or services for your event, often in exchange for your promotion — think alcohol sponsors at concerts or fashion shows. Sponsors are usually interested in reaching your audience or in the quantified reach they can get by partnering with you — the number of people you can attract to the event, say, or being included in press about the event.

Cash sponsorships are tough to land but great if you can get them. Typically, you’ll need to have a proven track record of success and strongly aligned brand values to get another company to hand you a wad of cash. Be sure to plan ahead if you’re relying on a cash sponsorship, as it can take six to nine months or more to get sponsorship approval from larger brands.

Lastly, platforms like Kickstarter, where pop-up organizers can connect with their fans and communities to raise funds, can help raise part or all of the money they need to execute their project. These platforms combine fundraising with showcasing, validating, and marketing your product in a single rewarding — albeit challenging! — effort. It’s also a great way to tell the story of your brand and build rapport, community, and engagement among your followers and supporters.

Here Now, a group exhibition and shop created by four Oregon-based artists, used Kickstarter to fund a month-long pop-up with a calendar full of events, each designed to attract a unique audience: fashion showcases, workshops, live music, a film screening, and more. This ensured a steady flow of visitors to the space throughout the month and a wide range of exposure for their concept. And American Qi used their two-day pop-up to launch their Kickstarter-funded brand with a fashion show. The pop-up brought their online supporters together offline and allowed visitors to get a real sensory experience of the clothes they were backing.

miLES began as a passion project, and it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to work with so many incredible artists, makers, and entrepreneurs who share our enthusiasm for this fun, experimental form. Now that you, too, have a feel for the ins and outs of popping up, we hope you’ll join the movement, transform your ideas into actions, and prototype your vision of your neighborhood or city, one storefront at a time!

Eric will be talking all things pop-up during a live hangout with the staff at Kickstarter on Wednesday, March 16 at 6pm EST. RSVP or comment with any questions that you might have for Eric. Chat with you then!