Comment: Calling time on the pop-up

Pop-ups seem to be popping up at a faster rate than at any point since they first started to appear a few years ago. It matters little whether it’s Nivea cream or Magnum ice cream, there’s a temporary store for almost every brand, and increasingly retailer, that you might care to think of. And in a way, the more unlikely the brand, the more probable that it will be a candidate for pop-up status.

Things have changed however. When they first started, pop-ups had a very limited life and if they were around for more than four weeks, it was unusual. The exception, of course, was the Dr Marten’s store in Spitalfields, which opened for a few months, and then a year, and then longer. In fact, Dr Marten’s set the pattern for what was to follow.

Nowadays, a pop-up will be around for as long as there are shoppers, hence the sudden rash of the things at Westfield in Stratford. The influx of shoppers in that location has meant that all of the units which seemed to be showcases for the talents of the student visual merchandiser a while back are now filled with temporary stores. And a few enquiries last week about how long they were going to be part of the mall’s retail panorama revealed the fact that nobody seemed to know, but that in most cases they anticipated trading up until Christmas.

Put another way, this means that the pop-up traders have taken a calculated risk that when the fun and (Olympic) Games are finally over in around five weeks, it will be worth bridging the tricky gap between then and the onset of the Christmas rush.

Which translates to around five months of trade, working on the assumption that the majority of the shops that are now open have been so for around a month prior to the Games starting. The real point is, however, that if trade proves sufficiently robust, some of them may continue to occupy their units into 2013. Many pop-ups no longer deserve the name. Large budgets are set aside to ensure that people deem them worth a visit and they’ll be around for as long as they’re needed. There are, of course, exceptions and Covent Garden appears to have several units that have had multiple occupancies during the course of 2012 so far.

But for most, the current pop-up is not a case of here today, gone tomorrow - it will probably be here the day after tomorrow and maybe beyond that….if trade permits. The ephemeral nature of the pop-up is largely no more.