As the merge between online and offline commerce and retail experience continues to grow, as evident with a decent major tech ecommerce players test a few pop-up shops in the past year or so with the likes of Ticketmaster and pure retail play like b8ta (personally very interesting in their model and how they could very well be on the forefront of this fundamental demographic shift in how consumers will consume products and services in the next few years).
Google actually just did donut popup shop here in Austin a few weeks back. The goal is not so much immediate revenue as it is promotion and data collection, mapping the internet’s capacity for surveillance onto physical retail space. Pop-ups of this variety, as ad people assure clients, can help more-traditional retailers “tap into ‘massclusivity’”––giving even large numbers of customers the feeling that what they’re getting is a distinct, limited-time-only experience that can’t be replicated.”
Storefront is one of the aggregators in this space I would watch out for (though they were M&A-ed last year).
What do you think?
Intersection notepad 