The Importance of Location in Pop Up Retailing

Despite pop-up stores being a retail format that is both temporary and mobile, as with other physical stores, despite their mobility, location considerations may be assumed necessary for their success. This paper reports on a study that examined locational drivers for this form of retailing and in particular explored to what extent are locational drivers, such as market saturation and site availability identified as important for pop-up stores as they are for other retail formats. In addition, developing work undertaken by Pioch and Byrom (2004), the researchers examined what locational planning practices where undertaken by retail managers, that is, to what extent were the practices driven by scientific analysis or alternatively gut instinct methods of evaluation employed. In all, the study seeks to evaluate the importance of location to pop-up retailing. The rationale for the study is, given that pop-up stores are temporary and as some view, opportunitistic, an assumption is made that location is not seen as critical to pop-up retail initiatives compared to decisions surrounding other physical retail formats. The empirical study was based upon a series of in-depth interviews with managers in a number of retail organisations operating within the UK. Common to all the organisations was that, at the time of the interview, they were currently or had recently embarked upon a pop-up store initiative.