behind the scenes of our first pop-up in shoreditch, london.
Building a brand is incredibly complicated - if it were easy, everybody would do it. You have to have patience, resilience and a shit load of drive. Nowhere does that get shown more than delivering an in-person shopping experience for the first time. To say nerves ran high would be an understatement.
Read below for our account of how we managed to pull off our first pop-up.
We decided at the start of 2024 that we wanted to take the brand offline for the first time this year. We made a few failed attempts, including some more initial community events falling through at the last minute.
We take a very calculated risk approach to business - it’s baked into our DNA through bootstrapping ourselves over the last three years and taking no external investment. What that means in reality is we never want to overspend on anything. Not spending money on traditional marketing routes (i.e. paid social ads) enables us to invest in the brand rather than social media companies, so we can spend a little bit more delivering branded moments.
Taking a brand offline, we felt you needed to walk into the store and know exactly where you are - this meant designing alongside our brand pillars. Now, that’s not easy when you have a sample sale, as you have a lot of stock, which is very hard to display. When you walk into a sample sale, you don’t typically feel the brand values, so in many ways, we had to flip the expected on its head to do what we knew was right.
We designed everything ourselves, from the store’s layout to the smaller details such as the bags and metal counter. We scoured far and wide to find vintage pieces that could help us present a juxtaposition of old and new.
The space we found had the harshness and industrial coldness that we were going for so that the furniture we chose could bring the softness and design details we’re known for. This was a very deliberate choice—too over-designed, and we felt like the brand delivery wouldn’t be right. The tension between old and new we created helped to curate the space into more of an ecosystem.
The next thing that was really important to us was staffing. This being our first pop-up, we had no retail team members embedded in the team. We toyed with the idea of hiring retail professionals but ultimately landed on hiring our close group of mates for the weekend.
We had the design; then we needed the vibe - having our friends and family there made the vibe in that store. You walked in and knew you were in the right place, even after a four-hour queue. A massive thanks to everybody who helped us out last weekend, we couldn’t have done it without you.
It was 8 am on Saturday when we all began arriving at the store. After a few nervous beers the night before (we didn’t think anybody would show up), our anxiety was at a peak. When we arrived, there was a queue beginning to snake around the corner. We couldn’t quite believe it. We knew another pop-up was happening on the same street, so we assumed it was for them.
We were blown away when it dawned on us that everybody was here for us. All the anxiety that nobody would show up was now replaced with nerves that we wouldn’t be able to deliver an experience befitting of so many people. But we were prepared - we prepared for a huge amount of people, arranging security and queue management ahead of time, but expected nobody to come. It meant that operationally, we were sound.
When the doors opened at 10am, we were on our feet nonstop until we closed at 7pm. It was an incredible weekend, meeting so many of you that have travelled from far and wide. It also gave us a new found respect for those who work in retail and stand on their feet all day; not an easy task.
Thank you to everybody who came through.
So where are we going next? It will take a couple of weeks to recover from the weekend. We are so humbled by the turnout that we know that retail and physical presence is on our road map. We have so much coming in the next few months, from our AW24 drops with our best pieces yet to new categories and more. Delivering that newness in disruptive ways offline creates an exciting pathway forward for us.
We can’t wait to meet you all again - sooner than you might think.
