Greg Spielberg, Author at

Pop Up at These Three New York Food Pop Up Spaces

There are plenty of New York City retail pop up spaces. But for food? That’s a different story. You need powerful kitchens and elegant dining areas. Food certifications and an intimate setting. We’ve partnered up with three of New York’s premier food pop up spaces in downtown Manhattan’s Soho and Lower East Side. New york food pop up space – now easy to find and book at We Are Pop Up.

Old Bowery Station
Old was an ironic shout out to the fact that this ground-level space is inside a former subway station. Now, it’s literal, as Old Bowery Station turns four this year and is the first pop up food lab in the city. With its tiled walls, reclaimed furniture from Tri-Lox and unmarked red doors, Old Bowery Station is the perfect NYC food pop up space. From underground dinners to public food pop ups to R&D for new food ideas, check out Old Bowery Station. Fung Tu‘s Jonathan Wu, Huertas‘ Jonah Miller and many other New York chefs got there start here. You can too

Book Old Bowery Station or reach out to our New York City team to find out more. gregs@wearepopup.com | 207-522-6715

Exhibit C
Exhibit C is the perfect blank canvas for your dinner parties in the Lower East Side. Launching a new art project? Take advantage of this New York food pop up space, their perfect white walls and sparkling lighting set up. The chic minimalist loft features a fully-equipped chef’s kitchen, high ceilings and a flexible furniture arrangement. Make Exhibit C your home for the night.

Book Exhibit C or reach out to our New York City team to find out more. gregs@wearepopup.com | 207-522-6715

Home Cooking New York
An open kitchen + a Soho location = The perfect New York food pop up space. Home Cooking New York is your location for cooking classes, test kitchen work and foodie meetings. Home Cooking is a unique mix of modern aesthetic and commercial capabilities. The warmth of home and the power to produce. Host a cooking class, wine tasting, video shoot here.

Book Home Cooking New York or reach out to our New York City team to find out more. gregs@wearepopup.com | 207-522-6715

The Store(y)telling Gift Shop – Tomorrow and Friday in Nolita, NYC

We’re popping up Thursday and Friday with The Store(y)telling Gift Shop at 2 Rivington St. The pop up is an experimentation in real-time curation inspired by Fashion Week’s direct-to-consumer shows. Fashion moves at the speed of media now, so we got together with some friends for a challenge: Create a concept store with visionary New York designers – in just one week. Thursday and Friday, We Are Pop Up, Parasol Projects, Creative CNTRL and Retail Access invite you to 2 Rivington Street for The Store(y)telling Gift Shop. 11am to 8pm.Featuring our favorite NYC fashion creatives like St. Ash, Proper Assembly, Martenero, Dirty Grl, March Caps, Thursday Finest and Gemela. From Ziggy Stardust soap to Magritte-inspired sweaters to Rio-to-Brooklyn rings, The Store(y)telling Gift Shop curates across cultures, categories and color palettes. The Gift Shop has customized belts from Beltology, upcycled brass jewelry by Loop de Loup, Hickies lace-free laces, fig liquor by Baron Nahmias and more. All elegantly tied together by Creative CNTRL. We believe in freedom of expression through retail, and The Store(y)telling Gift Shop lets you discover some of New York City’s most creative designers without having to scour the web.We’ve engineered a new creative retail store, stripping away traditional fixtures in favor of interactive displays, vinyls and artistic staging.

We invite you to touch and engage with each of the products, share the #StoreytellingLES experience n the gram and get a gift for yourself or a friend. Join us on a journey to explore visual merchandising and a storybook experience. Each brand is featuring five items with prices ranging from free (Little Treats Brigadeiros + Nahmias) to $495, with a happy median of $125. For private tours, email gregs@wearepopup.com. Pop up retail POS proudly provided by Lightspeed.

WAPU teams up with Modalyst to bring you dropshipping magic

You’ve popped up in the heart of Manhattan. Then load out day comes, and now what? You’ve gotten your press, made bunch of sales, engaged your community, gotten lots of social media love and pretty pictures. So what’s next? Through our partnership with Modalyst, turnkey dropshipping!

Dropshipping is one of the best ways to complement the brick and mortar experience and help you maintain sales when your store is closed. Not only will dropshipping offer you a way to sell off your excess inventory but it will help you widen your customer base by teaming up with e-commerce sites to market your brand. But after an exhausting pop up, who has the energy to start reaching out to e-commerce sites and pitch their collection?

Enter Modalyst. Founded in 2012, this B2B marketplace saw such an increase in dropshipping requests they recently released new technology that allow online stores to easily add brands to their sites. As a brand you can bulk upload your collection and immediately make it available to thousands of online stores. With the Modalyst Shopify app, retailers can add your collection to their store in one click. It’s so easy that more than 90% of Modalyst brands have been picked up by e-commerce sites all over the world. Currently their marketplace consists of close 10,000 stores and nearly 700 brands that are members of the community.

Dropshipping with Modalyst is an effective way to increase your distribution without having to hire a sales team. Similar to a pop up where brands benefit from the established customer base, staff and POS of the retail location, members of Modalyst have access to thousands of retailers and a backend tool to manage and organize all orders. In fact, much of the process is automated so one can easily manage hundreds of retailer relationships, keep buyers updated on new products and stock levels, plus process orders in seconds. For example, when an online order is placed for one of your products, the retailer will pay you directly and you will automatically receive all info needed including the customer’s shipping address.

After effectively capturing your local audience and building customer engagement through your pop up, dropshipping will help create a seasonless selling and marketing opportunity. As part of our partnership, Modalyst is offering WAPU brands a discount on the membership, so mention WAPU in your sign up to learn more! Get started with your free trial on Modalyst here.

Creative retail is now more important than the Internet

On Monday, We Are Pop Up Managing Director Greg Spielberg penned a guest post for WPP-owned global branding agency Brand Union. In his story, Greg revisits a 1996 Harvard Business Review roundtable highlighting the promise of a new innovation: The Internet. As we enter 2016, the 20th anniversary of the HBR roundtable, Spielberg writes that creative retail replaces the Internet as the most interactive form of brand marketing. He points to retail projects from Kiva to Glade, TicTail to Kit & Ace, Refinery 29 to Microsoft.

“Creative retail strategies architect memorable experiences that help consumers understand the world around them and generate product sales. They create stories in real life that allow consumers to participate as actual “people” rather than users, viewers, readers or listeners. There are two primary types of creative retail executions: 1) Nonfiction, or community-based and 2) Fiction, or imagination-based.” Read the full story at Brand Union.

We Are Pop Up chats with Of Mercer, ModaBox, Snowe Home and IMBY at Social Retail Summit

In January, we moderated the Social Retail Summit in New York. A quick recap of what we learned from #bosses Of Mercer Founder Emelyn Northway, ModaBox Founder Monica Phromsavanh, SNOWE Founder Rachel Cohen and IMBY Founder Sara Weinreb.
Of Mercer
Of Mercer started as an e-commerce destination for women where you can show off at work and at play. Within two years, the Wharton grads decided to open a brick and mortar in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. And, instead of filling the entire space with nothing but products, Of Mercer saved space for communal work desks, a place to drink wine, coffee and host events. The result is a blossoming community with high-profile guests and WOM out the wazoo. Check out Of Mercer.

ModaBox
What do you do when you’ve built a multimillion-dollar business? Shut down the store, of course! That’s what Monica Phromsavanh did with her 4,000 square-foot store ModaListas in 2014. Phromsavanh saw a brighter future in personal styling and a small footprint, so she launched the 400 sq-ft ModaBox at South Street Seaport. Not just a shop, ModaBox is the flagship for a personal styling network that connects buyers with professional fashionistas. Outfits are shipped directly to your home, and if you need to, you can head to the shop. Go see ModaBox.

SNOWE
SNOWE Founder Rachel Cohen is incredibly selective in where, and when, she pops up. SNOWE’s collaborations with Cuyana and Pop Up Flea keep the e-commerce brand’s image as pure as the driven …. . Cohen’s in no rush to take the beloved curator of home goods and decor offline. She’s perfecting her merchandising and shipping strategy, but we can’t wait until we see her curation IRL. Go snowhome.

IMBY
We first met Sara Weinreb when IMBY popped up at the Refinery Hotel through We Are Pop Up earlier this year. IMBY’s cut from a different cloth, curating capsule collections of Made-in-America designers. Except instead of the lumberjack vibe, IMBY’s brands toe the line between athleisure and cocktail fashion. Check out the IMBY collection and visit them on We Are Pop Up.

Food entrepreneurs, pop up at Artists & Fleas in Williamsburg and reach 2,000 for just $50 per day

We Are Pop Up is teaming up with Artists & Fleas to offer foodie entrepreneurs an incredible pop up opportunity. Sunday, Feb 28, showcase your delicious creations at Artists & Fleas in Williamsburg. This event is a unique opportunity for your brand to promote your treats to Artist & Fleas’ extensive shopper base and expand your network of fellow snack entrepreneurs! The Brooklyn market attracts more than 2,000 hungry visitors each weekend. You can also book Saturday Feb 27 to take part in the classic Artists & Fleas. Book Snack to the Future. Book Artists & Fleas Food Booth for weekend days outside of the 27th. Public hours are 10am to 7pm.

Snack to the Future opportunity and prizes
Participants will set up a booth at Artists & Fleas where they can sell their snacks for one or two days that weekend. During the event market shoppers will follow a “snack trail” through the market and sample a wide selection of nibbles and bites along the way before voting for their favorites. Based on these votes, one lucky vendor will receive the Snack to the Future prize, a free-selling day at the Artists & Fleas Brooklyn market (a $125 value) that can be used for any weekend date prior to May 1st, 2016.

Here’s what you need to pop up as a food entrepreneur at Artists & Fleas
1. A scanned jpg or pdf copy of DoH food handler’s permit/Food Protection Certificate.
2. A scanned copy or letter from the production facility where you operate.
3. A Temporary Mobile Food Vending Permit from the Dept of Consumer Affairs – only if you’d like to pop up outside. You don’t need this if you’re inside :).

We Are Pop Up x Reed Space are ShopSharing in NYC

Since 2002, Reed Space has pioneered the concept store idea that staff should be more than stockists. Instead, Reed Space’s team are curators who express their tastes through the styles they put on the floor. The result is a retail and design empire that’s led to collaborations with everyone from John Mayer to Shepard Fairey, HBO and PacSun. In-store and online, Reed Space curates hundreds of brands – like Native Shoes, Stussy, Moon Collective, and, of course, Founder Jeff Staple’s Staple Pigeon.

Starting this month, you can now join Reed Space for a day, a week, a month. We Are Pop Up and Reed Space are collaborating to provide ShopShare opportunities to brands in NYC and beyond. Not only is there space for your fresh designs and product launches, but Reed Space’s Gallery Wall is a home for art and photography too. Check out the Reed Space and share a shop with the team that invented Lower East Side creative culture. Pop Up Listing + Gallery Listing.

The CX Premiere at Bryant Park Hotel presented by North Highland and Fortune mag

Tuesday night, we’re joining leaders from Spotify, Dow Jones and J.D. Power for a conversation about customer experience. The CX Premiere is presented by North Highland and Fortune mag. CX panelists from We Are Pop Up, Spotify, Dow Jones and J.D. Power will share stories, best practices and predictions. Following the discussion and Q&A in the Bryant Park Hotel screening room, there will be drinks, appetizers and a chance to meet senior leaders from across the city. Want an invite? shoot us an email at gregs@wearepopup.com

Featured Panelists:

Spotify: Jeff Rossi – Global Director of Business Marketing
We Are Pop Up: Greg Spielberg – Managing Director
Dow Jones: Nick Varney – VP Customer Experience and Design Transformation
J.D. Power: Rocky Clancy – VP Financial Services
North Highland: Alex Bombeck – Global Customer Experience Lead

The Details:
Bryant Park Hotel, 40 W 40th St.
Tuesday February 2^nd 2016
6-9pm

Pop Up Tipping Point! The Only Statistics You Need to Know

This year pop ups are hitting tipping point in the UK and US. They’re becoming everywhere, seeping into retail ecosystems, marketing and media buys, urban planning and economic development strategies. Let’s take a look at the most important numbers driving the swiftly-growing industry into a mainstream staple of 21st century life – the only pop up statistics you need to know.

People
92% of us trust our friends’ recommendations over ad campaigns. The last 8% was likely just clicking through the survey as fast as possible to win an Amazon gift card. People matter more than ads – it’s a statistic that keeps showing up yet doesn’t ever have to be measured again. People like and trust people more than anything anyone can produce online. Since at least 92% of us would rather talk to, hear from and learn from friends, brands have no choice but to be more friendly. Which means, the GOI (growth of investment) in creative retail and pop ups will be massive.

Economy
In the UK, pop ups contribute £2.3 billion a year to the economy, with 12.3% revenue growth in 2015 and 26,000 employed in the industry. In the US, our friends at Pop Up Republic value the national industry at $50 billion, which is 16% of the online retail market. More than enough dollars to bury questions like “are pop ups a trend?”

Imagination
Creativity is an urban economic driver and recruitment tool. A recent Economic Development Quarterly study ties 1.1% growth in “knowledge class” employment to the presence of a metropolitan performing arts center. For cities with two types of PAC (the good kind of PAC), the increase is 1.5% and with three types it’s 2.2%. The short of that statistic is: If you want to recruit smart, creative people, do creative things in real-life space. Creativity means doing something, anything, differently. It keeps our cities fresh and our imaginations satisfied. Pop ups do the same.

Companies
79% of brands say they executed more event and experiential programs in 2015. 65% directly correlate experiential marketing to stronger sales. 84% of companies with $10 million+ marketing budgets are increasing their experiential focus.

Drake
Drake opened his first US store in LA after one in Toronto. If this guy is launching stores, it puts the whole world on a binary: You’re either with Drake or you’re against him. Don’t bet against Drake.

Kiva NYC Launch Party with President Bill Clinton

Last week we headed to Kiva NYC’s Launch Party at Frank Gehry’s iconic IAC Building in Chelsea. The event dovetailed close to our hearts as creative retailers filled IAC’s first floor. Dozens of businesses set up shop with a diversity ranging from Especially Puglia to Dog Parker. Each entrepreneur worked with Kiva to raise money via zero-interest loans. Kiva NYC has already connected thousands of small-dollar lenders to nearly 280 NYC entrepreneurs. We’re just one of Kiva’s fans – they have 1.1 million potential lenders on their site. President Bill Clinton is another. An early supporter of Kiva, the former president keynoted the event with a story about his grandfather. Like Kiva, Eldridge Clinton gave free credit to customers with good character. He and his wife Edith ran a grocery store in Hope, Arkansas, and helped out locals of all backgrounds. Explore Kiva and see how you can get a no-interest loan to help spark your business.