Author: We Are Pop Up

What is the future of brand? Why are urban farms relevant to me? How do we create meaningful human interactions in commercial spaces? How are brands using pop ups to grow?

These are just some of the questions that will be answered on 22^nd March, when brands, leading retailers, agents and leasing experts will be coming together for the annual SPREE Europe innovation day. We Are Pop Up is thrilled to be Chairing the event. The conference is aimed at helping brands and shopping centre professionals learn more about the €6bn specialty retail industry that consists of pop-up stores, kiosks and experiential events. It’s the key annual innovation conference for EU shopping centre operators and developers and we’ll be taking the opportunity as Chair to showcase the bravest and boldest new models. To attend and find out more, all the details are here.

The Programme:
Tuesday 22^nd March 2016
Islington Design Centre

9.00
Registration and Networking

9.30
Welcome Address
Clara Maguire: Chief Operating Officer, We Are Pop Up

9.40
10 New Retail Rules
Aaron Shields: Strategy Director Europe & Russia, Fitch

10.10
Immersive Experiences
Rupert Pick: Planning Director & Co-Founder, Hot Pickle
Lucy Johnston: Author, Brand Experience Curator & Founder, The Neon Birdcage
Dr Maggie Atkinson: Think Tank Member, Kidzania
Moderator: Petah Marian, Senior Editor Retail Intelligence, WGSN

10.40
‘Go Local’ Future Malls
Charlie Gent – Marketing Manager, Pop Brixton

11.40
Rise of the Retail Curator
Arianna Cefis: Founder, HC HQ Ltd & Kings Road Concept Store
Elisicia Moore: Founder & Director, Petit Miracles
Kathrine Heiberg: CEO, Re-Team Group & Mytiful Stores
Moderator: Emily Wright, Features & Global Editor, Estates Gazette

12.25
It’s all just space! Uses beyond retail
Fabian Weinlander: Director of Project Development, UrbanFarmers
James Layfield: Founder & CEO, Central Working
Tom Tobia: Co-Founder, Makerversity
Moderator: TBC

12:55
Lunch & Networking

14:10
How I Grew My Brand With Specialty Leasing
Jonny Burt: Co-Founder, The Unit
Daniel Peters: Founder, BBSC
Sandro Abeille: International Expansion, Chiquita Fruit Bar
Moderator:  Dan Innes, Managing Director, Innesco

14.40
Understanding New Brand Behaviour
Leading Brand Agency TBC

15:10 
Break

15.40
The Rise & Rise of F&B
Jonathan Downey, Co-Founder, London Union
Atholl Milton, CEO & Co-Founder, StreetDots
Dimple Lalwani, CEO & Founder, Social Belly
Moderator: Richard Johnson, award-winning food journalist, consultant and founder of the British Street Food Awards

16:25
Weak Signals of New Valuation Models
Speaker from CBRE

17:00
Closing Remarks 

17:15
Networking Drinks Reception
Axis Bar, Hilton London: Angel, Islington

 

We will lift the lid on innovative approaches to space use, consumer engagement, new brand behaviour, underlying drivers of demand, and business models. The programme has been developed based on our belief that retail and public realm space is a platform to unlock new ideas, create jobs, drive economic development, and create exciting places in the heart of communities.

With demand for fractional use of space from brands massive and growing rapidly, by lowering the barriers for entrepreneurs to get into space we are powering the creative retail movement. This is a movement built on connections that give birth to new retail concepts – from brand mash-ups, to collaborative leasing, and it’s being embraced by brands of all sizes, from start-up to global conglomerate.

The intensive one-day programme will address all aspects of the €6bn global specialty leasing sector including top industry trends; innovative immersive experiences; the rise of retail curating and how it can be leveraged to create a unique specialty programme; creative uses for vacant space in shopping centres beyond retail such as urban farming on rooftops, office space and industrial production; case studies from brands who will share how specialty pop-up store space has enabled them to trial new concepts and grow organically; and how food is changing the face of specialty retail.

Guest speakers include the world’s leading retail and brand consultancy Fitch; London Union – the next venture from the Founders of Street Feast and Leon; brand licensing and retail innovation experts Hot Pickle; Neon Birdcage; Kidzania; Pop Brixton; Concept Store Kings Rd; Petite Miracles; Mytiful; Soho success story The Unit; Dead Dolls House; Street Dots; Social Belly and CBRE.

 

“As our Cities swell to accommodate urbanisation – space becomes an increasingly precious commodity. Unlocking its value requires us to move beyond traditional concepts of yield management, long term leasing and retail conglomerates taking on multiple units.

How we enable that shift and make the Shopping Centre relevant to tomorrow’s brands will play a key part in the future viability of these retail assets and the communities they serve.”

(Clara Maguire, We Are Pop Up’s COO)

Patricia Norins, ICSC’s Vice President of Specialty Retail, who launched SPREE Europe in 2015, explains, “The specialty retail industry is making a significant difference in the global retail real estate landscape. ICSC’s SPREE events aim to bring together the leading brands, agents and those executives who are using specialty formats such as kiosks, pop-up stores and sponsorship to drive footfall, diversity and excitement.” She tells us, “We are thrilled to have We Are Pop Up as a 2016 sponsor and their COO, Clara Maguire serving as the SPREE Europe conference chair. Their deep expertise and connections in the pop-up store sector has helped to significantly shape the event by helping ICSC to attract a powerful line-up of innovative industry speakers.”

We are thrilled to be involved too, and would love to see you on the day. To attend or find out more, all the details are here.

 

Every year Britain’s property sector comes together to review the data behind commercial property leasing across the country. The data reveals trends and new behaviours and is crucial to understanding the shifting sands of property usage on Britain’s streets and what that means for business of all sizes. 

Now in it’s 17th year, the MSCI and Strutt & Parker’s UK Lease Event Review in partnership with British Property Federation took place in early November. We Are Pop Up’s COO Clara Maguire was thrilled to speak at the event. Here, Clara shares some of the key insights from the day and the data affecting brands, retailers and the property sector at large. 

The core lesson? Flexible leasing is a structural shift, and it’s here to stay.

Brands want shorter leases and more flexibility in where, and how, they engage consumers. A movement that was spurred by the recession caught fire with social media and has now become the norm. Large and small brands are building products and services in new ways.

Business financing options, innovation tools, and risk profiles have all changed. This means brands’ business and operating models are very different.

Sitting in a room with more than 100 property investors from leading institutions such as British Land and AXA, we reflected on both the opportunities and challenges of these shifts.

‘It will be those investors… with a focus on the underlying drivers of demand, who will succeed as the property cycle moves into its next phase’

Andy Martin – UK Lease Events Review – November 2015

Savvy property professionals know there is more to this than meets the eye. It’s not just the lease instrument that is shifting. In order to meet changing demand we need to overhaul our valuation models, risks profiles, and asset management approaches.

The new drivers of demand

Brands want shorter leases:

Brands want to know they can get out of the lease if they need to:

Brands will pay more for flexibility:

The real, underlying drivers of demand

‘In the past year we have seen serviced office operators catapulted into the limelight… they themselves are signing leases of up to 20-years, this of course disguises the fact that the underlying demand for their services is from occupiers taking on much shorter commitments – something not picked up in the data’

Andy Martin – UK Lease Events Review – November 2015

This behaviour isn’t limited to office space. In recent years there has been an explosive growth in demand from brands to share retail space. In global retail cities where location is king, this is how brands access prime retail space.

We are seeing a whole generation of creative retail talent with an entirely different relationship to real estate than their predecessors. We Are Pop Up’s data shows, at granular detail, demand for a single clothes rail in a boutique in Greenwich that costs £9 a day, to a concession in Oxford Street for £300 a day, or on Manhattan’s Lower East Side for $200 a day. We call this behaviour ShopShare.

We can tell you about the nature, scale, and source of underlying demand. We can tell you how frequently brands book, where they book, what they pay. As a tech platform we can tell you what day of the week a particular concession, in a particular part of town, is most likely to book. Every touch-point from sign-up, to enquiry, to booking is captured.

If this analysis is omitted from the data collected by the UK Lease Events Review, we can help. 

The WeWork Effect

Currently valued at $15billion, WeWork’s value is being generated below the head lease.

Once they sign a 20-year lease in a prime location they are able to service underlying demand for fractional and flexible use of space.

At WeWork you can rent 1 to 10 person offices, dedicated desks, shared desks. The WeWork Commons means you can book a desk on a mobile app on a global basis. You can attend and host events. You can access the social network of 30,000+ creatives, and thousands of potential customers.

In this model WeWork act as network aggregators. They service a growing, underlying demand for fractional use of high value real estate, anchored by a social and globally connected community.   

The result? Networks in physical space.

Hidden and untapped value

A demand of a similar nature exists within retail. Shops on We Are Pop Up are listing small modules of their store and are generating thousands of pounds of revenue every month. Boutiques in Shoreditch make £20k renting rails and tables. Another of our shops tells us 50% of revenue is product sales, the other 50% – renting out space on We Are Pop Up.

These retailers cluster in high-value spaces. This makes them the biggest ‘owners’ of high value space and the smart ones know it. They too are acting as network aggregators selling fractional use of their space.

The result? A new role in the ecosystem. We call them Retail Curators.

A shifting business model for retail

A number of drivers are commoditising retail space.

Channels: e-commerce

Before e-commerce, brick and mortar was how you reached customers. Now brands have options. We see that landlords can’t push increasing rents in the same way anymore. The goal now is just to minimise vacancy. The shift is evident with stable vacancy rates and the majority of retailers either paying the same or lower rates.

With rental uplift sacrificed for higher renewal, supply gets even more constrained. The mindset of minimising vacancy, rather than maximising utilisation is actively preventing future growth opportunities.

Product sourcing: ShopShare

For many brands ShopShare now replaces trade-shows. Rather than showcase a product to retail buyers at a trade-show, brands buy ShopShare space and face the product directly to consumers, able to invite buyers to the space too. We Are Pop Up allows brands to access high-value space, but we also allow low-value space to approach brands relevant for their stores.

For the retailer, ShopShare de-risks product selection. There is now an alternative to buying large consignments and hoping you’ve got it right, or fronting money for sale and return.

This transforms getting new inventory and fresh in-store content, from a cost centre to a revenue line.

Roles: Retail Curators

Retailers are the biggest space owners, but they’re stale on storytelling. They are paying prime rents and being hit by e-commerce. The retail in itself isn’t necessarily profitable but they need to engage consumers in the real world and drive them back online. They need a physical presence on the high street, and they need a new way to compete for attention anchored in experiences. 

Brands have fresh product and they need channels to market it to consumers. To them ShopShare is social media space and they share that story widely across their networks. Having a presence in a physical space creates new media content. The brands drive the network movement through sharing this content online. The retailer takes advantage of this behavior to anchor the experience in real space – in their real space. This drives footfall, brand awareness, and ultimately sales.

The result, once again is networks in physical space.

It’s the same with The Permanent Pop Up and The Dandy Lab. It’s the same with historic Heal’s flagship store on Tottenham Court Road partnering with coworking space Forge & Co.

Value: Adjacent benefit

Possibly my favourite graph of the day presented by Stephanie McMahon, Head of Research at Strutt & Parker, shows the comparative uplift in asset value in Brixton ‘v’ Clapham post the development of Brixton Village Market.

The market operator plays the role of aggregator. They offer micro-leases and build a new ‘anchor’ offer, based not on long leases, but on flexible ones. Consumers know there will be authentic and novel experiences and keep coming back for more. This drives footfall and ultimately pushes up the value of adjacent retail assets. The key thing here is the correlation between google hits and rising asset value.

New drivers of value

Taken together we are seeing a powerful set of drivers pointing us toward a new value proposition for commercial real estate. We have some work to do and some mindset shifts to make.

1/ We need to evolve our data models to include the underlying patterns of demand. This means exploring the real behavior shaping the future of commercial real estate that’s happening below the line of the head lease.

2/ Network Aggregators are benefiting from the underlying patterns of demand, inventing new ways to meet it based on fractional use overlaid with networks. They are creating new value and driving supply in a supply constrained market. Institutional investors can help scale this model and share in its benefits.

3/ The fundamental shift needed is to move from asset valuations to use-valuations. In a complicated real estate market where assets are over-leveraged or underpin pension policies, I recognise making this transition is a challenge. However, we do need to make it if we want the asset class to be productive and grow.

The opportunity costs are mounting for landowners, retailers, brands, which is having a knock-on effect at the simple level of job creation and economic growth. What is becoming increasingly apparent is that fewer and fewer benefit from trying to keep things the same. It’s time for a change. 

If you’d like to continue to the conversation over a coffee then contact me at clara@wearepopup.com