Charlotte Shi

Commercialisation and the Authenticity of Vintage Fashion

This chapter provides an overview of vintage fashion retailing and how it has been typified by its evolution. By first reviewing the environment and giving an in-depth background to vintage fashion retailing, it moves onto defining what the concept of vintage entails, how it can be sourced and supplied. The chapter utilises a practice-based approach to analyse the market of vintage fashion retailing and demonstrates how retailers, suppliers and consumers, each knowledgable in specialist areas of interest, define the buying and selling of merchandise.

Introducing a Framework for Planning and Implementing Pop-up Activities

This chapter introduces a conceptual framework for the planning and implementation of pop-up activities. Drawing on existing literature on experience, the conceptual framework is structured in processual terms, comprising four stages—Strategic Objectives, Pre-Pop-up, Pop-up Expereince and Post Pop-up. The framework considers these stages from two parallel perspectives—the Brand Perspective and the Consumer Perspective.

Introducing the Pop-up Concept

This chapter defines the concept of pop-up, in terms of an ephemeral retail-oriented setting which can facilitate direct, experientially oriented customer-brand interaction, albeit for a limited period. It goes on to discuss the origins of the concept, which in specific retail terms, arguably date back to the periodic markets of the middle ages, but more recently in its more contemporary brand-oriented manifestation, date from the 1990s-early 2000s. It then outlines key themes—experiential, temporal, promotional and spatial—that are becoming indelibly associated with the pop-up concept, with indicative examples of recent pop-up activities.

Classifying Pop-up Activities

The inherent flexibility of the concept means that pop-up retailing can take a variety of forms. This chapter reviews existing classificatory schemas from the academic literature, outlining the different forms that pop-up activities can take. These schemas are discussed by focusing on two key dimensions: location and function. The chapter concludes by introducing a new classificatory schema of pop-up activities, populated by exemplars of specific pop-up activities in each part of the schema.

Planning and Implementing Pop-up Activities: Strategic Objectives

The inherent flexibility of pop-up means that it can potentially contribute to a variety of objectives, termed by Warnaby et al. (2015) as Communicational, Experiential, Transactional and Testing objectives. This research identifies a range of different objectives that the pop-up activities studied sought to achieve. These are classified into seven, more specific objectives, namely: Increasing Brand Awareness; Influencing Brand Associations; Promoting Seasonal/Limited Collection Products; Engaging Customers; Gathering Customer Insight; Testing Market Concepts; and Facilitating Strategic Growth.

Pop-up’s Academic Antecedents

The existing academic literature on pop-up retailing is limited, especially in relation to managerial issues concerning its planning and implementation. Whilst there is a practitioner-oriented literature, manifested in what might be termed ‘How to…’ manuals (see Norsig 2011; Thompson 2012), this work is not strongly underpinned by academic theory. The aim of this chapter is to review relevant literature in three areas that could be viewed as theoretical antecedents of a more focused academic inquiry into pop-up retailing. These areas are: retail store environments/atmospherics; customer experience management; and event management. Each is discussed below in terms of how it can inform an understanding of pop-up. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how pop-up activities could be considered as territories (albeit temporary ones) of customer-brand interactions.

Planning and Implementing Pop-up Activities: The Pop-up Experience

The Pop-up Experience is when and where the major physical interactions and engagement between brands and consumers happen. The existing academic literature discusses various factors involved in the creation of customer experience. For example, Verhoef et al. (2009) posit a conceptual model of consumer experience creation in a retail context, which suggests that any strategy for managing customer experience should incorporate the following elements: social environment, service interface, retail atmosphere, product assortment, price, customer experience in alternative channels, the retail brand, and customer experience over time. Given that pop-up is an aspect of retail activity, many of these experiential components in a more general context resonate in the specific situation of pop-up retail activities. However, it can be argued that there are differences in nuance and emphasis arising from the inherent ephemerality of pop-up. Thus, in a pop-up context specific elements identified in the research that need to be considered at this stage are: the social environment, digital engagement, store atmospherics, product assortment, and promotion.

A Critical Perspective on the Pop-up Concept

In recent years, the ‘pop-up’ epithet has become synonymous with temporary events in a wide range of contexts, not least in relation to retailing where the growth rate of pop-up retailing is greater than that of the industry more generally. This chapter takes a more critical perspective on the pop-up concept, arguing that it seems to be becoming ubiquitous, and arguably, increasingly over-used. Also, the implications of pop-up for the wider urban context within which the great majority of such activities are located is a topic worthy of further research.

Characteristics of Pop-up

Existing definitions of pop-up given in Chap. 1 highlight its multi-faceted nature. In this chapter, some of these different facets are explored in more detail as a means of further explicating the pop-up concept, focusing on three key characteristics; namely the fact that pop-up activities are ephemeral, experiential and flexible. Each of these characteristics is considered in turn, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of an additional characteristic, which arguably underpins those mentioned above, and provides pop-up with significant part of its particular attraction to businesses and consumers alike, namely novelty.

A Comprehensive Framework for Planning and Implementing Pop-up Activities

Chapters 6– 9 introduced the various stages of the process of planning and implementing pop-up activities—Strategic Objectives, Pre Pop-up, the Pop-up Experience, and Post Pop-up—highlighting the decision areas and actions relevant to each particular stage. This chapter revisits the outline framework presented in Fig. 5.1 and incorporates more detail relating to the decision areas and actions in each stage, as outlined in previous chapters, to produce a more comprehensive diagrammatic representation of this process.