Popup shops are a great way to introduce your products to new customers. They’re a low-investment retail strategy for engaging loyal customers, boosting brand awareness, and gaining valuable customer feedback without committing to a permanent physical store.
When you’re coming up with popup shop ideas and launching them, there are hundreds of moving parts to consider, like choosing a venue, promoting your shop, and evaluating its success—to name a few. But you can learn a lot from other brands who’ve hosted successful popup shop experiences.
Check out this list of 14 creative popup shop ideas, curated for new entrepreneurs and veteran retailers alike, and get a step-by-step guide to learn how to launch your own popup shop.
A popup shop is a temporary in-person retail activation. It allows your customers to interact directly with your products and brand, creating a connection that online platforms often can’t replicate. Popup shops can be an effective strategy for engaging with potential and existing customers in real life while boosting sales at the same time.
There are many reasons why you might consider launching a popup shop for your brand:
Your popup shop may offer exclusive discounts and sales that are available only to physical attendees. This could increase the draw to bring in more customers and make those customers feel special.
For example, sustainable athleisure brand Girlfriend Collective held a popup sample sale at one of their LA warehouses. Shoppers could enjoy massive discounts during the event.
📌Pro tip: Retail associates don’t have to remember discount codes or manually add them to every popup order. Use Shopify POS’s discount feature to do this automatically. You can even configure codes to be time-sensitive, like only applying the discount to the first 50 orders.
Save new product releases or launches for your popup shop. This will increase demand for your popup and make attendees feel special and appreciated.
Danger Factory, for example, strategically sells low-stock items only at events—you won’t find the brand’s popular or nearly out-of-stock pieces on their website.
These events drive a sense of urgency, which the brand increases by not reissuing most of the products they sell at their popups. ”
Hold contests or raffles to encourage customers to visit, and have them enter via social media to spread the word about your popup event. Reward winners with free products, limited-time merchandise, or a special shout-out on your social media channels.
Better yet, host a social media contest and announce the winner on the last day of your popup. This could encourage customers to return multiple times. People could gain one entry when they visit your popup and share a photo using the event-themed hashtag on social media.
Free samples, whether food, cosmetics, or other consumables, can spur valuable impulse purchases. Attract customers to your popup shop with complimentary products that build trust and encourage them to buy more.
Log free samples for each order you ring up on Shopify POS to track what happens post-sample while also keeping accurate inventory levels.
The beauty of Shopify is that all inventory management data is unified in one place. For example, if someone bought a dress and got a free t-shirt at your popup store, you can consult your POS system to see:
Use the buzz generated by your popup to benefit charities that align with your brand values. Donate a portion of your proceeds to a nonprofit, co-brand your merch, or offer to collaborate with an organization so they can leverage your audience and attract foot traffic to raise awareness of their cause.
If your business sells products that require extra education, consider hosting a product demo at your popup shop. You can also ask existing customers to demo your products and explain their use cases, which can double as user-generated content.
Consider making your shop an opportunity for customers to customize your products to their liking. Not only will this differentiate your popup from your regular product offerings, but it will also incentivize customers to share their custom products on social media, thus promoting your popup.
When done right, popup shops can be playgrounds for consumers. Ecommerce stores don’t give customers the chance to touch, feel, and experience products. Leverage your popup shop so customers can interact with your brand, learn more about your products, and have a little fun.
Take Monday Swimwear, for example, which launched a popup store in LA. They allowed customers to work with a “Fit Specialist”—a retail associate who can help find the best swimwear for their bodies.
Monday Swimwear’s team expected the interactive popup to attract customers who were familiar with the brand. But, 60% of sales came from new customers—a profitable segment of people who also spent 8% more than existing customers, on average.
“We had a large number of new customers,” says Ahna Tillmanns, director of operations at Monday Swimwear. “Out of all the transactions processed at our popup, the majority are new to the brand, which is a testament to how great in-person experiences are for net-new acquisition.”
Virtual reality (VR) has been around for some time, but its constant innovation is what keeps it exciting for customers. VR can be a great way to enhance your popup shop idea and get people even more excited about it.
Virtual fitting rooms are great, especially if you don’t have space for physical fitting rooms or inventory. You might also consider contactless pay, self-checkout on mobile, digital showrooms, or augmented reality (AR) experiences such as branded photo filters.
Host interactive workshops that teach popup shoppers about something relevant to your products or brand. For example, a coffee brand’s popup could teach different brewing techniques that involve your brand’s brewing supplies and beans. Hands-on workshops like these help your audience gain confidence in the skills needed to get the most out of using your products.
People love their pets, and many would love to be able to take them shopping. Pure Paws Dog Bakery hosted a pet-friendly holiday popup while maintaining its permanent physical location. It aimed to boost sales and capture foot traffic from holiday shoppers.
Creating content for social media and encouraging in-store visitors to share memorable experiences with friends are two of the biggest challenges retailers face. Offering photo opportunities at your popup solves both in a cost-effective way.
For example, you could:
Many retailers need help finding a place for checkout at a popup. Would you be surprised that you don’t need a designated checkout area anywhere?
Point-of-sale (POS) systems have evolved to be incredibly mobile using your existing technology. For example, Shopify’s Tap to Pay feature can turn your smartphone into a mobile POS system. Retrieve product information, ring up orders, and take contactless payments from anywhere in the popup—without ushering customers toward a long checkout line.
Clothing brand Unfinished Legacy uses this feature to manage their highly anticipated popups. People can see how the retailer screen prints their apparel—a type of experiential retail that lets customers see how their products are made behind the scenes.
The best part? Unfinished Legacy doesn’t have a traditional POS system—just their smartphones and the Shopify POS app.
“We all have our iPhone with us all the time anyway, so it makes things easier when we can just bring our phone with us to the popup and be good to go,” says Mike Esiobu, marketing manager at Unfinished Legacy. “I can walk around and interact with people; if they want to make a purchase, I can do it right then and there from my iPhone.”
Collaborating with other brands for your popup shop expands your reach while saving on costs. But before collaborating, ensure your brand partners align with your goals and values and that your audiences are compatible.
FOLKDAYS, for example, has regular popup shop collaborations. Their FOLKDAYS & Friends Pop-up Shop series visits a new location each month, highlighting artisans and fellow small brands along the way.
Sustainable fashion brand Kūla also partnered with a local ceramics maker and a coffee shop for a weekend popup—creating a shop-within-a-shop experience.
Special guests like designers, influencers, and experts can bring in customers who want a chance to meet them.
If you have special brand ambassadors or a relationship with the designer of some of the products you sell, host a popup around their attendance and encourage them to share your shop with their audience. This can bring in customers outside your typical demographic.
ByFossdal, a Danish jewelry brand, uses this tactic for their popup shops. Special guests have included Instagram knit designers Libekbh and Sofie and Iris.
Like food trucks for restaurants, popup stores make retailers uniquely mobile in a way neither a brick-and-mortar location nor an ecommerce store can provide. Consider hosting your popup shop experience in a truck or trailer so you can visit different parts of your city.
Popup shops go where the shoppers are, so luxury brand Dolce & Gabbana set up a traveling popup shop in the Hamptons. The luxury popup offered summer clothes for men, women, and children, plus cultural activities as a nod to the brand’s Italian roots.
For one summer month, The Sicilian Cart was available to Hamptons locals and visitors as a shopping and cultural experience. It was designed to completely immerse consumers in the Italian island’s history through images and historical symbols.
First, ask yourself what you want to achieve. Many businesses use popups to test selling in a physical location without the risk of a long-term lease. In 2024, 17% of entrepreneurs used them for this purpose.
Other goals could be to sell extra inventory, let customers experience a new product, or support a specific business model like reselling. For example, the brand PopUp Kids Consign + Shop hosts popup events to sell new and used children’s clothing, posting the dates on their Shopify store.
Then, figure out how much you can spend. Typical popup budgets can range from around $5,000 to $20,000 for the average brand, or $10,000 to $50,000 for luxury brands. Your total costs will depend on your host city, the size of the popup space, and the duration of your activation. Remember to budget for essentials like rent, staff, decor, marketing, and your POS system.
You want to make the shopping experience smooth for your customers and easy for your team. If your popup shop and online store aren’t connected, you can run into problems like selling an item that’s already out of stock. A single system like Shopify POS solves this by connecting everything.
Here is what you need to get set up:
Once you’re ready to make sales, you can use these Shopify POS features to connect with customers and grow your brand:
It’s crucial to get the word out so people are aware of your popup and know when and where to show up.
Before you open, start building excitement a few weeks ahead of time. Use social media and email to tell your followers the dates and location. Let them know if you’ll have special products or events.
To reach beyond your current followers, you can use a tool like Shopify Audiences to run targeted ads. It uses custom lists built from millions of commerce insights to get your ads in front of the most interested buyers. Using Shopify Audiences can help cut customer acquisition costs by up to 50%.
Once your popup is over, look back at the goals you set to measure your performance. With Shopify Analytics, all this information lives right inside your admin.
Here are a few ways to track your popup shop success:
Popup shops provide unique ways to connect with your customers, bring tangibility to your brand, and generate buzz around campaigns, new products, or other causes. The benefits of a popup store far outweigh the low investment required to launch one.
Get inspired by this guide’s popup shop ideas to launch your next popup shop, expand your brand’s reach, and bring your small business idea to more customers.
Whether you’ll need a license for your popup depends on where you’re hosting it and what you’re selling. You might need a seller’s permit and business insurance (that includes public liability).
To make your popup shop stand out, try these ideas:
Here are some ways to stage a popup shop:
Warby Parker is a great example of a brand that found success in popup shops. Warby Parker started online and then tested physical retail with popup shops. The popup shops were successful, and now the brand has hundreds of permanent retail stores across the US.
The number of items you should have at a popup shop depends on many factors, including the size of the space, how much inventory you can transport at a time, the duration of the popup, and expected sales velocity. Having your entire product catalog or warehouse at a popup shop is unnecessary, so come up with a popup strategy that focuses only on certain products from your catalog.
