A Round-Up of the Summer’s Best Pop-Ups

The summer period is historically a busy time for shopping centres, kids are off school, the nice weather entices people out the house and summer holidays encourage consumers to update their summer wardrobe!

Commercialisation pop-up units are a fantastic way to maximise sales from the upsurge in footfall, increase dwell time and enhance the guest experience. Here are a few of my favourite pop-ups from summer 2018…

In Milton Keynes, centre:mk launched ‘Copa Beach’, along with the tonnes of sand, the pop up featured a carousel, deck chairs and candyfloss and ice-cream stands for visitors to enjoy! They combined this with ‘Cabana Village’ in Queens Court which offered food and entertainment to truly transform the destination and drive footfall!

Meadowhall shopping centre in Sheffield also launched a beach pop-up for the summer. British Land has reported that over August bank holiday, footfall grew by 50% year on year and across August, footfall was up 20% after 6pm across the whole of the mall with catering sales seeing a growth of 6.7%. The beach was combined with a double-decker bus which contained a range of activities for children. The experiential activities and unique experience created, boosted footfall, dwell time and overall revenue!

Westfield London hosted ‘summer 2018: all the fun of the fair comes to Westfield’ with a retro funfair. The funfair pop-up boasted dodgems, classic fairground games and a programme full of free kids activities.

North Face created a very exclusive pop-up shop this summer – so exclusive you had to hike for two hours in Val San Nicolò! This goes against the usual pull of launching a pop-up: placing a brand or products in a location where there are high volumes of footfall to benefit from. The strategy did, however, generate a lot of publicity and the difficulty of visiting the unit matched the exclusivity of the products on sale: collectors items worn by highly idolised and respected explorers.

Following the hot British summer and the clear success of the commercialisation beach initiatives, intu Trafford Centre installed a giant 50-foot artificial sun! The landlord conducted research which found a third of people say 2018 has been their happiest summer in memory – despite the economic uncertainty – with 20% crediting the sunshine. The sun has now left intu Trafford and is on a tour of the landlord’s 11 other centres!

Summer 2018 has been a great example of what commercialisation can offer us, let’s see what is around the corner for Christmas!