{"id":29712,"date":"2015-05-29T10:15:48","date_gmt":"2015-05-29T08:15:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/?p=29712"},"modified":"2015-05-29T10:15:48","modified_gmt":"2015-05-29T08:15:48","slug":"popup-immo-set-take-retail-revolution-around-globe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/2015\/05\/popup-immo-set-take-retail-revolution-around-globe\/","title":{"rendered":"PopUp Immo set to take their retail revolution around the globe"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"popup
\nOften\u00a0the most elegant and successful business ideas are the\u00a0most straightforward ones. PopUp Immo is looking to\u00a0address\u00a0two pressing, basic needs – \u00a0brands’ need\u00a0for\u00a0visibility with customers at\u00a0minimal financial investment\u00a0and commercial real-estate owners’ need to fill their space. With their launch last year, they’ve quickly become\u00a0the top marketplace in France\u00a0connecting brands and advertisers with the commercial real-estate sector\u00a0to create exceptional\u00a0Pop Up store experiences.
\nFresh off their selection to top-notch acceleration program NUMA Sprint<\/a>\u00a0and making the finals last month at leading\u00a0tech event B Dash Camp in Japan,\u00a0PopUp Immo founder\u00a0Mohamed Houache\u00a0discusses\u00a0their\u00a0vision, the unique value they deliver both brands and commercial retail, and their plans to quickly ramp-up internationally, particularly in\u00a0Asia.
\n\"\"What is PopUp Immo about and what’s special about what you do?<\/strong>
\nPopUp Immo is a retail revolution. What we do is\u00a0enable brands, artists, designers to find retail space for short-term duration. Although it’s mostly an innovation of service rather than technology, we can say that we’ve been impacting the future of some brands. Before PopUp Immo there was essentially no cost-effective way for smaller brands or brands not based in Paris to engage directly with\u00a0their customers at\u00a0retail. What these brands really wanted to test the Paris or French market at low financial risk to them. To do this they needed flexibility as well as visibility on the\u00a0cost of booking a boutique for two or three days.
\nPrior to our launch there was no marketplace like this, meaning essentially that there was no transparency or efficiency around this type of service. As the leading marketplace in France offering rental of short-term retail space, we’re addressing a real, basic need. The ability to launch a Pop Up store also gives\u00a0an edge to these brands because they can communicate and leverage social networks to bring their fans to their store and\u00a0connect with them afterwards.\u00a0In many ways we’re both an online-to-offline and an offline-to-online solution.
\nWho specifically do you think is most drawn to what PopUp Immo can offer?<\/strong>
\nThink about all the American brands that want to come to here to test the Paris market, all the ecommerce platforms\u00a0who can’t meet their customers directly, or all the PR or advertising firms who are bidding for contracts with big brands and can offer them this approach which will give them better ROI that pretty much any online marketing campaign.
\nAnother advantage which we didn’t anticipate is that pop-up stores are also bringing more life back to particular areas of Paris. After we launch a Pop Up\u00a0store and the brand does a good job at communicating and delivering an experience, people want to come back to the area. For example, last December we had a\u00a0collective of 10 small men’s accessories brands come together to book a Pop up store on small street in the Sentier district. They promoted like it crazy and the store\u00a0became the top Pop up store during that month. Following that success, we now we have all types of brands\u00a0wanting to book that space.
\nHow are you reaching the owners of these spaces to get them on your platform?<\/strong>
\nThey’re now contacting us. We really are helping both sides of the marketplace. For private owners and real estate agents they have a few issues. Many\u00a0really want to reinvent the DNA of the space. Others\u00a0just want to rent the space temporarily until they can find a more permanent long-term tenant. So as with brands, we can offer owners and agents flexibility.
\nWhat about all the services around it. Do you help in the conception of the Pop up store experience (design, promotion, etc)?<\/strong>
\nNot yet. We’re still a very small team and if we expand into an agency business where we connect brands with designers, advertising agencies, etc, you can create an ecosystem around PopUp Immo. But the problem is that it’s not completely scalable, it requires more people and resources, and it really is a different type of business. It doesn’t mean we won’t expand into that in the mid-term, but for now we want to focus first on the marketplace.
\n\"bdashI understand you were a finalist at last month’s B Dash Camp, an exclusive event for some of tech’s best and brightest in Fukuoka, Japan. Tell me a bit about that.<\/strong>
\nI was proud and extremely happy to just have gotten the chance to attend, let alone to reach the final phase of the competition. Initially my plan in going was to test the market and show to the world that there is a French company offering an innovative\u00a0solution for retail space. \u00a0The fact that I was a finalist was a big surprise because there were truly some other fantastic projects as well. Just being there for me was like the final. Being the only European company as a finalist and having such great feedback after the final was a big success for us. What I realized is that we’ve really developed a compelling story around the marketplace and that’s a unique angle.
\nI understand you\u00a0also\u00a0traveled to Hong Kong during your\u00a0visit to\u00a0Asia last month. What are your thoughts on opportunity in Japan and elsewhere in Asia?<\/strong>
\nI’ll start with the Japanese market, which is very unique and has several appealing characteristics for PopUp Immo. Customers have a lot of purchasing power. They love and enjoy brands. There’s a very high vacancy rate in Tokyo. When you bring these aspects together, it makes a really interesting opportunity for us. My biggest concern is to be able to find local expertise and be able to put in place PopUp Immo fully tailored to Japanese customers. I met some very skilled people on the VC-side, entrepreneurs and others that stressed that there was real market there for PopUp Immo. For example, we can be a bring between Europe and Japan just by offering retail space.
\nI also spent time in Hong Kong. Very a different dynamic. High growth market, completely deregulated and very oriented to shopping malls. There is a lower vacancy rate in Hong Kong than Tokyo, but a lot of brands want to test Hong Kong prior to expanding to mainland China.
\nTwo amazing and viable options for PopUp Immo, but to grow in these markets we’re definitely going to need more resources, especially\u00a0local talent.
\nWhat about competition? I imagine there’s an increasing number of startups in this space?<\/strong>
\nWe’re really keeping our eye on the competition, particularly one in the UK that recently raised a lot of money and one in the US. So far,\u00a0however, we have been able to do with few resources what our competitors have done with a lot more. I want to very quickly build\u00a0on the interest we’re getting from increasingly large brands, as well expand to new markets such as London and East Asia, where we want to have the first advantage there. \u00a0We feel that in Asia, particularly where you have lots of shopping malls that look similar, Pop up stores offer them a great way to differentiate themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Often\u00a0the most elegant and successful business ideas are the\u00a0most straightforward ones. PopUp Immo is looking to\u00a0address\u00a0two pressing, basic needs – \u00a0brands’ need\u00a0for\u00a0visibility with customers at\u00a0minimal financial investment\u00a0and commercial real-estate owners’ need to fill their space. With their launch last year, they’ve quickly become\u00a0the top marketplace in France\u00a0connecting brands and advertisers with the commercial real-estate sector\u00a0to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":29716,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10563],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tech"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}