Three months in a storefront and my pop up numbers did not follow me to the lease

Greg Foster· Vintage and resale clothing store, pop-ups first, storefront open three months· Open, Retail & Resale·1w

Two years of vintage pop ups, mostly weekend markets, where a good Saturday was around $2,800 and a bad one was $1,100. I took that average, found a cheap storefront on a side street two blocks off the main drag, and signed a three year lease feeling like the smartest person at the flea market.

Three months open and Saturdays are running $600 to $900. Tuesday through Thursday I have done less than $200 on more days than I want to admit. The rent is genuinely cheap and it is still the scariest number on my bank statement.

What I got wrong is obvious in hindsight. At a market I was renting a crowd. The organiser spent the money to get four thousand people through a parking lot and I paid $90 for a table in front of them. On my own street I am the one who has to produce the crowd, and a vintage store two blocks off the path is not a place people stumble into, it is a place people drive to on purpose.

So I am back doing one market a month for cash and announcing drops on social for the store.

For anyone with a shop: what actually pulled people in? Signage, hours, window changes, events? I need something that is not just posting more.

4 replies

Dev Patel· Idea stage·6d

This is the exact thread I needed and also did not want to read, because I have been scouting tea shop locations for four months and the cheapest space on my list is cheap for reasons I have been actively not thinking about.

Can I ask the boring question, what did the side street do to your weekday hours? I keep assuming I would open six days and now I am wondering whether three quiet days cost more in staffing and my own sanity than they bring in. Did you consider cutting Tuesday and Wednesday entirely, or does being closed make you look like you are already failing?

Greg Foster· Open·6d

I cut Tuesdays a month ago and nothing bad happened. Nobody has ever mentioned it. I use the day to source, which is the part of this business that actually makes money, so a closed Tuesday is more profitable than an open one was.

On your cheap space, the thing I would actually pay for now is being on the walking path between two places people already go. My street has a good bakery at one end and nothing at the other, and I am at the nothing end. Forty feet of difference, and the rent gap that seduced me was about $400 a month.

Rob Mackenzie· Open·6d

Car wash, so not your customer, but location is the entire business for me and I count cars the way you should probably count feet. Three things that moved my numbers and cost almost nothing.

Signage that reads at driving speed, not at reading speed. Mine had four lines and now it has two words. Second, a reason to come at a specific time, because people do not visit stores, they attend things. A Thursday evening drop with a beer and forty minutes is an event, a sale is not. Third, your Google Business Profile with real hours and photos from this month, because the side street problem is a findability problem.

Dev Patel· Idea stage·5d

People do not visit stores, they attend things is going in my notes app, right above the rent number I keep talking myself into.

Greg, the forty feet detail is what I am taking from this. I have been comparing spaces on rent per square foot in a spreadsheet, which makes two spaces look identical when one of them is on the path from the parking garage to the restaurants and the other is around a corner. That is not a spreadsheet column, it is something I have to go stand on the sidewalk and see.

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