In celebration of pop-up WOM
By Molly FlattIt is no surprise that the noughties, decade of social media mania, was also the decade of the pop-up. In 2004, Comme des Garcons started the trend with their guerilla stores throughout Europe, and for a while spotting temporary ventures was the city game du jour; in 2006, foodies were climbing over each other to secure a table at The Reindeer; in 2008 the art crowd were clawing for membership of The Double Club. Nowadays, pop-ups have firmly moved from the urbanista fringe into the mainstream: today I passed Marmite’s Regent Street boutique and the mini Dover Street Market in St Martin’s Lane Hotel in a single walk.
DSM goes XS on St Martin’s Lane
The pop-up is a brilliant conversational gambit, combining exclusivity, secrecy and status-raising cool in a capsule-sized hit of commerce which promises to bring you only the best. It harnesses the power of limitation I discussed in AdMap earlier this year, whereby aggressive aggregators win through in a world of endless choice. Purposefully anti-publicity, these places are like physical easter eggs for devoted fans and rely purely on word of mouth to disseminate their whereabouts and boost their in-the-know appeal. Their ephemeral nature means that they only live on in the minds and words and images of those who find them out, like collective social artefacts; and the knowledge of their imminent demise drives people to immortalise them online.
They’re increasingly becoming a bit of a cliché, but they are a striking symbol of how brands big and small made punters feel special in an overcrowded commercial decade. So all hail the WOM triumph of the pop-up. Which was your favourite and why?
