PopUp Republic

The Makings of PopUp Republic

I’d like to begin this chapter by inviting you to skip it. In fact, although it is being slotted in as Chapter 2, it happens to have been the last chapter written for this book. It was practically an afterthought, even though, in retrospect, once written, I felt it was important enough to put toward the front.

The subject of this chapter is my own company, PopUp Republic. It isn’t easy to justify devoting a chapter basically to writing about yourself, or at least about your own business, when you are tasked with writing the definitive, objective book about a subject matter about which readers might have an interest. But I’m doing it, and I think I not only have just cause, but it is actually an imperative if I am going to cover the topic of pop-ups, especially in the United States, in its entirety.

I say this for two reasons. First, “pop-ups” are a relatively new concept and industry. It represents the evolution of an amorphous group of disparate commercial trends into a growing, significant movement. While it can be illustrated that a so-called “pop-up” was hosted in the United States back in 1999 by a company named Vacant, and that this is justifiably referred to as the genesis of the pop-up industry in the United States, it was merely a foothold. It is really only in the past three years or so that pop-ups have spread and become so popular that they have been embraced by big brands, artisanal creators, online retailers, commercial landlords, ...