A brand can spend weeks building excitement for a shop, attract thousands of people to it and then close the doors before customers have even had the chance to get bored of it. That probably sounds like a weird way to approach physical retail, where the usual goal is to establish a location and keep customers coming back, but the concept of a pop-up is exactly what makes this unusual idea work.
The value for a brand isn鈥檛 necessarily in keeping the shop open; it can be in everything the business gets from having a physical presence for a limited period. Research published by ScienceDirect has found that pop-ups can be used to test new markets 鈥� which could help finding out how customers respond to a new location, giving an online-only brand somewhere to connect with its audience or creating a physical experience around a launch without having to make permanent decisions.
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Why Are Pop-Ups Appealing To Brands?
A permanent shop comes with a long-term commitment to a location. There鈥檚 the lease, the cost of fitting out the space and the ongoing expense of keeping it open, all before the business even has a chance to find out whether the location actually works or not. A pop-up cuts that commitment down, giving brands a chance to test a place or try physical retail without signing up permanently.
That physical experience for online brands can also reveal something that online sales can鈥檛 鈥� a business might know where its customers live, but that doesn鈥檛 exactly tell whether those people would visit a shop, interact with the brand in person or respond to a location.
The limited timeframe also gives customers a reason to act quickly; a shop that will disappear in a few weeks creates a sense of urgency, especially when it’s linked to a lunch, collaboration or limited-edition release.
More Than Just A Place To Sell
A launch or collaboration gives people an actual reason to visit a pop-up, rather than just giving them somewhere else to shop. Once they鈥檙e there, the experience can continue online, with photos, videos and posts from the space putting the campaign in front of people who’ve not been able to visit it themselves.
Pop Mart has used livestreaming as another way to bring its LABUBU products to customers online. According to Modern Retail, around 85% of the brand鈥檚 TikTok Shop sales in June 2025 came from livestreams, with Pop Mart regularly hosting them on its official channel; this gives people who aren’t there in person another way to interact with the brand and shop its products.
Glossier has also used one-day pop-ups and other temporary activations around specific launches. One of its Canadian pop-ups recorded 7,390 in foot traffic, according to Community 鈥� the agency that worked on the campaign.
Instead of keeping a permanent location around a single product or collaboration, the brands are able to build excitement towards one specific day and let the space disappear once the event is over. That gives the physical side of a campaign a proper beginning and end, which is really useful when the campaign is only built around a specific occasion.
The Short Life Span Works
A pop-up does not have to prove that it could work as a permanent shop to be useful. Sometimes the point is to find out what customers respond to, create attention around a particular launch or give an online brand a chance to exist somewhere that’s not behind a screen. It can close having done exactly what the brand needed it to do, even if nobody ever sees the doors open again.
