The Halloween Shopping Season?

This is for good reason, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF) the 2017 holiday season drove $687.9 billion in sales, and that number is forecasted to grow by 4.3-4.8% in 2018. However, the Halloween shopping season is powered by more than a sugar high as it is forecasted to drive $9 billion in sales in 2018 across Costumes, Candy, Decorations, and Greeting Cards. This year the Halloween has been bolstered by strong consumer confidence, and pet costumes. However, quite a bit of the growth in the Halloween holiday season over the last 13 years has been driven by pop-up retail.

Not all Dogs Love Halloween!

What is Pop-Up Retail?

Pop-Up retail is a trend of opening short-term sales spaces, in many cases around a season. A great example is Spirit Halloween, which has over 1,100 locations across the United States and Canada during the Halloween Shopping Season. The Halloween Holiday Shopping Season runs from September until the first week of November, and the stores “pop-up” for the season in a vacant shop front and go away in November until the following Halloween. The pop-up Halloween stores are not only a win for the pop-up retailer, but also for customers, real estate landlords, and communities they serve as a whole. According to Dan Bacani from Lee & Associates, "Seasonal tenants have been part of the retail landscape for many years. It's become more prevalent nowadays since the big-box properties are struggling to find their place in the commercial landscape…more and more of these pop-ups are occupying vacant properties and are extremely vital to the landlord’s cash flow.” However, Spirit Halloween’s spokeswoman Marisa Uzzolino explained, “as the economy continues to improve, retailers are beginning to expand their portfolios and vacant spaces are beginning to backfill. We do face challenges securing the best locations”.

How Would a Pop-Up Retailer Secure the Right Location?

The answer to finding the right seasonal locations for a pop-up shop reside in the real estate data, which surround a location, and the ability for a real estate professional to analyze the data with a business user friendly analytics platform. That platform must provide the following key capabilities:

1. Combinations of Data: Real estate and site selection analysis requires the ability to combine different data sets from both internal and external data which describe the market or trade area. This includes available inventory of units to rent, internal historical point of sale data, location demographic data, and market data.

2. GeoAnalytics: Specific geo location capabilities to understand drive times, clustering of real estate data points, sophisticated visualizations, and agile layering of mapping components.

3. Storytelling: Real Estate decisions are not made by one individual typically there is a steering committee that decides on the optimal location of a new pop-up store. Presentations have to be made and using the same analytics platform to quickly and easily present the site selection findings via a compelling data storytelling visual is critical.

The good news is finding a new set of pop-up retail store locations for Halloween does not have to be scary. The Qlik platform is perfect for finding a new Pop-Up store location with native GeoAnalytics capabilities built into the platform. Please try out the Qlik Retail Site Selection Solution Demo to see first-hand how Qlik can help make your Halloween part of a $9 billion treat!