The success of Storefront and their clients make it evident that things are changing in retail. The Wired Island team collected many great stories to tell by connecting with Storefront clients, and learning their goals and results of their pop-up stores. However, we wanted to take this one step further by adding some data to these anecdotal stories. Unable to find any current studies of the pop-up industry, the team decided to create a survey to study what industries were using short term retail, what were their reasons for doing so, were they successful, and other retail industry insights. We knew we needed to have third party assistance and validation for this study, and it just so happened that a college not too far from the current Wired Island HQ has a Department of Retail. Mark Rosenbaum, Fulbrighter, Professor, and Department of Retailing Chair at the University of South Carolina advised the team on question creation, collection and analysis, lending an experienced and academic lens to the research. Wired Island coordinated the creation and launch through the survey platform, including the design and distribution of an email campaign.

With nearly 600 respondents, the survey found that more than 80 percent of the respondents who had done at least one pop-up indicated the activation was a success, and 58 percent said they would be likely to do another one. An interesting finding was that sales was not the main goal for the majority of these stores, unlike traditional brick & mortar operations. Instead, new metrics such as social media engagement, web site traffic and enhancing customer relationships are the primary reasons to do a pop-up. While an increase in sales wasn't a top reason to do a pop-up, it was still considered an important result, finishing just behind "improve market visibility" which was cited by slightly more than half of the respondents as the most important result.

Armed with these new insights, Storefront and Univ. of SC organized a webinar to give a full analysis of the study. Wired Island crafted a media relations campaign to share the findings, promoting the webinar and Storefront as an expert in the space. Supporting content development included a press release and infographic. The study was well received among webinar attendees and press, including a feature in Business Insider and other trade publications.