How to Package Your Pop-Up Store

Once you’ve read up on opening your pop-up store, studied the data and determined where, when, and how to execute your shop, it’s time to think about branding. Incorporating branding and smart packaging inside your pop-up store are crucial consumer touchpoints to take into consideration for your next launch.

Whether you’re boxing, wrapping or bagging, here’s how to keep packaging in mind when you’re planning your concept.

Packaging creates the perfect UGC content.

The experience of your pop-up store (or any brick-and-mortar) does not end at the sale; it should also extend to the customer’s home, and personal social pages. Using branded packaging for your products creates the perfect surface for shareable moments, tagged posts, and brand promotion that is entirely organic.

This can be accelerated by creating an in-store experience that leads to user-generated content (UGC), which will spread awareness about your pop-up store on social media as well as press publications. Simply add a branded hashtag to your event and marketing campaign, so the UGC can easily be tracked and managed.

If you give your customers the materials they need to take photos for their social media accounts, you inherently increase the value of their experience and boost the organic content created surrounding your pop-up store. Keeping it user-friendly and creating so-called “instagrammable moments” will add to the buzz surrounding the venture. Your pop-up store’s success depends on connecting your brand to the elements that you choose for the store, as well as what you send your customers home with.

(If you’re in need of packaging inspiration, here’s a few tips).

The ripple effect that a brand can experience from having consumers post about an experience or product can have a massively positive effect both for audience and performance of your goods. An interesting development in the last decade or so has been the connection between social media and tangible, physical products. This connection, demonstrated perfectly by the countless unboxing videos on Youtube and the product display photos on Instagram, can provide a valuable boost to your social media presence and connect you with networks beyond your immediate audience.

Get creative.

Your packaging is just another canvas for your creativity. The element of scarcity--that there is a chance that if someone does not act right away they will miss out--is something that pop-up shops are able to capitalize on. Do not shy away from hiding the fact that this pop-up store is temporary; embrace it, and use it as a tool to attract promotion, word of mouth attribution, and to build hype.

Coming up with inventive ways to display, wrap, and package your products can be a difference maker for your brand. Brilliant packaging design inspiration abounds, such as Pepsi’s variety of packaging for worldwide events, or the Cannes Lions Survival Kit by AI firm GumGum. The short-lived and limited nature of a pop-up also means you might be willing to spend a little more than usual on a particularly impactful packaging design.

However, if you don’t have as much money to spend on large-scale, complex packaging designs as larger brands, branded boxes, bags, or wrapping are all affordable ways to make the most of a fantastic branding opportunity.

For those looking to refresh their brand through pop-up retail, packaging also provides a perfect platform to introduce your “new look” to customers for the very first time. In this way, a product, new label, or change of direction can be tested out on a smaller scale, rather than changing your entire brand without any proof of concept. Recent studies have shown that branded packaging changes customer’s perception of a brand, and makes it seem more upscale. Style recognition is what we are all striving for when it comes to marketing a brand, so use the opportunity to choose your packaging carefully.