Le Mill, the trending “concept” store in Mumbai, has an outpost in Delhi over this weekend — a “pop-up” store at One Style Mile, the popular hangout for the capital’s fashionistas next to the very popular Olive Bar & Kitchen and designer-wear store Kimaya. At 6,000 sqft, the five-day pop-up store which opened yesterday is much smaller than Le Mill’s 15,000 sqft space spread over several floors of a rice mill in Wadi Bunder, but “it’ll have all our fashion brands, including accessories and some furniture,” promises Cecilia Morelli-Parikh, one of the partners in the store. That should bring shopaholic Delhiwallahs driving down to Mehrauli by the droves since in the one year that it’s been around, Le Mill has gathered a reputation not just for stocking exclusive luxury international brands,but also for the discerning taste of its merchandise.
“Pop-up” stores are temporary stores that marketers set up to reach out to consumers. Durable goods and cosmetics brands, especially, use such pop-up stores during the festive season.
In the West in the last decade, pop-up stores have become a rage among boutique retailers of fashion and lifestyle goods to create a buzz among shoppers. Among the more notable instances is Target, the Minneapolis-based discount-chic chain, which set up a pop-up store on a 220-foot barge on the Hudson River off New York in 2002. Vacant, which specialises in one-off and limited-edition stuff, is another company which uses pop-ups consistently. Vacant stores come up in unlikely spaces such as an empty parking lot or outside the railway station, unannounced — Vacant Club members are informed through social networking moments before opening. No wonder, these stores have also been called “guerilla” stores.
The concept now seems to be dribbling into India, which has seen a huge growth in high-end retail. For about a month last January, Obataimu, a multi-discipline design house, opened a pop-up store in Colaba, Mumbai, in a decrepit a 200-sqft space behind Kala Ghoda Cafe. Funkily done up with polaroid cameras, wooden-framed spectables, a yellow scooter, it offered an eclectic collection of menswear, accessories and knick knacks. Another experiment was Pocket Electric, an offshoot of Bombay Electric, Mumbai’s uber-chic fashion store, that put up a pop-up store in Delhi’s Garden of Five Senses for three months in 2008. Recently, Design Temple, which specialises in urban Indian design and retails out of a store in Colaba, has tied up with The Park to open pop-up stores at its hotels. “The collaboration highlights a common philosophy shared by both the brands,” says Divya Thakur, creative director.
For Anaita Shroff-Adajania, fashion director of Vogue India, pop-up stores are mid-way between trunk shows and “exhibitions” held at semi-permanent retail spaces such as Aga Khan Hall in Delhi or Sophia Bhabha Hall in NCPA, Mumbai, where people can take up space and retail for a few days. “They are hugely successful, because they promise exclusivity.”
