Gearing up for the holiday shopping season in a small downtown is challenging in the best of years. And this is not the best of years.
- Social distancing means fewer crowds.
- Events we look forward to every year have been cancelled or drastically modified.
- Businesses we’ve relied on as downtown anchors may be struggling or already closed.
Who wants to shop downtown when it looks so empty?
Your challenge: make downtown look full or busy, even though it’s actually less busy this year.
The complicating factor: respecting social distancing and helping people feel safe.
Your best strategy: Fill as many empty spaces as you can with pop-ups. Decorate the windows of the rest really cheaply.
How do you find those entrepreneurs in your town that will fill a temporary pop-up? You have more than you think!
In November video from SaveYour.Town, we give you six ways to find the home-based businesses and the entrepreneurs who have something to sell but don’t have a storefront to sell from. In free sample below, Deb Brown shares some of those practical ways to find potential pop-up entrepreneurs.
- Look at who offers things for sale on Facebook.
- Do you have a local buy/sell group on Facebook? You might find some entrepreneurs there.
- Look on ecommerce sites like Etsy and Kickstarter. You can search by location on both Kickstarter and Etsy.
- Include local artists for a temporary gallery. Goffstown, New Hampshire, has an artists group that uses empty buildings to house their temporary gallery called Local Color. They just set up displays from local artists inside an empty building. It allows the artists to have their work seen, and hopefully bought.
