On the 30th August 2019 the first ever Solesmith pop up shop is coming to IntuDerby.
That's right we'll be the shop right opposite M&S and over the road from Debenhams (pinch us!!!)
We won a competition by Revo called Hatch that was all about supporting independent retailers and smaller businesses. The competition was national and supported by 9 major UK shopping centres all over the UK. We submitted our entry for the Derby competition, we filled in the form and were shortlisted to pitch and do a presentation about our ideas for our space and then we found out we had won!
That all happened if less than two months and we had less than two months since we found out we won to actually open!
So we prioritised everything and as we've never done this before (by 'this' I mean had any kind of physical space, had to make and dress shelves, display stock and generally be ready to make orders in front of people) we thought we'd document it.
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Firstly so you can get to know us
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Secondly because Jamie thought it might help him get famous
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And thirdly because we think retail spaces in town centres are important and hopefully this might help anyone else who is thinking of popping up somewhere (god I hope it doesn't put people off!)
So anyway we are filming our journey with a bit of a week by week mini series type things. We've been filming and editing and uploading as we go (in hindsight a slick more themed final series may have been better but this way it is really real and you can see week by week what we are actually doing and learning and stressing out about)
So I highly recommend checking out the video for episode one at the bottom of this blog... and subscribing to our YouTube channel for the whole story.
So far we know:
- that our shop is going to be on the ground floor right opposite M&S.
- We are going to have all the production facilities available in the shop so you can totally put our dogs face on socks while you wait
- It's going to be a lot of work!
We did a bit of a blog for the intu team as well which you can see here....https://intu.co.uk/derby/news/solesmith-blog
And generally what we don't yet know is highlighted by our week one, Episode One Sockumentary.