Tell me a little bit about your new pop up shop in Miami.
Barnett: The Shop In Pop Up Shop is a turnkey solution for brands trying to enter the Miami market who don’t have a brick and mortar presence, but who want to launch a product. We house multiple brands. They come in and allocate their product to us, and we do everything for them: their point of sale, hiring all the sales staff, all the fixtures, the design, the inventory, everything for them. It makes a seamless solution for a brand to try out the Miami market or to test a brick and mortar location to see if it resonates with particular customers.
Definitely. How’d you come up with that idea?
Barnett: I’ve been a stylist for 13 years on the purchasing side of retail. I started to perceive this change, where stores started closing; The retail business was dying. When you have places like Barneys closing because they’re holding too much inventory, you realize things need to change. You look at the Airbnbs of the world or companies like Uber. They are providing services without actually holding any inventory.
As I started shopping it around and asking people if they wanted to be a part of it, I got a lot of great feedback, and they were like, “Wait, will you be here in March, and will you be here this month?” And I was like, “No, it’s just for two months.” And they were like, “Oh, no. People need access to these shops year-round; everyone has different drops; everyone has different programming.” I needed to be able to provide that for them.