How to make your pop-up store a success for retail in 2025 (with Maxime from Shareclient)

Hello, you are listening to the podcast that talks about e-commerce, pure and simple. Once a month, I welcome an inspiring personality from the French e-commerce ecosystem for unpretentious discussions between friends about the subjects that fascinate them. The aim is to decipher e-commerce trends and share concrete tips to make your e-shop a hit. I'm Joseph Aubry, co-founder of Loyoly, the loyalty and referral platform that allows you to engage your customers through more than 50 mechanisms. Sharing, user content, customer reviews and much more to increase your LTV and decrease your CAC. If you like Loyoly Talks, subscribe and don't hesitate to leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to support us. Enjoy listening. Hi Maxime. Hello. Well listen, I'm really happy to have you on the podcast. Today, we're going to talk about e-commerce, customer experience, but also and above all about omnichannel. Because indeed, we see that there is less and less e-commerce without a physical point of sale or at least without one. Today, I'm with Maxime, who is the founder of Share Client. So, welcome to the podcast once again. And for a brief introduction, Share Client is a retail design agency specialising in the creation of pop-up stores and memorable experiences that transform the interactions between brands and their consumers. So, basically, you help brands like Birkin Stock, Sephora, Kabaya, Citadium and Championne to overcome the challenges of omnichannel retailing and maximise their physical presence through innovative strategies and rapid roll-outs. Does that sound about right? Very good summary, indeed. Great. And to round off my introduction a little, it might be interesting if you could tell us a little about ShareClient's starting point. What inspired you to create the company and the issues you want to address. In fact, it happened after quite a few years because I started to undertake a good dozen years ago now and I was involved in space design, particularly at trade fairs and for very event-based operations. And in fact, the better things were going, the more I saw brands that needed to establish themselves and create connections. I've always had that; it was always a bit nagging, but I've always had it in mind. And our way of designing experiences has always been guided a bit by this fact of connecting brands with people and a bit of the social aspect of it, you know. That's what really got me going, understanding why you would suddenly become attached to a brand when you had an experience with it. That stayed with me. I did a lot of stalls, a lot of exhibition centres, then in addition to events, then set-ups in shopping centres. And then we had the opportunity to start doing a pop-up, then that was with my old agency. And then along the way, we had enough, we grew. I sold the shares of this this this company and then I set up Sharklianz three years ago now with the ambition of saying we are going to put people's social connection with brands back at the heart of the reactor and we are going to try to create experiences. And from there, we started to focus on which brands want to create experiences, typically e-commerce brands because at a certain point they may have this need, we'll talk about it again but they have a bit of a need for connection and also brands that have been around for a long time, that need to reinvent themselves, that need to reposition themselves. And it's the same here, they come, they come to find us and we come to offer them this very service, to tell them how to connect consumers today, in their own way, with desires, with brands that have something to say. Listen, I have lots of questions. Now, to provide a little bit of context before these questions, I wanted to share with our listeners a bit of an overview of innovation from the Digital Native Group that came out recently. And indeed, one of the trends we are seeing is a return to retail. So, I quote the report with regard to the increase in acquisition costs and the glass ceiling of e-commerce, shops are once again becoming the often more profitable acquisition channels. The cost of customer acquisition increased by 60% between two thousand and eighteen and two thousand and twenty-two, compared with 11% growth in commercial lease rents in France over the same period. There is also Bastien, the CEO of Cabaïa, who tells us that omnichannel today is really unavoidable. And according to him, his priority is therefore overall GNP. He accepts the fact that profitability is reduced in e-commerce, because all the channels reinforce each other. He takes the example of Germany, where they have opened a shop for the go to market. And so this has enabled them to penetrate the market where in France, their reputation already allows them to modulate investments. So it's actually quite striking, a 60% increase versus 11%. It's true that, somewhat counter-intuitively, you have to realise that e-commerce is one of the lines, at least in the GNP, that is really the least profitable compared to shops. So when I heard that, I was quite surprised. And so in the end, between what you said, what the report also says, what Bastien told us, the question of going omnichannel is no longer really an issue. The idea now is to find out a little bit how we do that in concrete terms. And typically, in the test and learn approach, a good first step, it seems to me, is to open a pop-up store to be able to test the market a little bit. Absolutely. And so that's your expertise. So I suggest we approach the question in three stages: before, during and after. So my first question would be already before launching this operation. What do you think are the right questions to ask yourself? For example, when brands come to you today, what are the biggest issues or at least their biggest objectives when they contact you So first of all, we support brands, retailers, so there are different types of expectations and obviously in e-commerce brands to try to outline the questions a bit, we'll say in general. Knowing that everyone has slightly different needs, so you have to be able to identify that, so that's almost the first point, it's saying okay, how mature are you in the market, what is your objective in terms of developing your shop or acquiring new customers or acquiring customer loyalty because that's also what it's for, being in front with customers and prospects in person. So the first questions are more along those lines, i.e. what is the right strategy to adopt, what is it that we do each time, we start from there and then we think about what the levers are going to be, finally going to do physical and we talk about omnichannel, it's true that you have an impact right away, or at least a vision, you immediately think pop-up store, but pop-up store is a bit overused. We do a lot of things in physical terms. You can go to Made in France trade shows, for example, so there are quite a few DNVBs that are based on this model, so trade shows. You can have a presence in shopping centres, you can have a presence in shops, so in shopping centres, you can be in a station forecourt, you can be in very short-term activation, longer-term activation. So that's more or less the starting point. It's about how you gauge who you are as a brand and what your strategy will be and what you actually need to grow. So that's more like it, the first point isn't even really about pure and simple operations, it's about where you're going and why you're going there. And basically, if I understand correctly, it can be used for acquisition purposes, but also for brand awareness, or even retention to get customers to come back and connect with them in real life, so to speak. Are there any small signals that allow you, when you are a brand, to say to yourself, okay, now is the right time to go omnichannel? Yes, there are signals, so there are already brands that are going to have the problem of having either acquisition costs that are getting higher and higher, as we were telling you in the introduction, you see with the DNG study, but which are getting higher and higher and therefore, by essence, we are starting to take an interest in other channels. So it's these brands that can start to look at other channels and that already have the means to test these channels with a little energy, you see. You also have brands that will say to themselves, okay, we have a product that we need to promote, and for example, it can be a very good example to go to a physical store and offer to touch, test, try, and so on. Typically in cosmetics, in perfumery, in somewhat technical products and so on, these are very important levers. And then you also have brands that are going to say okay we want to re-address the market a bit, we want to have a slightly different aura or positioning, we want to renew a bit, we want to boost, that also adapts very well. So you see, in fact, overall, on each diagram, you have a typology of retail response and I'm not just talking about pop-ups, you can also have permanent shops. There is a typology of response. Okay, super interesting and I'm wondering a little bit, you know, from a financial point of view, because like all founders or marketing managers, it all starts a little bit from a spreadsheet. I was wondering from a profitability point of view, you know, when you want to do your calculations to launch on this channel or not. Do you should we estimate a quick ROI or is it more of a medium-term investment with an indirect allocation that will support other acquisition channels Sure, let's start with a brand, a DNVB that already has a comfortable turnover, that has a little money to put in, that already has a vision, a visibility on omnichannel approach or go and set up in a physical location, what is going to be important to monitor carefully in terms of cost On the one hand there is where are you going to set up So you already have a potential rent, you can also negotiate over and above the rent you can negotiate variable costs so you have places that can accommodate you and just for variable costs. So that's very good because it means you don't have any fixed costs. Then you're going to have the deployment costs, so here I'm talking a bit about the rough vision of a deployment, you see. So the deployment costs will be the furniture, the installation, the operational set-up, you're going to have a staff cost, that's quite significant and frankly I recommend most of the time that there be a presence of the market teams or the CEO, it depends on whether we're working with 6 levels directly or whether they're already an integral part of the company, they have to spend time on it because the leverage is huge in terms of return. You talk to customers who will potentially make you some, they give you immediate feedback on your product and suddenly you'll understand things that you can't understand in e-commerce. Even if you get, like, you have traffic with 100 people, you'll be able to see where there are sticking points etc. on your Shopify, but in reality having a person in front of you who gives you direct feedback to which you respond, that's an incredible lever. Anyway, I'm rambling, but you need to involve the CEO a bit to lighten the potential workload of the marketing people, and then you have all the costs inherent in setting up, i.e. you have to build up stock, you also need a payment and collection system, big up to Payplug for payment and collection, you can also use, you know, Shopify POS for example, which is also arriving with great fanfare for Shopify users, But suddenly you have all that to take into account and then there's the whole operational management part with the place where you set up. Sometimes you need authorisations, you have to meet standards and so on, and that's where we advise you to get support from people who know how to set up shops to save time, because clearly what costs a lot is mistakes in evaluation like that. Interesting, we'll be able to come back to the different mistakes a little bit later on, but rather towards the end of the interview. In your opinion, how long should an ideal test in retail last before launching a wider rollout? The ideal duration is more related to what you expect in terms of operations because, as we were saying at the beginning, you might think, okay, I'm going to open a pop-up store to show my products. So you don't have an immediate heroic need even if you can sell and so on, you don't have an immediate heroic need. The advice we would give is rather to say go for it in a very light-hearted but quite qualitative way, your brand, your branding and everything else has to exist, that's super important, you can't go cheap, but even if you go there simply or in a very, very light way, it has to be all quali, you're doing a product demonstration, the goal is not direct ROI but rather visibility, evangelising your product, meeting highly niche customers, etc., etc. Here you can set up shop for a very short time. Because you're going to limit the cost of staff, the cost of rent and so on and so forth. So it's like the sausage seller, offering samples of sausages in the supermarket. It's stupid but it's extremely powerful because you turn potential customers who like sausage into almost immediate buyers. They've tasted it, they think it's good, so you sell it to them. So these are super-powerful levers, you can just copy them, they've been around for a long time, they work very well. Then you have the goal of establishing yourself, let's imagine that you have about fifteen, twenty products, you have a whole range, typically solid products for the home, for housekeeping or for solid cosmetics and so on. Then you'll establish yourself, you'll want to stay longer because it will allow you to amortise all those fixed costs we talked about earlier over several weeks or months, and then it makes much more sense to establish yourself for a long time. On the one hand, you'll manage to have regular traffic in a shopping centre, for example, on x Saturdays, x Wednesdays with high footfall, so you can take advantage of that, you see. You don't have to concentrate everything on a single Saturday. So there we are, we would advise you to stay for several months, even 6 months, 6 to 12 months, that's great because you also create a habit with your customers and that's great and above all you can activate with all the chestnuts that we know, but you can activate very strongly between digital, your social media, etc. and your shop and create connections all the time, you know, to bring in your customers, for, etc., etc. And you're right about social media, it's true that attracting new customers to the shop is a real challenge. Communication, I imagine, is a really important part of the success of an omnichannel operation. How would you advise proceeding to maximise the impact of communications and bring in as many people as possible It's true that we tend to think that as long as you're in a physical area with traffic, that's enough. And so it's yes and no. For example, we did an op for tarte cosmetics, which are New York brands that have set up shop on Boulevard Haussmann across from Printemps. And so there is a huge amount of traffic on this street, and so without talking about it, there are a lot of people who stopped, who waited, who wanted to go into the pop-up store. But the bulk of the traffic was because the communication beforehand was to do a FOOH, you know to make a fake appearance in 3 d, in AI and so on, in the streets of Paris exactly. The banner that came down in the building. There you go, we know that so we've all seen Jacquesmus and so on, these fairs are a big thing. In any case, Tarte did one, it was about communicating that we're coming, we're in Paris and so you use social media. The advantage is that you immediately understand that something physical is going to happen. Then there's connecting all the influencers around the brand. So you invite all the people you work with on the brand, all your influencers, all the brand's opinion leaders, you have to invite them, you have to talk to them. They're going to do some preliminary outreach, so you have to write a little script so that ahead of the operation they can come and talk to their community. And above all, you need to make big announcements about maybe gifts, about specific experiences, about maybe a new product launch, that also works very well. You know, things like that. OK, so let's imagine that I've done it, I've decided to set up shop. I've managed to get lots of people through the door of my super pop-up store. Now, once we're there, how do you recommend transcribing a little of the concept storytelling aspect, which is quite obviously something to highlight on a site, because you do have quite a bit of control over the user journey. And how do you manage to transcribe a little of that in-store shopping experience. What you say is really good, it's true that we haven't talked about it but it's an often central point. When you do e-commerce, you have good image data, you have good graphic plates, you have lots of stuff like logos, images, shoots and so on. You don't have anything that exists in physical form, you don't have your own material, you don't have, you see your DNA it doesn't yet physically exist. So we don't neglect this time; on the contrary, we spend a lot of time beforehand thinking carefully about the strategy and how to transform a digital brand into a physical brand. And for that you don't just have a form of furniture, different materials and so on, but you have a whole journey that you have to imagine. Exactly the same tunnel you're going to make, but it's a bit technical on e-commerce because the aim there is to maximise your conversion rate. Here it's going to be a bit the same, except that we're going to think about it with lots of sensory or emotional connectors. So, for example, you will come across staff who are obviously smiling, who greet you, it's hello, you are asked to try something and so on, we can put in a sound environment, we can put in an olfactory environment, we have to do that too. You also have a whole series of small steps depending on the brand's position and stature, but you can have a whole series of steps to either premiumise the experience or, on the contrary, simplify it and encourage people to come in. So all of this is all the encoders that you will be able to position around your overall experience and so it has to be thought through so that typically I take the example of Size Up that we did in the heart of La Défense, it was a few weeks ago, we made a large structure that was two hundred square metres that was completely enclosed, you could see a little of the inside but not all of it not all of it, so there are Sephora products, it's a mascara, it gives you an incredible look. And so there you went inside and you had a whole scenario where you were going to have a little card stamped, so you still had tangible things in your hand. You know, we deliberately disconnect from tablets, digital stuff in shops and so on, but here we went for something much more tangible where you had to test products once you had tested or done your workshop on make-up and so on, you were entitled to your thing, then you went to a little box where you had to catch a ticket with a windmill, stuff like that, so it was very, very fun. If you caught the right ticket, you also had other potential prizes or other small free samples, you went to another stage with a little roulette wheel, you could bet, a bit like a small casino, it's very, very fun but in a few seconds, you had something else and the more you did these little activations, the more you came into contact with the brand, the more you had little gifts, little extras depending on your experience. And something really tangible, you know, really tangible stuff. And that was a big hit. Yeah, I'm not surprised, it really stands out from the digital experience. So really a clean break with that to offer something different from the usual. It seems to me, it seems to me really interesting and it touches a bit on the subject of personalisation. Today, in the digital world, you can customise the purchasing process, the product pages, the whole customer experience based on their behaviour with solutions such as Webin, for example. How can this customisation be done in a physical example? Perhaps you have a specific example of this. I think you mentioned a tea brand. Yes, exactly. We are setting up a shop for a tea brand that is B2B today, making teas for almost all the top chefs and teas for hotels and so on. And in fact we thought about it because, as you say, personalised sales tunnels and so on according to the type of customer, it's easily done. It's true that it's different in a shop. What kind of message are you going to adapt And typically for this brand of tea, we are working on their shop, so there in B to C, and their positioning is that they want to accompany tea lovers but also connoisseurs and turn these tea lovers or even novices into tea connoisseurs. So they really have a positioning and they are looking for teas, it's extremely extremely polished, it's it's very beautiful products. And in fact we have thought about this whole axis around the 3 types of customers they work with and we have 3 different types of discourse in the shop. They all intertwine, but to give a concrete example, you might have a typical customer who is still an amateur, who doesn't know much, and you might talk to them about tea infusions, morning tea or tea for the day, fruit tea or tea with more character, and so on. However, for someone who is a little more amateur or more experienced, you might talk to them about the origin of the tea, the type of cultivation, the vintages, and so on and so forth. And so it doesn't stop your super-knowledgeable customer from picking up a morning pack to give as a gift, for example, and heading to another place where you can see that they will be a little more expected. The wording will correspond a little more to his needs. So in fact, we do more or less the same work that we can do digitally. Except that here, we stretch it out a little bit in the route through the shop. It's a really super interesting experience. I was also wondering, you were talking earlier about gamification of the routes a bit. If you had any other examples in mind, it's true that gamification, as those listening to us may know, Loyoly, is really our hobbyhorse, if I may say so. Do you have any other examples of how to transpose the gamification of the experience to pop store-type experiences in the physical world? There are some, we have a few examples like that. What's also interesting is to think ahead before you open or before you open your pop-up or before your customers or prospects arrive. In other words, you can already start inviting them. You can also have automated WhatsApp discussion processes, for example, there are some incredible systems that will allow you to either create a little personalisation to go in the direction of what we were saying just before, or to create gamification, so in retail it's quite easy because you have lots of tangible elements that you can play with. We've all seen pop-ups with a little wheel to win a discount, things like that. For example, we did something on Inga, which was quite interesting. Inga makes sponges, they were a big hit and they're number one in washable sponges today, and Benjamin, who is a completely brilliant and enlightened mind when it comes to e-commerce and selling sponges, we worked together on how to create a pop-up store and in fact we said to ourselves we're going to create a whole bunch of games around the sponge. So how do you create games around a sponge? That's a good question. And in fact, typically, the sponge is washable, so what do you wash it in? A washing machine. So we recreated a washing machine in the shop and you take sponges, we hand out sponges, so in fact you come into contact with the product immediately, you feel that it's soft, it's quality and in fact the game is to throw the sponge in the washing machine to earn discounts and the more you throw in and so on the more discounts you get so you pass it off as a discount and so on but in fact you immediately create an approach to the brand where you think it's fun, you throw it in the washing machine you understand that it's washable and you also get to touch the product immediately. So as soon as you arrive, they make you play a game, which is great fun, and you learn about it. They also hide little Easter eggs all over the shop with little phrases and things like that that can give you discounts, so if you're a bit observant, it could trigger that and, above all, it also triggered the shop going viral. We haven't talked about that, but obviously it's an extremely strong time, it's that people are going to republish, you're going to be able to create a lot of content on your shop too and that's it, we haven't talked about it yet, but it's one of the things you can do and that your shop allows you to make your image even more credible. Let's talk about the virality aspect. It's true that in my experience, from my own perspective with one eye open and one eye shut, so it's a question of loyalty and commitment. You were talking about communication, about preparation. So, if I may also offer a little advice, it's your customers, for example, who are on third-party gold, platinum, so really your top customers who are used to your products, who are already familiar with your products. It's those who, for me in any case, should really be invited in a slightly exclusive way to your physical operation to create even more attachment. These are people who have baskets that are quite high too. So it can allow them to move on to another stage. And then also, when it's part of the operation on the day, potentially allow them to earn additional discounts or loyalty points if they do stories, Tik Toks, if they create UGC that you can then reuse for commercial purposes. So that's what I think intuitively. Do you, for example, have an example of a brand that has capitalised on this aspect of virality? Basically, almost all concepts should embody this principle because it's one of the levers on which you're going to make your operation last. Because it will allow you to do communication, as you said it makes you g c what you can do a lot of content with and use it. And so you have, for example, brands like that we did an op for in parallel with the pop-up for Champion, It was at Citadium, it was a few months ago, we had created a box right next to the pop-up, so you had the pop-up which was already set up with the whole new collection. The idea was to invite people to this presentation of the new collection and at the same time we created a display where we had a large mirror with a background and on this background there was all the new Champion Brent communication. There were also basketballs, which are kind of the heart of the communication that you could pick up and pose with, and we had a large mirror facing us with big lights, a bit like in a studio, studio lighting with a photo boost, and so the idea was that you could take a photo of yourself and get tokens in the shop, so in the shop the salesperson could give you tokens, so you create an interaction with the seller and your customers and by distributing this token you could go and have your photo taken, print your photo, send it to yourself by email of course so we collect email data because typically boost photos are perfect for that. Yeah. We collect the email data and at the same time with the token he could play to get goodies. So there were 3 types of goodies, there were champion socks, a beanie and something else, a bag I think, and we had these little vending machines, you know, a bit Japanese-style with these balls, these PVC balls with a toy inside, so you had a win-lose thing inside and so you had several of them on the operation and you actually came to put your token in, turn that handle and so on. So you had real physical interaction with the thing, people loved it. So full story and so on because, but in fact it's a mechanical thing, it's simple, but in fact it's good for the brand, you have a, you have a, there's something going on. And it worked really well and they're all really simple ideas, but well executed and above all well integrated and the set-up was very high quality. You know, we had a basketball-type surface over the whole structure of the cube and so on. Everything was well lit, we had put in place elements of the branding, the balls that were placed on it and so on. So you see, they're small operations, but they really have a very powerful aspect of virality. Yeah, it's crazy, I think, to see how creative we can afford to be on this kind of initiative. I find it really, really interesting and it gives me a few ideas for some of the brands we also work with. OK, so now let's think a little bit about afterwards. So I did my operation and lots of people came. I got lots of opt-ins to the site and we had a quick chat. This is also one of the major challenges if one of our objectives is to make acquisitions in particular. How do I measure the success of my operation? What are the KPIs that I'm going to look at? That would be my first question. So depending on what you wanted to set up, the objective of your brand and the objective of your operation, let's imagine that you have very little time for communication. Obviously, your KPIs are quite different from a 12-month installation to achieve ROI. Let's assume that you just want to spread the word about the brand, you will be able to collect data on customers with whom you may have interacted. So they are potentially potential customers or already customers that you have managed to re-identify in person, with perhaps issues that have brought up products for you or simply questions that you will be able to reuse, upgrading your pitch and your sales funnels as well. So that's already a lot of information that you can process. You will also potentially see the possibility of having created content on the spot, visual content, reputation for your brand too because typically you launch a new brand of shoes something like that, you can touch it all at once it changes your tone your vision towards your potential customers at the other end of France on the digital because they saw that you had made a shop at a given moment. I have a good example of this with bi-collagen, a brand that has now become neutral, a brand of food supplements. The company itself was just over a year old when it started a little over a year ago. The brand started, it started to set up a coffee shop in the Galeries Lafayette, it's a small coffee shop that put collagen in its drinks. The aim was not to sell collagen, the aim was to sell coffees and functional drinks with collagen in front of collagen is good for the skin, for the joints and so on. And so from day 0 to day 10, people would ask us how they could buy collagen because they couldn't feel it, they would say to themselves well and so on and so forth. And in fact the bi collagen brand was born like that, it started selling collagen because in fact customers were asking for it, the brand would never have started selling it, packaged, sachets and so on without having been there. In other words, the credibility of the place made the product so strong that it became desirable to customers. And the example is incredible because imagine that your brand exists a little bit, you arrive in person all of a sudden you actually have a you have a special aura, you are real you see, you really exist, you are not a guy who imports a bit weird products and that. You're really there, face to face with people. That changes everything. Frankly, it's an incredible lever and we don't realise it enough, but it's really very powerful. So there's that, for example, and the neutral brand came today to an e-commerce site and so on, it was continuing that and there were other operations like that in physical form in Paris with a small bar and so on and so on. And so typically you can have this to finish answering you, you can already have this kind of feedback on a small, short activation just to build awareness. Then you can set yourself up for a longer period and so there you want to do R0I, you have more products, what are your returns? You're going to see which products perform in physical terms, how many sales you've made, purchase versus sale, what turnover you've made, what profit you've made. You can also get all the traffic figures. So there are different ways to set up. When you're running a shop or a pop-up shop, et cetera, and you want to do R0I, you absolutely have to put in traffic counters. That already allows you to see if, for example, you're in the city centre, you're renting a shop for 6 months in the city centre. You'll see all the people passing in the street, you'll see your conversion rate with the people who enter your shop. So now you have the same tools in digital form. On Google analytics you have the same principle. So you install it and you can see your conversion rate. On a particular day you can see how much traffic you had, how many baskets you filled and what the volume was and so on and so forth. So you can still collect a lot of data. Obviously, you calculate your overall profitability as you go along. And what's more, you create traffic from the geographical area, digital traffic, from the geographical area in which you are established. We saw this at the time with Cabaïa, who was one of the first clients of my former agency, where we did his pop-ups, his first beanie bars. So at that time the bags didn't exist yet and everything, it was really the beginning with Bastien Valandi. And so he had realised that on his e-commerce, he had spectacular traffic spikes from the areas where he was setting up. Okay. He would go to Burgundy, he would go to lots of medium-sized towns and cities and to the big shopping centres in medium-sized towns and cities, where he had very high traffic hubs on his site. Because he had a credible physical presence, he made sales online and he managed to monitor that. So you can have that too, which is a bit harder to do, but you also have traffic on your site and you also have sales directly on your site. Very, very interesting. In fact, what I've learnt is that launching a pop-up store is an excellent way to really confront the market with real consumers, who will enable us to understand a little of the objections they might have about certain products. It can also allow us to have new products tested by an audience that perhaps already knows us a little. There is also a big issue in general because, as you mentioned, there are plenty of things that can be done to create virality relatively easily with experiences that really stand out and that will also leave a fairly interesting memory with the consumer. The question I would now have, if we stay for a moment on the aftermath and how we can actually capitalise on this operation in the long term. I am thinking, for example, of the CRM brick once we have collected all the opt-ins. So, what would you say if you have any visibility on this stage of the journey, which comes much further down the line for what you do with Share Client. Do you have any best practices like that on how to really continue to capitalise on customers over time after the operation? Well, it's true that our core business is to be the torchbearer between digital and physical addressing issues, to create experiences, to connect brands with their consumers, and then we leave it to them. is to be this torchbearer between the problems of digital addressing to go into physics, to create experiences, to connect brands with their consumers and then we let go until we recreate activations, we rethink connections with customers and the brand and so on. So on that we have, I have less, I have less information but obviously the fact of continuing to activate them, of working on direct communications with your customers via newsletters and so on and of using your social media to try to keep up this enthusiasm obviously we are going to work on these subjects what in any case the shops will make it possible to create this kind of data and content, but we really intervene on the physical part you see. So clearly, we need to rely on an agency that will collect this data and process it. But our job is more about momentum, the momentum on this. Yeah, I understand. Look, we've talked a little bit about the best cases with examples that have been successful. Now, I'd like us to talk a little bit about the opposite, the most frequent mistakes that you observe on your side. The most frequent mistakes, you want the complete opposite of the good guys we mentioned at the beginning, it's good intelligence, good preparation of your strategy to go and deploy yourself. There was a time when pop-ups were what almost all start-ups or e-commerce brands and so on did. Because it's good, because you have to be present to the public, because others are doing it and so on. So that's good because he had a lot of things activated but we saw things happening that were not at all aligned, that is to say rushing to the wrong location. Yeah there's a great opportunity such and such a centre, such and such a station offers us a location and everything's great, let's go, we can't miss it. You have this fear of missing out and so you jump at it first mistake. As a general rule, you haven't visited it. You don't realise because there is a post a metre and a half in front of it that hides half the visibility of the main door and so on. They're stupid things but it's really, really important to go there and physically see how I see the shop window, how this kiosk and that one are positioned, and so on and so forth. There are some real untruths there and above all there are real mistakes to avoid simply by going there. You stay next to it for a few hours, you go for a coffee, you stay there for half an hour on a certain day and so on, you watch the traffic a bit, you see if people are consuming, you also have places where so there I'm more based on what the reflection is more on the place, but it is extremely important in physical commerce because you can have places where people are just passing through but with a mission in mind, typically in a transport hub, you can have a place between one platform and another where people are hurrying through and they are not necessarily going to stop. You have other places in a station and that is easy to understand or you have time on your hands. So when we advise our customers today and we tell them we're looking for locations for you, we'll think about the locations for you according to the type of customer, whether it's food or a fashion brand, for example, you don't buy at the same time and not with the same brain. When I say not with the same brain, it's because you don't have the same temporality in your head when you buy. Well, you don't look for the same places, even in the same shopping centre or the same station, you see. And so typically you're going to be near a main entrance, for example, you're going to have an incoming flow of customers with a mission, I want to buy groceries for tonight or a gift for my mother, and so on. OK, you go in, you go there, you walk past, you might not even necessarily be drawn in, but by the time you've finished your shopping, at that point your brain is kind of scanning what's going on. And at that point, you need to be seen. So your message hierarchy, your logos, what you are going to say, your branding and so on, that's where it has to be powerful or the direction in which your customers will pass with the time of brain available to see you. Typically the orientation of your kiosk, it can vary a lot on your performance too. So already doing that is good intelligence, but already doing that is essential, you see, going to see the place. That's a good way to avoid making a mistake. OK, so yeah, go and see the place, we remember that it's always a good idea to check it out for yourself. Yeah, get some help, otherwise you know, like a mate who already has a business, or even just basic tips, but there are lots of things that when you only do e-commerce you don't realise are fundamental. If the road is damaged in front of the shop, for example, or the pavement is damaged in that particular spot, people will take a detour. That's normal, but you're going to lose a huge volume of traffic. So that means that either the shop isn't ready yet, or it's not the right time. Even if it's great, next, you can move on to something else, you see. So you have that, mistakes to avoid are for example trying too hard to copy a model. You know typically people say to me oh so often we have brands that tell us we saw so and so so and so they do that we see the same thing. So yeah, but no, because you can obviously take inspiration, we all take inspiration, you have a creative thing to work with and so on, but you have to start from the foundations of who your customers are, what they want and what you bring to them, you see. So you can be similar to another brand, it performs well and so on, but not copied just for the sake of copying. That sometimes you're going to have ideas that are going to be, we can try to find ideas that are going to be more clever, like maybe lighter deployments or in more strategic places, you know, or to find a more concentrated niche. So it's good to be inspired but not from A to Z, i.e. trying to copy just for the sake of copying, you can end up with stuff that doesn't work well. Because you're not exactly aligned with your target and sometimes they're kind of minor mistakes, you know. OK. So the place, the copy and paste. Yeah, then you can have the tone, your deployment typology, precisely to avoid going there for too short a time when you want to do R0I because you have trouble amortising your fixed costs. Even if you can invest, you can have a small line of capex by saying, okay, we're already making furniture that we're going to be able to use at a trade show tomorrow, at a pop-up and so on. You still have to store it, you have to transport it, you know there are costs associated with that and above all you have to calibrate your operating time with the investment you want to make. You have lots of customers from the start, we say to them ok, what's the budget? Ah we have such a good budget, let's imagine they have a good budget for deployment and so on, which we find coherent. What is a good budget anyway? A good budget depends on what you want to do. If you want to give a range, for example, you can see from an entry-level range to top of the range. We typically have a particularity, which is that in order to quickly place a small skills of the agency, but our particularity is to say from the start, when we are thinking about your strategy, we tell you what you should invest. Sometimes we ask brands for the investment so as not to end up with a deficit at the end of the operation or otherwise have an expense that is much too high in relation to the potential of the activation. And then it's counter-productive for the agency, but in fact it isn't because we are going to work with these clients over time and the idea is that we think, for example, for a brand that is going to set up for 6 or 12 months, your cost on your furniture is going to be a little higher because you have to, it has to be a little more specialised, that it lasts for several months, your floor covering, your installation, electricity and so on, so you have a lot of related costs and a budget of twenty-five to thirty-five, forty thousand euros. That's about twenty-five for six months, a year. That's an investment in the setup, you see. Then you have the rent, you have your staff, obviously you have all your variable costs. I'm talking to you in terms of fixed costs. Yeah. And you have brands for which we're going to say no no you have to be around 20 twenty-five max because you buy products, you don't process them and so you have a margin that is perhaps a little more condensed and you realise that the number of products you have to sell to try to be profitable is not consistent. So we tell them to reduce and we help them to do so. So we keep a concept and work on it, and from the outset of the concept we work on clever things to make it efficient, aesthetic, up to standard of course, but also to make it look good, you know. And so really that's the leverage you're going to work on, and as long as you have brands that are going to transform raw products with very, very high margins, and then they can afford to say to themselves, okay, we're going to invest a little more in something harder, something brighter, and so on. All these details that mean that when you as a consumer arrive, you perceive the brand as better placed or the screen is a little nicer, particularly at Cosmeto, which is exhibiting at the moment. You see where we invest a little more because we need to reassure people like that, so the finishes, the materials are super important, you see. So you put in a little more budget. And then you have very short-term O p and that's a few thousand euros or a few hundred euros sometimes. We also help shopping centres to invest in small kiosks that are ready to be used by brands, so smaller brands. Typically, you have an e-commerce, you make a few hundred thousand euros or a few tens of thousands of euros, you are starting out, you can go into this kind of arrangement and for a few hundred euros for a week, for example, you will be able to sell your products directly. The leverage is incredible. You go from being an unknown brand to lots of people who will come across you, who will talk about you and so on. You can do what you want in ads, you spend spend five hundred bucks on ads, not the return you get for 500 bucks by being there for a week. And that's a trick, yeah it seems complicated, it's not at all. And we support property companies by designing these systems for brands. All right. We try to provide support in every sense of the word. Because all the layers are extremely important. So you can start with very little and make it profitable, efficient and more effective for your brand, and you can go a little further, like shops. We can also do shops of several hundred square metres to several hundred thousand euros even for a week for big international brands for example but because the communication lever and it's a national or international marketing plan suddenly you see the stakes are not at all the same. Yeah of course. But now we're getting a bit off track, we're a bit beyond the need for a DNVB or you know a digital brand. And so it seems pretty clear to me about the fixed costs. And now, if we try to go down a little bit to the other items of the BP, personal expenses, how much do you estimate it to be? So the personal expenses already depending on where you are located, you have some operating times that are a bit compulsory in the shopping centre, it opens at 10 am, closes at 8 pm, you see it takes time, especially that length of time, so you have at least one and a half people a day to do the whole thing, so you have to manage that and it still has a cost. So you can either go through direct recruitment, which is the cheapest, but you have to recruit and train the person. It's a person. Exactly, you see, it can be complex. You also have options with a Student Pop, for example. I don't know if you know them, but it's actually really well done. You make a reservation, you have a pool of students who will be trained and so on, and who can come to the rescue a bit like that and strengthen teams a little. There are lots of brands for which it works very well. Like products that are easy to sell or where you need a presence. There are others for which you have to be much more technical and it can be a good help but not necessarily the heart of the reactor. But it works well. We also have other partners who also provide you with additional sales force. So there, in fact, it's really shameful source of the staff who are already recruited by the agency in question, who will be trained and it's their job to be really good salespeople. So they learn the brand half a day of training and they arrive they are very strong. We did this for Emma matelas at the time, a start-up, you know, you know, you know well. And I introduce them but there must be four hundred of them now and so we set them up as a pop-up and we organised a super sales team, you know, calibrated for the duration of the pop-up store and they did great. So I was really happy even if it costs a little more because you have a sales manager, you have sales teams underneath and so on. So it costs more. In terms of budget ranges on this. You take the cost, the hourly rate of a salesperson, and you add about thirty percent for an agency, you know. Okay. Otherwise, you recruit directly, but it's like anything. If you pay them well, you potentially have someone who will come on time and who won't run off. If you don't pay them well, you potentially have turnover, so that's important. And above all there's one thing, but you have to be extremely vigilant, which is that you can screw up everything by having a salesperson on their mobile phone. Yeah. We come across them all the time and we go around the pop-up centres. A game is when you see the retail areas, it's having our shop customers, our customers, but whether it's in a shop, in a pop-up, in an activation, wherever you want, frankly, everyone has the reflex to get on their phone. It's a bit of a wolf in the business. Yeah, it's, there's nothing worse. It's enough to do it. I won't comment on that, but I share your sentiment. OK, cool. And now listen, to finish up, I'd like us to talk a little bit about the future of the future, for you to take out your crystal ball and explain to us a little bit about your vision of things in terms of the next trends. I mentioned it at the beginning, it's true that we can see that there's a big comeback in retail. And in this context, in terms of a little physical experience, what are the new types of experiences, the new formats of experience that you see emerging and that you think will develop in the months and years to come? There are subjects on which we are convinced, you see, but the return of human connections, you see, of managing to humanise brands as much as possible. So it's no longer so much about the brand, but is expressed in retail, but you see it's really a vision of trying to get to know your customer better, trying to embody your brand and so on, humanising it as much as possible. I think this is an important logic for the future of retail and physical retail. There is also a subject that I believe in a lot, which is the mix, the sharing of places. You have lots of brands that can coexist, each one reinforcing the other's positioning. So that's a really interesting lever. Firstly, it allows brands to communicate with each other. You see it today in other sectors, but you see a Burger King x another brand, and suddenly all the brands become cool, you take an interest in another brand, you almost like it as much as the main brand and so on, it's ultra powerful in physical retail, it's great, you can already imagine, you're talking to two to bring them to one place. All you need is for your customer to be a bit complementary, for example, if they're sporty, you have a sports product and at the same time a food supplement. You see, you sell trainers and supplements, you have the same target market, basically. So that's extraordinary, you can do that kind of thing, I really believe in it. And then continue to try to create strong connections between digital activation and physical activation, you see. On this last point, do you have an example in mind of creating better connections between the digital and the physical? I think it comes back a bit to item number one, the idea of humanising your brand a bit. A while ago, we thought that going omnichannel meant going back from digital to the shops. We were putting tablets everywhere. You know what I mean, you necessarily have the good. Has there really been any performance around that? There are a few that have succeeded, there are good examples with data in-store or at least with additional purchases in-store and so on, but there have been a lot of aborted things that haven't necessarily worked. So you see, it was more about feeling, we were never very keen on bringing down a lot of digital content into the shop, thinking that maybe we could reconnect our digital customers because thanks to their smartphone, they come to the shop and then they find their customer account, their thing, but no, you don't just put your info on your phone at home or on your computer in front of you on the sofa, but in the shop you don't put your credit card info, your stuff and so on. So you see, all that was a really bad idea and I think we've arrived at something where we're going to try to create a slightly better connection with our customers, precisely by having perhaps more efficient staff who recognise the customers a little, typically our tea shop, our customer, that's one of the positioning strategies, so I'm not going to say everything because we are in the process of finalising the roll-out of its its concept, but one of the positioning strategies is really to put the human back at the heart of the of the system and try to have a loyalty system that works mainly through the ah I remember you. And so there are plenty of opportunities to start discussions, to give the impression in any case that we have already crossed paths and then to implementing in a fairly simple CRM system, but implementing information to quickly find out ah hello ah you had bought such and such a product, so you liked it number time and so on, would you like to try this, we have a new product that looks like this, would you like to, For us, this is a very, very strong lever that you can have in physical commerce, what. Yeah, honestly, I'm learning a lot of things. I'm, I can't wait to see the next operations you're going to do, I'll come and see you in person André to contemplate all that. With pleasure. And listen, I think we've actually covered the subject well. Do you have any general advice to finish with that we might not have mentioned. Yeah, creating in real life is, for us, a bit like the centre of the discussion every time we always come back to that, everything we do, all the energy we put into developing ourselves in terms of physicality, it's about creating a connection at a given moment, creating something, so it's a bit of a cliché to say that it's about emotion and so on, but it's in itself it's it's true, you see. It's about managing to have a physical point of contact and making your customer become a kind of ambassador for your brand. And that at every stage of the design, the point of sale, the experience, the design, your signs, your message, your hierarchy of messages, the place in which you set up, each time it is what we link to the DNA of the brand, do we link well to who are, who are the customers, dear customers that was actually the idea. That is to say obviously there is the play on words because we love our customers, but above all in fact it is the sharing of the customer. The customer, our customer, that's who we have to talk to, you see. And that was our way of thinking, it was about saying how we create this emotional thing, so above all the the the central point is to create a moment of encounter, to create something where a smile can happen, a product test, let's say the quintessence of that it's just the exchange around your product, your brand and around it you add elements to create an atmosphere, to create an environment, to communicate correctly. You really have to think about the heart of the reactor. The connection with the customer, the connection with your product. That's just the basics, but starting from that you have a better chance of getting it right. Because you don't choose the wrong place because you say but no our product is them, our customers are them you see this place there it's not our customers you see, well it can clear up. It's common sense but frankly everything has to revolve around that. In any case, that's how we see it. Too right, listen, where can we find our dear customer, where can we find you? We are everywhere there is trade, that is to say in France, in Europe and today we have more and more international customers, so we are very happy. We also have brands that want to set up in Europe that come from Asia, the US and so on. So we continue to support them and then I find myself on LinkedIn where I try to give as many tips as possible, feedback and so on about setting up a shop or pop-up store. So that's also on my insta, on the agency's insta where we post a few small photos and videos of our operations. That's it for the traditional social media. Great. Well listen, thank you very much Maxime. It was a pleasure and I hope it will appeal to those who are listening too. I hope so too. Ciao. Thank you for listening to this episode of Loyoly talks right to the end. I hope you enjoyed it and found lots of tips to try out for your brand. If so, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Spread the word and leave us a 5-star rating on Apple podcast, it helps us a lot. Finally, if you need to increase your LTV, don't hesitate to contact me on LinkedIn or on our website point I o. See you soon.