AURORA | The neighborhood lemonade stand is a timeless summertime venture that has sparked and squashed the aspirations of many a prepubescent Gordon Gekko. With a dose of cuteness and a pinch of high-fructose corn syrup, these endearing enterprises have provided countless young entrepreneurs with their first taste of success.
But to brothers Preston and Austin Anguilm, ages 10 and 15, lemonade stands, lawn-mowing businesses and other youthful métiers seemed like juvenile endeavors that kept their wallets thin and stifled their creativity.
“We wanted to make more than our allowance and do something that we liked to do,” Austin said.
That’s why in Jan. 2012, the then third and eighth-graders from Parker created Fly Guy Brands, a clothing line for adults and kids. Lead by the brothers’ mom, Kelly — also the proprietor of her own clothing line Good Girl Brands — the company designs, markets and sells T-shirts, bumper stickers and snap-back hats. Almost all of the apparel items sport the company’s logo, a large, cartoon fly.
“We’ve always been people who like clothes,” Austin said. “I thought with our mom’s experience and our, I guess, creativity, we could do something really cool.”
On top of giving the bothers a “cool” experience, the project has afforded them an early entry into the business world, and a steady income. Not too shabby for a duo that doesn’t even have a valid driver’s license between them.
“We’ve done pretty well,” Austin said humbly.
The Fly Guy team added a notch to their growing list of accomplishments this past weekend — a brick and mortar store. The venture had been entirely Web-based until last Friday when the team opened up shop at the Southlands Shopping Center in Aurora.
“It was really stressful setting everything up,” Preston said. “We had to do everything so fast.”
Fast is an understatement to describe the brand’s stint at Southlands, which totaled a whopping 72 hours. Open Friday morning and is closed on Sunday afternoon, the team was operating a pop-up shop, a business trend that has seen rapid proliferation in recent years and is quickly storming into cities around Colorado. With epicenters in New York and Los Angeles, the idea is grounded on the premise of setting up a retail shop for a short, finite period of time, sometimes as brief as 24 hours.
“It’s really anything that’s temporary with a specific opening and closing date,” Jeremy Baras, CEO of Pop-up Republic said. “That could be a restaurant, a farmers market — if it’s temporary, interesting and unique for the customer, it’s absolutely a pop-up.”
Baras and his team at Pop-up Republic work to locate and provide resources to pop-up shops and restaurants across the country. One of their most utilized and popular services is providing marketing and PR support for pop-up operators, such as Fly Guy.
“Pop-ups rely mostly on word-of-mouth because they don’t have big budgets,” he said. “For companies like Fly Guy, we create social media campaigns, distribute press releases to search engines and local media and do everything we can to spread the word.”
The budgetary concerns that Baras mentions are a common concern for all new business owners and operators, but are often even more pressing for pop-ups.
“Rent aside, you’ve got to staff it, be working mall hours of 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., paying utilities on the space and all that kind of stuff,” Jeff Nemec, general manager of Southlands said. “A lot of people have the ideas, but once they kind of flesh out, how much it’s going to cost and what it takes to actually run a business, you lose about 80 percent of them.”
Nemec worked with Fly Guy to help them find an available space in Southlands, the mall’s first pop-up. He said that while he admires that concept, it was not intended to be a lucrative venture.
“It takes more work on our end, than the amount of money that we might get from the pop-up shop,” he said. “We take a low base amount plus a small percentage of sales. It’s not a money-maker by any means.”
Even without a beefy fiscal incentive, Nemec said that he believes the pop-up trend will continue and he is open to having more at Southlands, as long as they are handled properly.
“You need to convey that it’s a pop-up properly because otherwise it looks like a store that opened and closed quickly and failed,” he said. “But that’s not the case, that was the intent — to spur activity and test a concept.”
Tim Gonerka, retail specialist for the City of Aurora, agreed that these shops can be helpful and that Aurora could see more pop-ups.
“They’re a great way to introduce a product to an area that you’re not so sure of,” he said. “Aurora has some locations where there could certainly be an opportunity for that.”