When Businesses Rise From the Dead

Bredemarket provides marketing and writing services all year. So do grocery stores. Restaurants. Most other firms.

Other businesses are seasonal, but necessitate year-round facilities. Most baseball stadiums don’t host games in December, but host (or struggle to host) non-baseball events when the team isn’t playing. Graber Olive House would hire seasonal staff when the olives were harvested.

And then there is Spirit Halloween, where Joe Marver accidentally discovered how to take advantage of a fundamental truth at his Castro Valley, California women’s clothing store named Spirit.

“He’d put out a small Halloween section—just costumes and decorations to capture some seasonal traffic. That tiny corner of his store consistently outperformed the rest of his inventory combined.”

But he couldn’t just create a Halloween version of Spirit…or could he?

“Shopping malls and strip centers always had vacant spaces—stores that had closed, leaving landlords desperate for any revenue. He could negotiate dirt-cheap short-term leases, operate for 8-10 weeks, and disappear before the first rent increase.”

Google Gemini.

That first landlord was happy to accept a few bucks for a few weeks, which was better than nothing. Marver, of course, saw many, many, more dollars from people who only bought sexy product marketer costumes in October.

Google Gemini.

Then the store closed for the winter, spring, and summer.

Google Gemini.

And the word “pop-up,” albeit used for videos at one point, remained in the domain of retail.

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