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State of Technology in Fargo by Tristan Pollock
- 1. State of Technology August 20, 2014 www.thestorefront.com
- 5. Mom and Dad Uptown Art Fair - Minneapolis
- 6. Growing Up
- 10. “Storefront’s mission is to make the world’s retail space accessible.”
- 11. Gray Space
- 12. 1 in 10stores are vacant
- 13. 28 Millionsmall businesses and entrepreneurs
- 22. “Airbnb of Retail” World’s largest marketplace connecting businesses with the best retail space.
- 25. anye West “Yeezus” Pop-Up Shop in NYC
- 26. ckson Junge Gallery in Chicago
- 27. Let’s Make Space CREATE SPACE THAT MATTERS
Notes de l'éditeur
- Welcome. Smile.
- I’m the co-founder and head of community at Storefront. Storefront is a marketplace that connects artists, designers, and brands to a city’s best retail spaces.
- I live in San Francisco now, but I grew up in the Twin Cities.
- I’m also an NDSU alumni. Go Bison. I graduated in 2008 with a degree in business, concentration in marketing.
- From a young age I’ve always been a part of the creative community. My mom is an artist, my dad is a designer. They took me to my first art fair and gallery opening.
- Although I love the city, I grew up in quiet town 15 minutes south of Minneapolis. The picture you see here is now a neighborhood. Thank you suburban sprawl. But what came out of these nature walks was a desire to explore, and I continually felt myself pulled back to the city. It turns out I’m not alone and over half the world’s population live in urban centers – that’s 3.5B -- and that number will double by 2050.
- After studying aboard in New Zealand, and about a dozen internships, I graduated from NDSU and started working at BestBuy.com. I was tasked with connecting the in-store and online experiences. After having the opportunity to craft content and ideas for millions of Best Buy customers, including one of the best performing emails of all time, I started thinking about how to have a more meaningful impact in the world.
- I met Erik Eliason, my co-founder at Storefront, in 2009 in a Minneapolis coffee shop and together we started a site called SocialEarth.
- SocialEarth is the Huffington Post for social entrepreneurship news and resources. The problem was the mainstream media wasn’t covering the hardest working people tackling the world’s most complex and difficult problems, so we created a place for their voice to be heard. We bootstrapped and ran SocialEarth for 3 years. Sold it to a Boston-based media company, and I’m proud to say we built one of largest networks representing the social entrepreneurship community and it continues today.
- A few months later, Erik and I started thinking about Storefront. What tied the two companies together was our passion for urban innovation and vibrant, livable cities. We wanted to find a way to help the maker movement be more successful.
- In my opinion, there is way too much of this in cities. I’m not sure who decided gray is a city’s favorite color, but I’d like to change that.
- On average, 1 in 10 retail stores is sitting empty in the US today.
- At the same time, it’s never been easier to start a business with tools like Etsy for online stores, Square for POS, and Twitter for promotion. There are 28 million small business owners and entrepreneurs in the US today, and 1/6 of them work in the creative industry. These are artists, designers and makers who make our communities more vibrant, but the leg up to physical retail is still incredibly high.
- This is Jennifer, a friend and creative entrepreneur. She wanted to grow awareness of local artists in Minneapolis with a pop-up gallery in vacant space.
- It wasn’t easy for her. To get this vacant retail space, she had to talk to 20 different commercial brokers, 10 insurance providers, and paid a premium, because she wanted to rent it for one month instead of 5-10 years.
- And the space wasn’t move-in ready and needed improvements. Jennifer had to built out the space herself.
- But it came together.
- And it looked more and more like the gallery she imagined.
- And people came in the door… It’s stories like Jennifer’s that drove us to create Storefront.
- Back to San Francisco. How did we end up there? Erik and I applied to an accelerator called AngelPad started by ex-Googlers. AngelPad is a 10-week startup accelerator in San Francisco. They take 12 companies 2 times per year. Storefront became 1 of the 12 for their 5th class on a warm Thursday night in October. I was in Minneapolis at the time and had three days to stop everything I was doing and get to SF. I had a close friend’s wedding over the weekend and flew out Sunday night. I found a random couch the first night. Slept on a friend’s brother’s floor for the next week. Lived in a one bedroom apartment with four startup founders on air mattresses. And didn’t stop working for the next three months.
- Here’s our class of 12 startups on demo day – where we pitched 200 investors in a hot, packed room.
- Today Storefront is often been compared to Airbnb for Retail. We’ve raised almost $9M in funding….
- And 16 people work out of our offices in a high rise art gallery building in San Francisco just steps away from Union Square - the busiest shopping district in the city. Pictured here is the Storefront Showroom where we live and breath our work hosting artists and designers for monthly pop-up experiences.
- On Storefront, you can find the best pop-up retail spaces in a city in one place. We are redefining what retail space can be. Locations range from empty retail stores to galleries to hotel lobbies. And you can rent space by the day/week/month instead of expensive and risky 5-10 year leases. Plus we provide free insurance to every business that uses us.
- We’ve helped everyone from NIKE and Kanye West to emerging artists and designers find space on the best streets in New York, LA, Chicago, and San Francisco.
- In total, we’ve helped open over 1,000 stores since launching a year and a half ago. Retail is accessible again.
- To end, I want to leave you with one message – create space that matters. It could be your office, a vacant store, or a blank wall. We all have the power to control our surroundings, so let’s create places that inspire. Thank you.
- End.