British high streets are struggling because of online shopping, higher costs, and inflation. Many shops are empty. A new startup called Sook wants to help by turning empty shops into short-term rental stores. This was started by John Hoyle, a former army captain and real estate worker. Even though more people shop online, Hoyle thinks people still want real stores. Sook offers a different way to rent stores. Instead of long leases, they share profits with landlords and rent by the hour or day. This helps smaller brands that can’t afford big upfront costs.
The company runs places in 12 spots in the UK, like London, Leeds, and Newcastle. They will also open one in Johannesburg, South Africa, soon. They let big companies like TikTok, Adobe, and Mastercard rent space from them. But most of the time, about 70%, they rent to online shops that want a physical store. This helps those online businesses sell in real shops.
Nicole Stark started Glownic Vintage in 2019. It’s a business where she sells old clothes online from her university apartment and her childhood home in Edinburgh, Scotland.
She gets most of the clothes from Italy and France. In the beginning, she sold these clothes on websites like Depop and Finds. Even though it started as a hobby, last year she made almost £40,000 ($51,000) from it.
She wanted to connect with customers in real life, so she did temporary sales events with a company called Sook. She had these events in Edinburgh and also on Oxford Street in London.
Oxford Street is one of the busiest shopping streets in Europe. But, right now, 15% of the stores there are empty. This is the highest it’s ever been, and it shows that even very popular shopping areas have problems. When Stark had a pop-up shop in London, she made £6,000 in just one weekend. This was the most money she ever made from a single event.
People who rent Sook spaces can access various services like customizable displays, data analytics, and digital planning tools. These tools allow Sook spaces in the UK to be managed from afar. This means that brands from anywhere in the world can engage with UK customers in person without actually being present there.
Sook’s main goal is to be flexible, and its spaces have been used for many different purposes. They’ve served as Coronavirus testing centers, art galleries, and even a place where someone transformed the space into a special area to propose to his girlfriend. Sook is all about reimagining how spaces can be used, and their customers come in all sorts of different types.
Andrew Goodacre is the CEO of the British Independent Retailers Association, working with over 6,000 small businesses. He supports the idea of Sook’s temporary business model, as it’s a smart way to use space, provide opportunities, and attract brands back to the high street. Goodacre thinks that small businesses need to be open to trying new things due to the tough challenges they’re facing. According to Hoyle, online-first brands like Glownic represent this creativity well, as they don’t require many physical stores and are a sign of a big change in retail.