First Industry Wide "Pop-Up" Conference to be Held in Burlington, Vermont on October 12th
Boston, Massachusetts (PRWEB) September 05, 2013 -- In recognition of the important role that pop-ups are playing in the United States and worldwide, an industry that according to Bloomberg/Business Week reached $8 billion in the U.S. in 2012, a pop-up conference, entitled Pop-Ups Across America, will be held in Burlington, Vermont, on Saturday October 12th, the first day of the Columbus Holiday weekend. Co-hosting the forum is the University of Vermont’s nationally-recognized Community Development and Applied Economics department, and PopUp Republic (http://www.popuprepublic.com), a social media marketing company that has emerged as a force in the promotion of pop-ups across the United States.
The conference will welcome two special guest speakers who are the impresarios of two of the world’s most popular pop-up events. Timo Santala, co-founder of Restaurant Day, which organizes simultaneous pop-up restaurant festivals in 35 countries four times a year, will be using the conference as a platform to formally launch Restaurant Day in the U.S. Luke Jerram, world-acclaimed artist who founded “Play Me, I’m Yours,” public piano installations that have engaged over 3 million people in dozens of cities worldwide, will speak to the audience about his wildly popular pop-up that is making its way across the United States.
Other speakers at the event include community economic development experts, pop-up service providers, and popular pop-up hosts. The conference’s two keynote speakers, Dr. Jane Kolodinsky, Chair of the UVM Community Development and Applied Economics department, and Miro Weinberger, Mayor of the host city Burlington, Vermont, will address the changing circumstances affecting community economics and how pop-ups can serve as pivotal tools for municipal officials to embrace the burgeoning “buy local” and “know what you are buying and eating” movements. Top pop-up service providers such as Christina Norsig of PopUp Insider, Nicholas Russell of We Are PopUp, Erik Eliason and Tristan Pollock of The Storefront, and Scott Cipolla of PopUp Republic will cover the step-by-step process of launching a successful pop-up.
“Pop-ups are often whimsical and fanciful,” said Jeremy Baras, C.E.O. of PopUp Republic. “They provide an impromptu, spontaneous, one-of-a-kind component to daily existence, which all of us love. But they also have a very important and serious side. We have seen aspiring chefs use pop-up restaurants to showcase their culinary skills; artisanal merchants use them to exhibit and sell their goods; and commercial landlords can stage their vacant storefronts in a way that presents them as being commercially viable locations for retail businesses.”
PopUp Republic will also be providing a case study on a pop-up marketplace it recently opened in a vacant building in Brookline, Massachusetts, that can serve as a template for other cities to replicate. Further information on the Brookline pop-up marketplace is available here.
For further information on the conference, please contact Jeremy Baras at jbaras(at)popuprepublic(dot)com, or visit http://www.popupsacrossamerica.com.
Jeremy Baras, PopUp Republic/Pop-Ups Across America, http://www.popupsacrossamerica.com, +1 (617) 733-1276, [email protected]
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