Pop-Up Shop Opens on the Information Superhighway

During five years of blogging about ideas that make a change in cities we've built a giant collection of pop-up things — from shops and galleries to houses, entire neighborhoods and even cities. All these examples are physical. A few days ago, however, we stumbled upon Quitokeeto, one of the world's first online pop-up shops.

San Francisco-based Quitokeeto is a pop-up web store run by Heidi Swanson and Wayne Bremser that offers a selection of carefully curated products, ranging from tableware to food. What makes this online shop a ‘pop-up shop’ is that it will only be open on occasion. Anyone on the mailing list will be notified first when the shop is open, when there are new items, or when items are back in stock. Quitokeeto plans to be open the morning of April 22nd with a new collection.

Quitokeeto's online pop-up shop

The people behind the online pop-up shop seem to counter the idea that everything on the Internet should be accessible to everyone at all times. Last January we translated this thought to the urban context with our 2013 trend article about Secret Urbanism and New Exclusivity, in which we describe how increasing numbers of organizations, brands and people come to realize that keeping things exclusive, and sometimes even secret, could add value and quality. Quitokeeto’s online pop-up shop is an interesting experiment with pop-up principles on the Web.