From online to high street: Testing physical retail

Explore how to move from e-commerce into physical spaces through pop-ups, markets and short-term lets, in this webinar led by Natalie Binns.

Learn how to choose the right location, test demand, manage costs and decide whether bricks-and-mortar is right for your business.

Topics covered in this session

• A simple framework for choosing between pop-up, market and short-term let formats based on your product, margin and goals

• The key numbers to track during any physical retail test

• A cost checklist covering the expenses most brands forget to factor in before they sign anything

About the speaker

Natalie is a fashion buying and sustainable sourcing expert helping ambitious founders build responsible and profitable fashion brands.

With nearly two decades of experience in the industry, she brings big-brand know-how to independent fashion brands, guiding founders from design to delivery and scaling with clarity and confidence.

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Transcript

Lightly edited for clarity.

Beth: Hello everyone, and welcome to today's Powering Local Businesses Lunch and Learn. I'm Beth, the community manager here at Enterprise Nation. Powering Local Businesses is brought to you by EDF Small Business and Enterprise Nation in partnership with Square. It's designed to help small businesses grow more sustainably, however you sell and wherever you're based.

Through the hub, you can apply for grants, pop-up shop opportunities, and access energy-saving guidance and expert workshops. We'll be dropping links in the chat throughout, so keep an eye out. Today, we are focusing on a question many growing businesses are asking: What does it actually take to test physical retail?

Whether you run a product-based business online and are curious about what selling in person might look like, or you're already dabbling with markets and pop-ups and want to take the next step, this session is for you. We're joined today by Natalie Binns, founder of Better Fashion Consultancy. Natalie has worked with businesses just like yours and understands both the opportunity and the complexity of moving from online to in-person selling.

With nearly two decades of experience in the industry, Natalie knows how to guide founders to scale with clarity and confidence. In this session, we will cover how to test physical retail without overcommitting, what formats are available – from pop-up shops and markets to concessions and permanent spaces – how to weigh up costs and benefits, and what practical next steps look like for your business. Please add any questions to the Q&A as we go. This session is being recorded, and we will share the recording and further resources afterwards. So thanks for joining everyone, and over to you, Natalie.

Natalie Binns: Morning, everyone – or afternoon now, anyway. Please do feel free to introduce yourself in the chat. Quick introduction to me: my name is Natalie Binns. I founded Better Fashion Consultancy, where I help emerging brands and startups – mainly founder-led brands – with product strategy, sourcing, and sustainability.

You can think of me as a fashion buyer and sustainability manager for a brand that doesn't have a team for that yet. If you're wondering why sustainability and buying go hand in hand, it's because I think sustainability strategy works best when it's embedded into your product and sourcing decisions – rather than sitting in a silo in a different area of your business. It's embedded into those decisions you're making every day, and it's linked to your commercial targets.

I had a career for over a decade as a fashion buyer, working for the UK high street, in wholesale fashion, and also in e-commerce. I decided I wanted to take those skills and help independent, responsible, and purpose-driven brands achieve the same commercial goals as big brands.

So today we're going to be talking about physical retail – it's one of those areas that ecommerce brands often want to test. Recently, I've been noticing from my clients that people are getting a lot out of doing some kind of physical retail space. The things we're going to talk about today are: creating a framework to choose the right format for your physical space; the metrics you should be using to track your performance, to see whether it was successful and what you need to change for next time; and we'll go through some of the costs you can expect, which are very different to an online space.

So, getting started – why physical retail? I started my career in e-commerce. I worked at ASOS for five years, and at that time, we were one of the first online fashion websites. Very quickly after that, so many more sprung up, because it's so easy to create an online brand compared to physical retail. For a while, people were really attracted to e-commerce businesses, and the reasons why are because the overheads are so much lower.

In physical retail, the cons are the high overheads. You've got your rental of the unit, staff, and utilities. You've got point-of-sale that you have to create, and your store has to look good – everything has to work together. Online, you can put everything up on the website almost immediately, you can be selling 24 hours a day, and you can reach the whole world from the first day you launch your business if you want to.

In-store, you also have limited customer reach, and it's much more difficult to capture customer data. We know that capturing emails and being able to keep up with your customers is really helpful for marketing, and that's harder to achieve in person.

So that's why online businesses have been thriving, and why people are probably apprehensive about physical retail. But if you're all here, then you're probably aware of some of the pros. The first is visibility – it's very expensive to get visibility online now and drive people to your store, but with a physical retail space, people walk past, they see your store, and you have the benefit of passing footfall.

That gives you automatic credibility as well. People see something on the high street; they see it in physical form, and it automatically gives you credibility. You can build on that further with personalised customer service, which also builds trust and loyalty with your customers – and it's particularly good for upselling. If you have a clothing brand, for example, styling is a really good way of not only giving people a personal service, but upselling to them as well.

Online, we're really buying with our eyes, but in person, you can touch, smell, and taste the product – you can see the detail and the quality up close, and you're using all your senses. If you have food products, you need to be able to taste them; with fragrance products, you want to be able to smell them; and even with clothing, you want to be able to feel the texture and look at the seams and the quality.

Because people are making a more considered purchase – seeing the product in more detail – we have much lower returns in physical retail. Returns can be as high as 44-45% in e-commerce. The customer also gets immediate gratification, and you can talk to them and get direct feedback on the spot. You can find out why they bought, where they're going, and you get to see your customer in real life instead of creating an avatar of what you think they might look like. You can also observe how they move around the store, and that's really priceless feedback – seeing what people gravitate towards, and what they pick up and put down again, can tell you a lot about why people aren't buying a particular product.

So let's talk about the retail formats available to you. You've got the market stall, the pop-up, and the short-term let. The pop-up and short-term let are often used interchangeably, but I'll explain the differences between them.

With the market stall, this is your lowest-commitment and lowest-cost way of doing physical retail. There will be existing marketplaces where you can go and pay for a stall, usually just for a day. This is great for testing product-market fit – if you don't know whether people are going to like your product or if you've priced it right, this is a really low-cost, low-commitment way of testing. You get direct customer feedback because you're speaking to people face to face, and you can build some local awareness of your product.

The cons here are weather and unpredictability in general, because footfall can vary. Because it's one day, you're relying on that one day – if something happens that prevents people from coming, you could have a difficult time. You also have a long setup and breakdown: everything is resting on that one day, whereas with a pop-up, you set up once and you might be there for a little while. The market is really good for makers and anyone who wants to have a personal connection with their customer, introduce themselves, and add value to their story. It's great for testing the first time you're doing a retail space, and really good for food or drink, or anything that people want to pick up, smell, taste, or touch.

The pop-up is a temporary retail space – it could be not that much more than a market stall, because it might just be a space shared with lots of other brands, which you could either run privately or join something that somebody else is running. It could be a pop-up within another store, or it could be a completely vacant unit – there are lots of different ways to approach this, and it's really variable. You can make it feel like a proper shop, you can partner with other brands and share costs, and you get to test the full retail experience before you take on any kind of proper contract. It could be as simple as a week somewhere, just to see what it's like to actually run a store.

The cons are that it's a higher cost and longer lead time than a market, and requires more logistics planning. You've got to make the store or space look good, so you need a stronger visual identity, and you need a bit more product depth. It suits businesses that are a little further along – they've got enough product, and they can deliver a good brand experience for the customer.

Then we have the short-term let. This is a formal agreement – you're actually signing a contract, and you're responsible for all the costs of running a store. It's much more expensive, but it's a short-term let rather than a five-year lease, which is quite common with commercial units. The good thing about this is stability: you're going to be there for a while, you'll have a really strong brand presence because you'll keep improving the store over time, and you'll build a lot of local awareness. Your customers will know where to find you.

But it is the highest cost and commitment, and it will need a proper fit-out and staffing. You're going to encounter things like business rates, utilities, and all the other extra costs that come with running a store. It suits people who've already proven some demand, have a clear audience, and have money to invest.

So how do you choose a format? There are three questions you should be asking yourself. First: what's my margin? How much money are you making from your products, and is the profit you're going to generate enough to cover the cost of the format you've chosen and make it worthwhile? A caveat here – if you're doing a market and it's very low cost, you might decide to do it knowing you may not make any money, simply because it's a useful marketing test.

Second: how much volume do you need to sell? Based on the profit you make per product, how many units do you need to sell? Is it realistic to sell that amount in the area or format you've chosen? If you've chosen a market and you need to sell 1,000 units to break even, is it realistic to achieve that in one day? Make sure you choose the format that makes sense.

Third: how ready is your brand? Think about your visual identity in particular, how much depth you have in your product range, and whether you have the capacity to show up properly.

Here's a quick yes/no guide. For a market stall, you can do it even if your product isn't making much profit at the moment, mostly because the cost is so low. You may not make any money, but you can write that cost off as a test or marketing expense. You can have a very small product range, use the smallest table or pitch, and be a very early-stage brand – you can almost just have an idea, a banner, a logo, and some products, and give it a try. Capital investment needed is very low, and it's great for testing everything: product, pricing, and customers, right from the very beginning.

If you're thinking of doing a pop-up, you would generally want to be making a decent profit margin from your products, because there's going to be more time and cost investment involved. You'd want a solid product range and a brand identity, since you're more responsible for making the space look good. Capital-wise, it sits in the middle, but it's extremely variable depending on the route you choose. A pop-up could be anything from taking a completely vacant unit for a few days, to joining three other brands in a shared unit, to going through a business like Lone Design Club, which is for independent fashion designers and makers and hosts pop-ups in places like Oxford Street or Bond Street, where you really have to have a strong point-of-sale. A pop-up could also be something as simple as a display of your candles in your local café. It can mean so many different things.

The pop-up is best for testing everything, much like a market stall. But if you do a pop-up on your own or a bigger pop-up, you can test the full brand experience and the full retail experience without having to sign a lease.

The short-term let is the biggest commitment. You do need to make sure your numbers stack up, because you're going to be spending a decent amount of money. You need a full-size range and complementary products at different price points, a strong brand identity, and it's good to have built a decent audience as well. This is the highest spend, but it's the best format for testing your long-term viability. If you're serious about physical retail, the short-term let is really your last step before signing a permanent lease.

By the way, don't forget you can ask questions in the chat at any time, and I'll answer them at the end. So, when choosing a location, you want to make sure you visit the location as a customer first. Check that the footfall in that area matches your customer profile – the type of person you want to sell to, or who you know likes your product. Also, check your neighbours: do the brands in that area match the kind of lifestyle your target customer would be interested in? Are there complementary businesses and brands around you?

When you go to markets, again, check what kind of market it is. Is it a market for makers? If you're a maker and you go to a market that has lots of people selling job lots of stock, you might look expensive next to everyone else. Make sure it matches your demographic and your type of business.

Do your research. Ask for verified data about attendance or footfall if you're going to markets, and the same applies to pop-ups or retail spaces – anything you can get information on. Speak to previous traders and find out what they experienced, and look online for reviews and press coverage. Before you sign anything, check the terms and cancellation policies, and choose the right occasion. If you're choosing a market and it's only one day, make sure it's the right one – don't do a Christmas market if you're a beachwear brand, for example. Give yourself the best opportunity for this test.

Avoid low-footfall areas and poor-visibility locations – anywhere down a side street, for instance. I always think of a woman in Brixton who has a shop with telegraph poles right in front of it. It wasn't like that when she took the space, but now nobody can see her store. The same goes for being right in front of a busy bus stop – every 10 minutes, a double-decker could be blocking your frontage. Avoid awkward layouts and anything lacking accessibility, since the more accessible the space is, the more customers can come in.

Avoid being the most expensive option around, and at the same time, avoid sale or discount-focused events if that's not what you're looking for – you don't want to devalue your brand. If everyone at a market has loads of offers and it attracts bargain hunters, it might not be the right fit. And avoid committing to anything long term without doing a test first.

So, some of the costs you may not have encountered before. Premises fees cover everything from rent or a hire fee, business rates – which are essentially like your council tax but for a commercial property – public liability insurance, which is really important if you're selling in person (most markets will require you to have it), and membership fees, as some markets require you to be a member. Then there are energy costs and all your utilities, and trading costs such as your card reader and fees, a float if you're taking cash, snacks, and any last-minute supplies. Logistics – how are you getting there? Parking, van hire, and delivery if you need it.

Display and setup covers things like trestle tables, rails, and shelving. Even for a market, I always encourage people to try and make their stall look like a proper shop – use different heights on your table, add a rail next to it, a backdrop, a banner. Packaging: You'll probably need more than you're used to, since you'll definitely need bags and something for people to take away. It's also worth having a thank-you card or something to signpost people to your online store.

Staffing: remember, your time and your helpers' time have a cost. Factor that in from the beginning, and make sure you account for everything – setup, trading, breakdown, travel, all of it. And then stock risk: if you have perishable goods, some stock may not sell. Think ahead about how you'll deal with that. Shrinkage does happen, too, so it's best to factor it in.

So before you open, the most important thing you need to do is work out how many units you need to sell at your pop-up or market to break even. To do that, you add up all of your costs and divide by the average profit on your product. Let's say your costs were £500, and you sell candles for £15, and it costs you £5 to make each candle. You make a profit of £10 on each candle, so £500 divided by ten is 50 – you need to sell 50 units to break even. That is the most important number you need to know.

After that, you can test what happened – did you meet that target or not? If you didn't, you can start to break down why. And even if you did, you can look at what went really well and what could be done better. The things you'd be looking at are: conversion rate, which tells you the number of people who bought versus the number of people who looked. You'll mostly be counting this manually when you're starting out – get a clicker or use a tally chart. If you use a tally chart, it's good to break it down by the morning period, the middle of the day, and the end of the day, to see if there are certain times when you're busier.

Conversion rate is calculated as the number of buyers divided by the number of visitors, multiplied by 100. You'll probably be used to around two to three per cent conversion on a website, but in person, you want it to be more like between 20% and 40% – roughly one in four or one in five people buying something. If it's low, then something is wrong: people are looking but not buying.

Average order value is your total revenue divided by the number of transactions. This can help you see if you could be getting more from each customer. If you have a really good conversion rate but you still don't hit your revenue targets, one way of improving is to try to get each customer to spend a bit more. The aim is to generate as much revenue from the lowest number of customers – £500 could come from 50 customers buying one thing, but if everyone bought two things, you could reach that £500 after just 25 customers. It's simply more efficient, and that applies online as well.

Revenue per hour is a good way of working out whether your staffing needs to change. Divide your total revenue by the hours you were trading, and that gives you an average. Then you can look at your actual revenue per hour and see patterns – maybe the first four hours were well below average, but the middle of the day was well above it. Maybe at six o'clock, things were flying, and then you had to close. If you can affect your opening hours, you'll know you don't need to open until eleven because things don't pick up until twelve, or that you'd benefit from staying open until seven one night a week because people like to shop late.

Then your cost to trade – just your total cost overall. It's important to look at this because if your conversion was really high but you still didn't make enough money, your cost to trade may be too high. It might not be that you're doing anything wrong on the day – you might just be spending too much to get there. That means you need to go back and assess what you could do differently to improve your costs. Similarly, if you have high conversion but you're not breaking even, it may be that increasing the order value – getting each person to buy more – would make the difference.

Some tips for making your space work harder: these days, stores aren't just for selling – they're really about building trust, and you can get a lot more from your store than just revenue. Direct people to your online space, and build the brand world within your store. Think about workshops – styling sessions, demos if you're a maker, visible making so the customer can see your process. Could you do customisation on the day, or alterations or repairs? How can you create a more experiential space for them to be in?

Make your online and physical presence seamless. You want to direct people from the store back to your website, and from your online following into your store. Offer a discount to your online newsletter readers when they come in and buy, for example, some kind of in-person exclusive. Try to capture emails in store too, even though it's harder – you want to be able to keep the relationship going. Drive customers back to your socials and create lots of content: a physical retail space is a fantastic content opportunity for showing setup, behind-the-scenes, and customers in action.

Think differently about what else your space could be. I always talk about the Co-Edit, which is a vintage shop my sister used to own. They went to a local bar that was quiet and asked if they could do a sip-and-shop event – a little shopping evening on a Friday night when the bar should have been busy but wasn't. It was an incentive for the bar to host them, and it worked really well. Think outside the box: where could you pop up? Who could you collaborate with? Which businesses on your high street or in your local area could be useful to you?

A great example is Ivy and the Wolf in Crystal Palace, which I always talk about. It started as a collaboration between someone who sold plants online and someone who sold baked goods online – they came together and created a shared space. The baked goods side has since moved on, but the store has expanded into a full lifestyle store and café, and they also host workshops. It's a true destination space with so many different things to offer.

So, key takeaways. Make sure you know your costs before you commit – this is the biggest thing, really. Whatever you try, be clear on how much it's going to cost you and what you want to get out of it. With a market, it might be a bit of experimentation, but the more you're spending, the more important it is to make sure your revenue holds up too. Align with your customer – make sure everything lines up to their lifestyle and what they're interested in.

Signs you're getting it right: you're breaking even or exceeding it; the conversion feels natural, with people buying without being sold to; you're left with contacts, followers, and content as well as sales; it's driven traffic or sales online; or even just grown your newsletter. And if you'd do it again without dreading it – that's also a really good sign. Hopefully that's helpful. A few minutes left for some questions, and if you want to keep in touch with me, my details are in the chat – the QR code will take you to my newsletter if you'd like to sign up.

Beth: There's one in from Penelope. She's asking for any tips on how to actually look for pop-up spaces.

Natalie: Yes, so through local councils for sure. But more practically, there are companies like Appear Here whose whole purpose is to help get people into empty units – so following those kinds of organisations is a good start. Generally, I'd also say being in small business networks helps a lot. I saw someone on TikTok the other day calling out, saying, "I want to do a pop-up, does anyone want to do it with me?" – you can do that same kind of callout. A lot of the best pop-up spaces come from people coming together and making it happen themselves. I think networking is probably the best route, really.

Beth: Absolutely, yeah, thank you. So Naomi is saying she loves the idea of doing a pop-up. How does she get started on finding pop-up partnerships in stores, as well as boutique hotels and spas?

Natalie: It depends on whether it's a private partnership – where you go to them and say, "Can I pop up in your space?" – or whether it's something they already offer. John Lewis, for example, does pop-ups with brands that you can apply for. I think Westfield does it as well, where you can apply to be in their pop-up space. Those tend to work on a commission basis – sometimes there's an initial fee and then a commission on sales, something like that. But if you're approaching someone privately, you can offer whatever works for you and start the negotiation. I try to get the space for free and offer them a commission in return. It's really about going to people where it's going to benefit them too, the same as when you're trying to get into wholesale. You have to show them: this is going to be good for you, it'll make people stay in your space for longer, or it'll bring people in. Show them your audience, and point out if you've noticed they're quiet on a particular day, so this could help.

Beth: No, that's great, thank you. We do have more questions in the chat, but we're going to have to wrap up, unfortunately. All of Natalie's details are in the chat, so please feel free to reach out to her afterwards.

Applications are now open for the Powering Local Business pop-up shop in Brighton. It's a brilliant opportunity to get your products in front of new customers, raise brand awareness, and be part of something that celebrates local businesses. Slots are two weeks long, and it's running between the 29th of June and the 26th of July 2026. If you're interested, please apply via the Powering Local Business landing page.

Thank you, everyone, for joining today – there are lots of thank-yous in the chat for Natalie, which is really lovely to see. We'll be sharing the recording and further resources in a follow-up email later this afternoon. A massive thank you to our guest speaker, Natalie, for sharing your insight and expertise with us. I hope everyone has a lovely rest of the day. Thanks everyone, bye!

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