We couldn't wait to follow up on the Tokyo Pop Up with another event to showcase our desk. I briefed the team on everything that I learned from the experience in Tokyo, so we could make the next pop up even better.
KEN TOMITA (Grovemade Co-Founder): Follow along as I tell the story of our first pop up in the US!
From the City of Roses to the Emerald City
Kat, our marketing manager, took the helm to plan the event. Step one was find a venue. In Tokyo, I had used a very small setting in a friend of a friend's bike shop. In Seattle, we cast a wide net, but pretty quickly found a very interesting space: the Seattle Design Center.
Originally designed and built in the 1970's, Seattle Design Center is a modern / industrial hub for everything from furniture showrooms to events. It was substantially renovated in 2015, to serve as a Seattle nucleus for all things design. The atrium is particularly dramatic—a bright open space, with an open 2nd floor mezzanine. The light floods in from two rows of sawtooth skylights, pointed east and west. When you look up they present an array of fascinating clips of the sky.
It has a completely different vibe from the Tokyo e-bike shop, but felt like a great space to highlight our desk. Just south of downtown Seattle in the Georgetown neighborhood, it was our spot—a design hub in an industrial neighborhood.
Every Time is Something New
A pop up, just a few hours up the road from our headquarters, should have much easier logistics than doing the same in Tokyo, right? Just load up a U-Haul and head North. You'd think so, but every event and every space is different.
In Tokyo, the space was incredibly small. In Seattle, we actually had a surplus—and I didn't realize how much surplus until we got there and scoped it out.
Our space was structured like an art gallery, with three adjoining rooms. Concrete arches framed the exterior windows and white walls defined the space. Our first concept was to put the desk near the windows, washed in natural light. But after seeing the space, we pivoted, putting the desk in the center where it was darkest. It created focus on the desk, and gave a feeling of discovery to the event as you moved through the space. We designed custom signage to direct people to our pop up as they entered the design center. We imagined the main room would be the welcoming spot, with coffee and bagels (shout out to Push Pull Coffee, our old neighbors in Portland), but what to do with the 2nd room?
Our space was structured like an art gallery, with three adjoining rooms. Concrete arches framed the exterior windows and white walls defined the space. Our first concept was to put the desk near the windows, washed in natural light. But after seeing the space, we pivoted, putting the desk in the center where it was darkest. It created focus on the desk, and gave a feeling of discovery to the event as you moved through the space. We designed custom signage to direct people to our pop up as they entered the design center. We imagined the main room would be the welcoming spot, with coffee and bagels (shout out to Push Pull Coffee, our old neighbors in Portland), but what to do with the 2nd room?
We decided we wanted to tell a version of the design story, to convert our existing journal entry into something that looked natural in the art museum-style setting. We tried several approaches, and ultimately used a series of concept sketches and photographs of early prototypes to tell a distilled version of the longer article. It gave visitors a visual peak at the process, and a behind-the-scenes look at some of the directions we didn't take, while looking right at home in the space.
(Read the full desk design story here.)
The Event
The event was scheduled for 10AM, but by 9:30, we had attendees starting to arrive! A slight drizzle couldn't dampen the vibe. We kicked off our first demo with a group of 15 people, including several customers who already own the desk. What's fun about the demo is how it evolves—I have a story that I refined at the Tokyo pop up, but each group and location introduce variations. The audience might have particular questions or things they respond to, but in each case, I go deep on all the major pieces of the desk—from design inspiration to engineering hurdles, to tradeoffs and difficult decisions. Just like in Tokyo, I was blown away by our fans’ enthusiasm.
After the first demo, we rolled through the rest of the morning: Jim and Kat welcomed people as they entered, coffee and bagels ready to go. Nick walked people through the design images and story in the anteroom, and I talked through the desk, the design, the process, and fielded everyone's questions and showed off the features of the desk.
(Crowd ooohs and ahhhs at the reveal.)
The rain picked up around lunch time and gave me time to grab a quick bite to eat and sit for a few minutes before finishing the afternoon sessions. As the day wore down, we were visited by friends and family that had come to see the desk. Kids and dogs ran laps around the desk, and it was a chance to unwind. And, at the end of the day, the sun poked back out from the clouds. We cleaned up the space, packed up the U-haul, and headed south back to Portland, already thinking about what we could do better next time…
