God’s Plan: PopShop Local

When I joined PopCom in 2020 as an employee, I wasn’t sure if the passion I felt as a founder would ever be reignited again. After all, I had spent 10 years as an entrepreneur building two different software startups. I was worried that because PopCom wasn’t my idea, I wouldn’t care about it as much as the two companies I founded before. Most worrisome to me was the fact that I always had a negative view of hardware startups. The economics of startups building hardware just didn’t seem worth the trouble. However, I have a deep admiration for Dawn Dickson-Akpoghene as the trailblazing leader she is and was really drawn to the fact that PopCom is mostly crowdfunded, which means a lot of non-traditional investors own equity in the company. When PopCom wins, people in our own communities win too. Dawn always says her goal is to “have the biggest financial liquidation event for Black and Brown people in history” and I believe her. If anyone is going to do it, it’s going to be Dawn. With this vision in mind, I joined PopCom as the Head of Business Development.

As the lead Business Development person, it is my job to bring in sales, partnerships, and opportunities to grow the company. I was heads down for the first few weeks on the job and my efforts were rewarded. We closed several clients within my first 90 days. As the months passed by, and I began to understand the business better, I realized something about our financials and the business model were completely off. I started asking questions about how much each machine costs to build, specifically, the non-recurring engineering expenses. I observed the amount of effort different team members were committing to get one machine out the door, and the additional hours spent to do testing on EACH machine. I compared them to the sales we were bringing in and made one startling conclusion: we shouldn’t be selling our machines. To put it a different way, our machines were so expensive to build that by selling it, we would probably never recoup our costs by letting go our most valuable assets. It was definitely not a good problem to have as the new Business Dev person. How do I tell my team we shouldn’t be selling our machines anymore? If I’m going to tell them not to sell any more machines, what should I propose we do? I had no answers on what to do so I did the only thing I could: I fasted and I prayed. I was new to the world of spiritual fasting but it seemed like whenever people in the Bible needed God to do something, they fasted so I decided it should work for me as well.

Within the first day of my fast, I felt God telling me to look closer at my notes from the conversation with the hotel operator in Silicon Valley. At the time, we were mostly talking to malls and shopping centers so the hotel being a potential location for a popshop was a bit rare. The key highlights of my notes were: he wants to support local businesses. He wants local brands in the hotel to give his guests a sense of place. He wants to create a new amenity in the hotel so guests don’t have to leave the premises and still be able to discover some of the best locally-made products. There was definitely something here but I needed to confirm if this was just a one-off situation or were other hotel operators feeling the same way? I had our Head of Partnership reach out to several other hotel groups to see if they shared the same sentiments. She connected with some high level executives at Virgin Hotel and Hotel Kabuki. The response was the same: they wanted locally-made products in their hotel lobbies. I felt like I on to something but I couldn’t yet articulate what it was we should do. I asked my Bible Study group that week to pray for me and my job. I needed some discernment on our business model because I had no idea where this was going. I went back to fasting again. I dug deep into the Bible for clues. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I felt like if God was going to speak to me, He would do it through a Bible verse.

As I was reading about the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 15:14-30) one day, a story in the Bible literally about the importance of using the resources God gives you to grow and multiply, an idea hit me so hard I couldn’t move: we should create revolving gift shops that feature locally made products. We would place our PopShop machines in high traffic areas and lease out space in the machine to local entrepreneurs. This would provide small businesses an alternative to brick and mortar. Rather than selling our machines and losing our most valuable assets, I should focus on getting long term leases with venue partners that would allow our popshops to be in that location for several years. If we priced it correctly, we would recoup our costs for the machine within the first year and generate pure profits in the following years. I called it “The Local PopShop.” The idea came to me in such great detail so rapidly that I immediately opened up a powerpoint and began typing out everything that came to mind because I didn’t want to forget anything. I wasn’t really thinking but thoughts kept filling my head. After one hour of transferring all of these thoughts into a powerpoint, I saw that I had created a 18 page slideshow for The Local PopShop. As I looked through the deck, I marveled at how brilliant it was. There was no way this idea came from me. It was so detailed and so perfectly cohesive that it couldn’t have been anything but divine intervention. God is so good to me. Why was He entrusting me with such a brilliant idea? That’s when doubt crept in and told me “you can’t do this. This is too hard. This business model is difficult to pull off.” In that moment, I felt drawn to look up Redbox and Coinstar. I was shocked to see that their business strategy was very similar to my new PopShop Local strategy. Mind you, I had never done any research on either of those businesses before. The crux of their success rests on their multi-year lease terms, which surprisingly I just wrote out in detail in my powerpoint without ever seeing it.

I nervously took the idea to our CEO, Dawn, and was relieved to receive her enthusiastic support. She immediately called a Board meeting together and had me present The Local PopShop idea to the Board. They loved it! One of our Board members, Alexa McCulloch, suggested that we change the name to “PopShop Local” because the words “Shop Local” was in the name. We began executing on the first part of the presentation deck, which was to launch an online application for brands. I set a goal of 100 local brand sign-ups. We quickly surpassed that within a few weeks. To date, over 600+ local brands have signed up to participate in PopShop Local. Covid-related parts shortages delayed the launch of our machines by several months so we didn’t get to roll out our first PopShop Local machine until November 2021. Today, we have 8 PopShop Local cities: Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York City, DC, Columbus, Dallas, Charlotte, and San Francisco.

Our vision for PopShop Local is to be the Redbox of the Travel Industry. In the same way that Redbox was strategically present anywhere you need to buy food or snacks (i.e. grocery shops and convenience stores), we want the PopShop to be present anywhere a traveler might be. I firmly believe PopShop Local is going to make PopCom a unicorn.  As the person that oversees brands and venue partnerships, I see the reactions and hear the feedback directly from the companies. They love everything about PopShop Local. My fear that my passion would never come back is gone. I deeply care for and love the work that I do every day for PopShop Local. It kinda feels like my own startup. Dawn gives me full control and autonomy to lead the program how I want to. I know I am walking in my purpose. I have no doubt that everything I went through, and every experience I had, was meant for me to lead PopShop Local. I don’t worry about how the business is going to do because it’s not even my idea. I was gifted this idea from God. Every day before I take on a customer call or a venue partnership call I say a short prayer “God, let your will be done, not mine.” It gives me so much peace because I don’t have to worry about whether a brand will say yes or no, or whether a venue will want to partner with us. It’s in God’s hands. It always has been, always will be. PopShop Local is God’s Plan. I am just fortunate enough to be His assistant here on earth.