Stay in one place: The search for a permanent home
Fresh snowfall on opening day of our Holly Jolly Trolley-Stop Pop-Up Shop in Hershey.
At 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve, we concluded the three-week run of Stay’s Holly Jolly Trolley-Stop Pop-Up Shop, having been open to the public for exactly 100 hours.
To put that achievement into perspective, consider that we were open for only 56 hours during the 14 summer weeks of Hershey’s downtown Market on Chocolate.
On a purely transactional basis, Holly Jolly, aka HoJo, wasn’t a blockbuster success. But we made more money than we spent, helping Stay achieve its best holiday season and best calendar year since our 2017 debut.
Perhaps more important, the experience further convinced us that finding a permanent home is at once our biggest challenge and greatest opportunity in the year ahead.
We don’t want to abandon pop-up appearances, to which we owe the bulk of our success. But to grow our business, we need more selling dates than weekly pop-ups will allow, and we want to build a deeper relationship with our customers.
Embraced by Hershey History Center
That’s why it was so important to take a step in that direction by making the HoJo a reality after we first presented the concept to the Hershey History Center, specifically executive director Nikki Soliday.
Nikki has been a great friend to Stay since our early days, carrying a number of our throwback-inspired tees in the history center’s store and including us in history center events.
On Aug. 30, after delivering Nikki a fresh batch of our Hershey Football Training Camp Tees, I peeked into the 1930s-era trolley building. I posited the idea of operating a holiday pop-up in the trolley building to Nikki, who quickly embraced it.
We’ve popped up hundreds of times through the years, usually at multi-vendor shows but sometimes as a solo act. It’s a lot of slogging: a six-foot table, totes full of tees, crates and torsos for all appearances, with the addition of a 10-foot-by-10-foot tent and four sand-filled tent weights when we are outside.
In 2023, we returned to State College and made first-time visits to Union and Bucks counties in addition to our more usual stops in Hershey, Harrisburg, Lancaster, York and Carlisle. Our inaugural participation in Marietta Day in Lancaster County was a revelation.
And then we capped the year with the HoJo. It was the biggest commitment we’ve made to one place, complete with painting (Nikki let us transform the yellow door to poinsettia red) and decorating for the holidays.
My wife, Sara, and I replicated the trolley building’s dimensions in painter’s tape on the concrete floor of our basement so we could plan for maximizing the small retail space. We branded the HoJo through a flyer, newspaper ad, on-site signs and a banner, news release and social media posts.
Sara and I, after running our annual Thanksgiving Day 5K, headed to the HoJo to drive T-posts into the ground from which to hang the banner, illuminate it with in-ground lights, string colored lights around the trolley building’s roofline, and install the eight-foot photo op Christmas tree crafted by Sara’s brother, Steve.
We tweaked the plan right up to opening day, Dec. 7, when we determined that we needed a blinking OPEN sign, which we quickly ordered and installed the next day.
Despite all of those efforts, I pined for just a fraction of the traffic turning into Starbucks and the rest of the Tanger Outlets Hershey, across the street from the HoJo.
Connections with customers
Yet I experienced heartwarming visits from fellow makers, friends and previous customers, and from new faces:
The man from Harrisburg who had read about us in The Burg and came for a Hockey Night in Hershey Tee for his son-in-law;
The three friends who, unfamiliar with Stay, stopped in after one of them scanned the QR code on one of our roadside signs (he came back two weeks later with another friend);
The young family that bought two tees, left briefly and came back to purchase a third.
Those are great memories that I will cherish. They also crystallized my desire to have a single location where customers always can find us. Our website offers that in a sense, but it lacks intimacy that I can’t re-create online no matter how many handwritten thank-you notes I slip into packages.
When I was developing the concept of Stay six-plus years ago, I didn’t anticipate how much we would depend on face-to-face interactions with customers. We take great pride in developing and curating high-quality, high-value American-made products and delivering excellent customer service. We need to make money to survive, but the thrill of building Stay is about far more than selling goods. We want to deliver an experience.
With one place, we could present all of our products, not just those that we can fit on a six-foot table at that week’s pop-up. (The HoJo likewise was limited in this regard.) We could have expanded hours and days of operation. We could offer amenities — we have some cool ones in mind — that just aren’t practical when you’re setting up for mere hours at a time.
No matter what the HoJo achieved in the ledger, its more important role was to inspire us to want to build on it and give Stay, a brand with a keen sense of place, a permanent home.
We’ll be working on those plans in the months ahead. A particular building is the focus of our attention. That’s where we hope you’ll find us during the 2024 holiday season.