Marquee Closing
This past winter, we partnered with How Bazaar to launch a collaborative retail space on one half of the storefront space at the rather fabled 11 Whitney St. in Hartford's West End. After too much debate, we called it Marquee. The hope for the space was that it would be a platform to help get young and emerging brands off the ground here in Hartford. The idea was to lower the barrier to entry to having a brick and mortar retail presence by getting brands to work together.
We also were able to work with some talented folks at Rubberworks © to make sure we were not only creating opportunity but also hopefully a beautiful space that would help make for a great shopping experience for customers and be simple enough that the space could be transformed for short term pop-up installations. When the space opened, 12 brands stocked their merchandise in the store together we were able to help generate thousands of dollars in revenue for these small businesses. In addition, 4 day-long pop ups took over the space celebrating businesses anniversaries, magazine launches and new brand releases.
We are proud that we were able to bring this idea to life, but to be frank behind the scenes the whole Marquee project was challenging. We ended up learning a few lessons the hard way. After spending many months and our cash renovating the space, we found out that we’d have to be out of the space after the end of the first year meaning the store was open for just a short time from December 2018 to February 2019. Approaching the project as we did in a DIY way has its benefits but it left us unprotected from our city’s continual problem of finding an open and willing landlord that allows things to get off the ground and succeed.
We certainly learned our lesson, but we also learned that this idea has merit, serves a need, and can be sustainable with the right pieces in place. We’ll be off searching for the right pieces to do it again some day. Shoot us a note if you got any good ideas. A big thanks to all the brands that participated and all the customers who supported Marquee.
