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’Tis the season for indie artisans, chefs and bakers to find customers eager to shop locally for their holiday-related needs. Finding them can be hard, though, especially if social media algorithms don’t show posts with dates until well after the events have passed.
Enter Pop-Ups Please, a new Portland-developed app offering to sync your calendar with the dates and times of short-lived markets, dinners and other types of intimate shopping events from local makers. Released to iOS and Android stores on Nov. 27 with the mononym PopupsPlease—search results with proper format just load apps promising to block pop-up ads—the app’s co-founders, Alexandra Peter and Francisco Morales, wanted to help budding creatives break out to wider audiences.
“I firsthand know how much work, money, and chaos goes into throwing a pop-up,” Peter tells WW via email. “I also don’t see anything else that brings as much community, culture, joy and substance into an experience quite like a pop-up.”
Peter and Morales opened the art gallery Walk-In on Northeast Alberta Street in 2021. For two years, Walk-In was part exhibition and event space and part gift shop and served as some emerging artists’ proving grounds. Peter and Morales found themselves gravitating away from visual art and closer to pop-up events through collaborations like a dining series with the late chef Lauro Romero.
“Pop-up people are hungry for more opportunity and to meaningfully connect with their community,” Peter says. “I was afraid adding another app to the plate might be an obstacle, but so far it looks like we’ve created a platform that can continue to support our hardworking pop-up creators.”
Software developer Zach Babb joined Peter and Morales as Pop-Up Please’s chief technology officer. After laying groundwork this past May, Pop-Up Please rolled out beta testing in August. The app currently doesn’t have many filters to allow users to choose between shopping and dining events, but there is a filter to search by ZIP code. The Portland area dominates the app, but Pop-Up Please works nationwide, with some Los Angeles events starting to appear.
Along with existing vendors and organizers, the Pop-Up Please team is also starting to plan its own events. Along with offering free listings, it’s all part of the team’s plan to help its communities during an economically rough time.
“As a tech person, it makes me sick watching these software-as-a-service companies bleeding small and medium-sized businesses dry,” Babb tells WW via email. “All those costs are contributing to the inflation we’re seeing everywhere, and hurting families. If our app can save business owners $50 or $100 on marketing for an event, that’s money that doesn’t have to be baked into prices.”
TRY IT: PopupsPlease is available for free at Apple and Android app stores.