As you might have heard, Created in Birmingham is opening a shop in the Bullring. This is, of course, mildly insane. But only mildly.
It’s one of those pop-up shops which take an empty unit for free for a short amount of time and fill it with cool stuff. The shopping centre fills a gap with something quirky and bespoke while the artists get the sort of traffic they can only dream of.
Of course whether that traffic turns into sales is another matter. Sometime a small curated audience is better than a massive random one – quality, not quantity and all that – but it’s still an interesting and challenging opportunity.
Since my involvement Created in Birmingham currently amounts to being introduced by Chris as the guy who started it off and having occasional chats with him about what he’s doing I can take zero credit for setting this up, but I am going to be involved.
Y’see, as long-time readers will know, from 1990 to 2003 I worked pretty consistently in retail, mostly for Waterstone’s where I found myself stumbling towards management before circumstances (see this blog, summer 2002 – spring 2003) caused me to leave the wacky world of the high street. So while I might be rusty I do know a little bit about how to run a shop.
I’m also currently without an office and while home-working has been pretty good over the Winter I will be getting itchy feet soon, so the shop can double up as somewhere to work on my photography and other things. And it’ll be a regular gig, getting in to open up and so on, which is probably what I need at the moment.
We popped in for a look today. Here’s the shop floor which is about a third as deep behind the camera:
(The white balance was really weird thanks to the mix of light sources so excuse the tone. (What I am saying, it’s a cameraphone snap. You can deal.))
And here’s Chris, Ian and the Bullring lady at the rear of the shop:
(Ah, that’s better.)
Oh, and excitingly (well, for me anyway) there’s a big storage bit upstairs with loads of shelves!
No idea what we might do with this other than store stuff in it but, ooh, I do like it.
The lease is for at least 6 weeks and it could go on for much longer. I’d probably best not go into too many details at this stage as that’s what Chris does and I’ll probably get them wrong. But it looks very likely I’ll be working in a shop in the Bullring this spring.
If you’d told me that a few months ago I’d have laughed you out of town.
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