Small Business has teamed up with Sage to offer your business the chance to open its own pop-up shop in Edinburgh in its glittering St James Quarter. The deadline has been extended to 15th October, so get your entries in now!
Three winning small businesses will share the Edinburgh pop-up shop in the St James Quarter retail destination, where you will be selling alongside John Lewis and luxury brands including Space NK, Hotel Chocolat and L’Occitane.
It couldn’t be a better showcase for your business in the run-up to Christmas – and it’s completely free to enter.
Three lucky businesses will share our Small Business x Sage pop-up shop from Wednesday, 29th November to Saturday, 2nd December.
It’s an ideal way to test your product, find new customers or get feedback on your service.
4 reasons to enter
Grow your brand
Winners will get high-profile awareness via footfall through the busy St James Quarter during the run-up to Christmas, plus you’ll secure helpful press coverage.
Showcase your business
Invite investors, peers or prospects to showcase your business. The shop also has an events space where we’ll run events during the pop-up.
Roadtest your product or service
A unique opportunity to sell or demo your product or service to potential customers at scale and garner invaluable face-to-face feedback from consumers.
Create leads for your business
Get a pipeline of high-intent leads for your business that you can follow up with beyond the shop.
What you could win
Four days takeover of a pop-up shop in St James Quarter, Edinburgh
- Support with set up
- Video interview and editorial coverage post-event
- £500 budget to spend on stock, marketing and promotion
- Sage Accounting 6 months free trial
- Promotion across Small Business including email newsletters and social media posts
What previous winners say
Last June, Small Business and Sage teamed up to give three winning businesses the chance to run their own pop-up shop in central London’s busy Oxford Street.
Vegan brownie company Cake Or Death, online bookstore LoveReading and baby equipment rental service Baboodle were chosen out of dozens/hundreds of entries to share the pop-up.
The reaction from winners was hugely positive, especially about the platform it gave their brands.
Deborah Maclaren of LoveReading said: “The support we’ve had from Sage and Small Business has been brilliant. It’s just been a seamless, brilliant experience.”
Katie Hanton-Parr of Baboodle added: “All the support around it has been brilliant as well – all the workshops, it’s a bit of a gamechanger. You won’t even realise for a bit how important it’s been … it’s a trickle-down effect.”
How to enter our Sage pop-up shop competition
Just fill in the online competition entry form here.
Entries close at midnight on 15th October 2023.
The winner will be announced on Monday 23rd October.
The winning businesses will take over the space from Tuesday 28th November to Saturday 2nd December (with the shop open for trading Wednesday to Saturday).
The competition is open to all UK businesses who have been trading for less than five years (up to and including 28th November 2023) and is completely free to enter.
Who are our Sage pop-up shop judges?
Oliver Clark
Global VP of integrated campaigns for Sage
Oliver Clarke joined Sage in January 2022 as the global VP of integrated campaigns. He’s responsible for driving the strategy and creative for all Sage’s campaigns globally, with the ambition to make Sage an iconic brand in its category. Olly has a wealth of experience in marketing and advertising, creating transformation and award-winning campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands, working with companies such as Unilever, ABInBev and Mars.
Katie Cross
Founder and director of Cake or Death
Katie Cross had a career in fundraising and development for a range of charities before quitting in January 2019 to pursue her dream of being a business owner. Cake or Death started as a wholesale vegan cake company in early 2019. After the incredible response to Cake or Death’s brownies at a vegan market in London, Katie focused her energy on the secret recipe and developed several new flavours. Once the pandemic hit, Katie pivoted the business from wholesale to Cake or Death’s ingenious consumer letterbox brownie boxes. The bakery moved from East London to Exeter in Summer 2021, where it now houses a shop front and continues to send bakes across the country.
Deborah Maclaren
Managing director of LoveReading
Deborah Maclaren is the managing director of LoveReading and LoveReading4Kids and she has been steering the ship since 2018. Her involvement in the LoveReading portfolio brings together her media background, passion for books, her love of literacy, marketing knowledge and her commercial acumen and has led the LoveReading brand into a new world, filled with brilliantly bookish content and the launch of an online bookstore with social purpose. LoveReading was one of the winners of the Sage x Small Business inaugual competition in June, which enabled them to have their very first physical presence as a bookstore.
Kirsty Waller
Vice president of UKI performance marketing for Sage
Kirsty Waller is responsible for gaining insight and understanding of the ever-changing business environment for SMEs and supporting over one million Sage UK customers to scale and grow their businesses.
