Rockin' around the OpBox store: Maine-made retail holiday pop-up stars at New York's Rockefeller Center
Courtesy / OpBox
Live from New York, it's a retail pop-up store made in Maine, by Woolwich-based OpBox.
A pop–up retail store designed and manufactured on the Maine midcoast is in the national spotlight this holiday season at New York City’s Rockefeller Center, near the famous tree and skating rink.
OpBox, a startup in Woolwich co-founded by siblings Ben and Emily Davis in 2018, made the modular structure for Corkcicle, an Orlando, Fla.-based brand of tumblers, coolers and drinkware whose high-profile fans include Oprah Winfrey and Julia Roberts.
The OpBox unit is made with a proprietary panel and building system branded as Edura that uses recycled PET plastics.
For the Rockefeller Center OpBox, some 24,712 plastic bottles were upcycled into a shopping hut about 8 feet wide by 20 feet long. That’s about the size of a shipping container.
“It’s one of our standard retail designs, but the most interesting thing is the location, and the national partnership is great,” Ben Davis told Mainebiz. He and his sister were honored on the Mainebiz Next list in 2018 and profiled in the 2023 Mainebiz Startub Hub magazine.
OpBox, which employs 13 people, originated from an earlier Davis venture, Portland Container Co., which leased out recycled shipping containers. Ultimately, they proved impractical for many uses, since they container lacked windows, were heavy to move and prone to rust.
During a trip to Canada, however, Ben Davis came upon a building material that used 100% recycled PET plastic from JD Composites of Nova Scotia. A new business idea was born.
The Edura panels have multiple uses from affordable housing to retail structures like the temporary one in the Big Apple.
The Corkcicle pop-up store, which took a month to build, will be at Rockefeller Plaza through the holidays and into 2024.
Stehen Bruner, co-founder and chief marketing officer at Corkcicle, told Mainebiz his company was thrilled to learn about OpBox and the company’s unique vision around building useful structures from eco-friendly materials.
“For us, as a brand that seeks to replace single-use plastic with our reusable bottles, the fact that they are constructed from single plastic reuse was the ultimate missional fit,” he added. “We are so pleased with the work the OpBox team did for this pop-up and are proud to be showcasing it in one of the finest destinations on the globe during the holidays.”
With holiday shopping still in full swing, Bruner reports strong sales at the venue so far.
"The whole activation has been a great success all around," he said. "With the visibility and amount of traffic, it's been quite strong."
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Good stuff!
Outstanding exposure for such a smart, hard working team!
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