Instagram’s favorite museum is opening a flagship location in NYC this fall. Here’s how the company is building a more permanent business from a pop-up.

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Since Museum of Ice Cream first launched, its creators have been steadily carving a more permanent place for themselves in the world of experiential retail. Under its parent company Figure8, which raised a $40 million series A round of funding last week, the Museum of Ice Cream brand has extended to a retail collection at Target, a makeup collaboration with Sephora, and, yes, actual ice cream. But most importantly, the Museum of Ice Cream moved away from its pop-up format in lieu of flagship locations, first in San Francisco and now in New York City.

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The Museum of Ice Cream is charting a unique course in how to build a sustainable business off the back of a pop-up experience. For Bunn, the competition isn’t necessarily the deluge of pop-up experiences that are dotting cities worldwide—it’s a wider fight in the battle for attention (and connection) IRL.1“When I think about competitive landscape, I think about Netflix and Instagram, because it’s about who are the players that are captivating your time,” Bunn says. “It really is like, how can we create something that is both so enticing and those so fulfilling in the real world that it wants to get people out and exploring and interacting with the space and interacting with other people.”

  • 1. “What we’re really creating is the first-of-its-kind development group, and we’ll be able to develop experience-first properties around the world,” she says. “It’s taking a fully new approach to the development cycle and thinking about the conceptual and emotional layers of what we’re creating.”