Shopping Center Business is the leading monthly business magazine for the retail real estate industry.
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RETAIL REVIEW 46 • SHOPPING CENTER BUSINESS • December 2016 W hat is your favorite sweet? It's an innocuous question — one that many can answer at the drop of a hat. But for Sid Gupta, CEO and founder of Lolli and Pops — an upscale sweet shop seeing growth nationwide — it is the starting point from which his busi- ness runs. "I've asked that question to thousands of people, and almost everyone responds in the same way — they laugh," says Gup- ta. "People have a very positive, emotion- al experience when it comes to candy. I couldn't understand why for such an emotional product, it was being sold in the most unemotional ways in drugstores and convenience stores. To me, that just didn't make sense." While this inkling was the basis from which Lolli and Pops was born, the sto- ry begins much earlier in an unexpected place: Wall Street. "I started my career on Wall Street in New York," says Gupta. "At some point, I decided that I was not 100 percent fulfilled with my job, so I left. I started to think about what to do and somehow, some way, I found a distressed chain of candy stores in Oklahoma and Kansas called Candyopolis. My family and I, we ended up buying that company and I moved to Oklahoma to run it." From New York City to Oklahoma City, Gupta moved in hopes of bringing the business back to life. "I knew nothing about retail, so I cleaned the floors, I rang the register, bought the product, paid the bills," he says. "We really got the business up and running. Then, I had an opportu- nity to go back to The Bay Area where I grew up for business school, and while I was at Stanford, I was thinking about the category of sweets. It's a $35 billion cat- egory that has seen very little innovation and is extremely fragmented at retail." Gupta paired this insight with his ex- perience in classic sweet shops in Europe to create and grow Lolli and Pops. "In Europe, I was reminded of the romance of sweet shops — all of that was kind of lost," says Gupta. "Bringing back the look and feel of a classic sweet shop is how we came up with Lolli and Pops, and we really drove it around delighting folks." Lolli and Pops combines an experien- tial store design — described by Gupta as "a vintage feel with a modern twist" — with unique candy offerings and top shelf cus- tomer service. Each store uses upscale materials like authentic tin ceilings, real marble coun- tertops and wooden storefronts to give the space a vintage feel. "We wanted the materials to make the shops feel perma- nent — like a memory," says Gupta. "We A Sweet Experience Lolli and Pops delivers an authentic shopping experience, pairing upscale, modern candies with the look and feel of a vintage sweet shop. Katie Sloan The store stocks a variety of sweets made by artisans around the world in collaboration with Lolli and Pops. Each Lolli and Pops location utilizes upscale materials like authentic tin ceilings, real marble countertops and wooden storefronts to give the space a vintage feel.