After bag­ging $1.35 mil­lion in seed-fund­ing in March and launch­ing in August, New York-based arti­san cloth­ing e‑commerce start­up Zady has opened a pop­up store – in LaGuardia Airport’s Delta ter­mi­nal, of all places. Ecom­merce ana­lysts in the know, how­ev­er, might con­sid­er this a rather clever step.

Why an air­port? 

On the face of it, an ecom­merce site spe­cial­iz­ing in pared back, qual­i­ty threads for men and women might have been more at home with a pop­up store in SoHo. But co-founders Max­ine Bedat and Soraya Dara­bi have done some hard­boiled think­ing about the selec­tion of an air­port for their first bricks-and-mor­tar accom­pa­ni­ment: you get to show­case your goods to a much wider range of people.

As Bedat explains:

“We’re a small team and obvi­ous­ly don’t have the funds to open up every­where, but at the air­port you can inter­act with peo­ple across the country.”

Sim­ple but savvy

The can­ny ecom­merce ana­lyst will agree that because an idea hap­pens to be sim­ple doesn’t mean that it isn’t also savvy. If Bedat’s rea­son­ing proves right, a mod­est New York ecom­merce start­up could get itself known in a short space of time from one end of the repub­lic to the oth­er. And beyond.

And its prod­ucts are increas­ing­ly appeal­ing to the grow­ing breed of eth­i­cal­ly con­scious con­sumers in the US, who want to know where their pur­chas­es come from. At Zady, that quest is a dod­dle. Click on any item on the web­site and you not only get a detailed prod­uct descrip­tion, but a map show­ing where the brand was man­u­fac­tured and where its raw mate­ri­als were sourced.

For Bedat and Dara­bi, the vol­ume of cred­it card swipes achieved at La Guardia is sec­ondary to expand­ing brand aware­ness. And they know what they’re on about. As informed ecom­merce ana­lysts can tes­ti­fy, air­ports are great loca­tions for both. Busi­ness of Fash­ion, for exam­ple, pro­duced research in Sep­tem­ber which found that one of their most lucra­tive loca­tions, as mea­sured in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty per square foot, was London’s Heathrow Air­port. They may be a lit­tle ster­ile in atmos­phere, but air­ports are places that lots of peo­ple like to buy stuff in, from last minute gifts to a lit­tle self-pampering.

The pop­up store will be at La Guardia for the next two months, cov­er­ing Zady’s first hol­i­day season.