Context
Aggieland Marketplace is a pop-up market in College Station, Texas, that gathers local vendors selling vintage clothing, handmade jewelry, farm-fresh produce, and similar goods. It runs across several recurring locations around the university and nearby apartment communities, renting booth space to vendors and drawing shoppers with food trucks and entertainment alongside the stalls. Its audience is largely Texas A&M students, with families turning out for the larger market days and social organizations arriving in groups on weekends.
Early in 2025 the business opened Thrift Station, a permanent storefront that buys, sells, and trades vintage clothing and Texas A&M apparel, and which doubles as one of the market's booth locations. The store had opened only weeks before the engagement began, with a grand opening that drew a crowd and a sharp rise in social media reach. Its regular shoppers skew toward students who follow vintage and streetwear, and the surrounding Bryan-College Station area already holds a number of established resale and thrift storefronts.
Challenge
Aggieland Marketplace runs pop-up markets in College Station featuring local vendors, and had recently opened Thrift Station, a vintage and Texas A&M apparel store. The business wanted to strengthen its revenue streams, build a social media strategy that turned a fast-growing audience into regular customers, and give the new store the online presence, loyalty tools, and event calendar it needed to bring in steady foot traffic. Booth fees were the market's main revenue line, yet they were set the same way at every location regardless of how quickly each one filled. The store had a following on Instagram and TikTok but no website, no map listing, and no way to reward a shopper for coming back. The open question was how far each of those could be carried inside a single semester.
How the team worked
TASK organized the work around three aims: profitability, social media strategy, and customer acquisition and retention. The engagement ran on a semester schedule, opening in February and closing with an in-person final presentation at the end of April, with a midpoint client checkup in between and a standing rule that any client material a workstream depended on had to arrive inside the first two weeks. Pairs of consultants owned each aim, and a single shared timeline tracked research, drafting, and review weeks across all three at once.
The monetization team worked through the university's crafter licensing rules to establish what a small-batch seller may and may not do, then narrowed a camouflage line to one anchor shirt after testing three options against student interest. For booth fees, the team scored each market location on time to sell out, booth capacity, foot traffic, and the fee vendors were already used to, converted those signals into a single elasticity score, and used the score to set a ceiling on how far each site's fee could rise while every booth still sold out.
Accessory work started from trend research on the platforms students actually browse, then ran a survey of female students on thrifting habits and jewelry preferences to narrow a long list to items the owner could stock profitably. The marketing team read the accounts' recent performance data to identify which formats and subjects drew the most views and how paid promotion compared with organic reach, then turned that into an advertising recommendation, a content idea bank drawn from formats already popular in thrifting communities, printed collateral, an A-frame signage mockup with local and online sourcing options, and partnership lists.
For the store itself, the team built rather than recommended. It wireframed a landing page, services, about, and contact section, published the website, created the Google Business profile so the store appears in map and search results, and priced out domain and hosting options so the owner could take both over. It then configured a loyalty program inside the point-of-sale system already at the register, drafted Earth Day, back-to-school, and game day events with flyers and promotion plans, and designed a sticker-based weekly discount rotation and periodic fill-a-bag sales that staff could run during a normal closing walkthrough without new technology.
Workstreams
- Mapped the collegiate licensing process and product guidelines for a Texas A&M-branded camouflage apparel line, and tested shirt options to select an anchor product.
- Built a demand-based elasticity model for vendor booth fees across the market's locations and turned it into a vendor-facing pricing menu.
- Defined current and secondary target customers, surveyed students on thrifting habits, and compiled a sourced list of accessory additions with a note on tariff risk.
- Reviewed social media performance by content type and ad spend, compared boosted posts with the full ads manager, and recommended a content calendar of thrift flips, hauls, challenges, and giveaways.
- Created flyers and A-frame signage mockups with sourcing options, and assembled partnership targets among local businesses, resale storefronts, student organizations, and area figures.
- Built a website and Google Business profile for Thrift Station, designed a point-of-sale loyalty program, and planned community events and a weekly sale rotation.
What the team found
- Booth demand varied sharply by location: some sites filled within the hour registration opened, while others took days to reach capacity, so one flat fee fit none of them.
- Short-form video outperformed static posts and stories across the accounts, and content featuring Texas A&M apparel or the store interior drew the widest reach of any subject.
- Most of the reach the accounts earned came from people who did not follow them, pointing to conversion rather than discovery as the place to concentrate effort.
- Paid promotion returned more profile visits as spend rose, and the two ways of buying it differed mainly in targeting depth and learning curve rather than in cost of entry.
- The student survey showed steady interest in thrifting among women who rarely attend vintage markets, and a clear preference for small, inexpensive accessories over clothing.
- Licensing rules for university-branded goods confine small-batch sellers to direct-to-consumer channels and require every design to be approved on its own before it can be sold.
What the client received
- Written final deliverable covering monetization, social media and marketing, and customer acquisition and retention
- Vendor booth fee elasticity model with a per-location price ceiling, plus a branded vendor pricing menu
- Collegiate licensing guide for a camouflage apparel line, with product testing notes and an anchor product
- Accessory sourcing table with survey-based demand signals and a note on rising import cost risk
- Social media analytics review with content and retention recommendations
- Advertising platform comparison covering setup, targeting, and split testing
- Flyers, an A-frame signage mockup, and a sourcing comparison for producing the sign
- Partnership lists covering local businesses, resale storefronts, student organizations, and area ambassadors
- Thrift Station website, built and published, with domain and hosting options
- Google Business profile, loyalty program roadmap, three community event plans, and a weekly sale system
Outcome
Aggieland Marketplace left the engagement with a licensing path and an anchor product for a branded apparel line, a defensible method for setting booth fees location by location, and a live web and map presence for Thrift Station that reaches shoppers who never see the social accounts. The store also has a ready-to-run loyalty program inside the till it already uses, a calendar of seasonal events with the material to promote them, a color-coded weekly sale system to keep inventory moving, and a clear view of which social formats and subjects earn the most attention from students.
Recommendations
- Launch a collegiate-licensed camouflage line, beginning with a single anchor tee and building a wider Texas A&M camo collection from it as student interest and seasonal demand allow.
- Set booth fees location by location using the elasticity score, raising each site only as far as its own demand signals allow so that every booth continues to sell out.
- Add a short run of trend-led accessories aimed at the secondary market of female students, ordering ahead of expected import cost increases and lining up a broader global supplier directory as a longer-term source.
- Move paid promotion into the full ads manager rather than in-app boosting, and use retargeting and split testing to convert the non-follower audience the accounts already reach.
- Make short-form video the primary format, cross-post it to a second platform, and run a recurring series of thrift flips, hauls, challenges, and giveaways to stay in front of students.
- Switch on the loyalty module inside the existing point-of-sale system, prompt enrollment at checkout, and use bonus-point days to lift traffic during slower parts of the week.
Next steps
- The client was handed a published website and Google Business profile for Thrift Station, along with instructions for registering a custom domain and lower-cost hosting alternatives.
- The client was handed a step-by-step loyalty rollout, from switching the module on to setting point rules, announcing the program, and enrolling shoppers at the register.
- The client was handed three fully planned community events, an Earth Day market, a back-to-school week, and a game day promotion, each with discounts, activities, and flyers ready to post.
- The client was handed a weekly sale rotation built on color-coded stickers, plus a periodic fill-a-bag format for clearing older stock, both run by staff during a normal closing sweep.
- The client was handed a vendor pricing menu and outreach lists for local businesses, resale storefronts, student organizations, and area figures to approach about cross-promotion.