PopUp Bagels  ×  Sota  ·  Participation Partnership

More than
a bagel.
A movement.

Turning the line into a community, and the hype into an audience you own.
Prepared for Julianna Severino & Lone Star Bagels  ·  August 2026
Confidential
What you've built

PopUp isn't a food brand.
It's a lifestyle.

People line up three blocks for a bagel. Grip, rip and dip became a ritual. A new flavor every week became an event. That is more than a menu. That is a culture, and very few brands in the world ever get there.
It's a lifestyle brand, not a food brand. Once you feel it, you can't unfeel it.
The moment

The plan is set. 25 new stores.
24 months. Six states.

Lone Star holds the rights across Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. And the ambition runs further still: more brands under one roof. The destination is written down. The engine to reach it is the missing piece.
Footprint
3 → 28
stores, next 24 months
Territory
6
TX · CO · NM · KS · MO · OK
The bigger play
A multi-brand house
Lone Star as the platform
The gap inside the boom

The hype wins the first visit.
Nothing owns the next.

Every fan in that line is anonymous. No name at the register, in and out. And the buzz is rented, you pay social media, Google and the advertising platforms again every time you want to reach them.
Anonymous
You don't know who they are
Foot traffic, no name, no contact. The most passionate fans in food, and there's no way to re-engage them once they leave.
Rented
The reach isn't yours
The hype lives on Instagram's algorithm. When it moves on, so does your audience, unless you pay to win it back.
Leaky
Visit one, then gone
The product earns the first visit. Nothing is built to earn the fifth. A brand can be everywhere and own no one.
Proof from the field · case studyFinns Beach Club

Finns Beach Club had the crowd.
It didn't own it.

Visitors a year
1.5M
one venue, world-class destination
One of the biggest beach clubs on earth. A million and a half people through the doors every year, and once they left, nothing brought them back. A giant leaky bucket: all that traffic, none of it owned.
So we are building Finns a membership and participation engine. The same one we will build for Pop Up Bagels. Capture the visitor, give them reasons to return, and turn a one-time crowd into an owned audience.
The shift

From renting attention
to owning participation.

Attention → Participation → Belonging → Repeat → Advocacy
The sale is not the finish line. It's the start line.
The concept

It all starts with membership.

Membership is where belonging lives. It's the community PopUp already is, made tangible and given a hub, never a discount to chase. The sales promotion and the instant win are engagement levers, the incentives that pull people in and keep them playing. Membership is bigger than any lever. It's the belonging they all pull toward.
The pilot · free to join
The PopUp Club
  • Join in seconds at the counter, one scan
  • The way in to every sales promotion and instant win
  • New flavor drops and members-first moments
  • Everyone on the platform, every fan now known
Future roadmap · what's to come
The PopUp Insiders
  • A paid tier for the superfans, phase two
  • Early access to new flavors, before anyone
  • Members-only flavors, merch and collabs
  • Experiences and the schmear passport, as it scales
Join free → Pull the levers → We capture the fan → They belong
Membership is proven, people pay to belong
Costco renews around 90% of its members every year, with 81M of them paying just for the right to shop. Athletic Brewing's $29 members' club, early access to limited drops and members-only brews, helped build one of the fastest-growing beverage brands in the US. Belonging, and what only members get, is what drives the spend.
How it works

One purchase, and an anonymous fan becomes a member you own.

01
Buy or engage
A purchase, or any interaction. This doubles as the free entry route.
02
Play a lever
That earns a draw entry, or a digital instant-win scratch card.
03
Join the free PopUp Club
Their details are captured on the spot, and they land in the dashboard.
Light-touch tech. A QR at the counter and a web app, no point-of-sale to replace and no heavy integration, so it drops into every store fast.
Scan
Scan
Join
Join
Receipt
Receipt
9:43
PopUp Bagels3 entries
The PopUp Club
Welcome in, Jules.
3
Draw entries
1
Win to claim
Live now · this week's draw
A global food & bagel trip
Every receipt = more entries · draws in 2d
Limited merch drop
Instant win · ready to claim
Claim
New flavor drops · Thursday 7am
Everything
Poppy
Plain
Founders roadmap
Early flavor accessMembers-only merchExclusive collabsReal-world events
▶Interactive. Scroll the dashboard. Design and mechanics are illustrative, we finalise them together.
Engagement lever one

A flagship sales promotion.

The first lever that drives the membership. One major prize draw members earn their way into, and the premise is simple: the more you engage with the brand, the more entries you get.
Earn
Purchase or engage
Every bagel and every interaction earns entries. What fans already do, now rewarded.
Win
Money-can't-buy
A global food and bagel trip, a chef collab, a flavor named after them. Experiential, never a discount.
Your fans are Millennials and Gen Z who don't just eat, they participate, and value experiences over price. To enter, they join the free PopUp Club, a compliant free-entry route that captures every one of them.
9:42
PopUp Bagels0 entries
Welcome to the club
Let's get you entries.
This week
The grand draw
A global food
& bagel trip for two
Every receipt = more entries.
1
Upload your receipt to enter
Every receipt earns entries toward the trip.
9:42
PopUp Bagels0 entries
Earn your entries
Snap your receipt.
+
Add receipt photo
Tap to upload
Everything bagel ×3$13.00
Scallion schmear$5.00
PopUp Bagels · total$18.00
✓Verified · that's 3 entries
No POS integration. The receipt is the proof, that's what drops this into any store overnight.
9:42
PopUp Bagels3 entries
+3 entries added
You're in the draw for
A global food
& bagel trip
You now have 3 entries. Every visit stacks more.
3
Your entries
1
Free scratch waiting
▶Interactive. Tap upload, add the receipt, then claim, and watch the entries land. Design and mechanics are illustrative, we finalise them together.
Engagement lever two

Instant win. A digital scratch card.

A Scratch & Win, built digital. A member scans at the counter and reveals a card on the spot. The prize pool is predetermined, so odds and cost are fixed, and the win is instant. It turns the wait into a reward and pulls the next visit forward.
And the prizes are what your fans actually want: hyper-limited merch drops, exclusive flavors, collabs. The stuff that makes people feel part of the culture, not a discount.
The mechanic
Scan, reveal, win
fixed pool · member-gated
McDonald's
McDonald's Monopoly
$2B+
and a +21% visit frequency lift. 37 years running.
9:43
PopUp Bagels3 entries
Instant win · match 3 in a row
Scratch to match.
★
★
👆
You matched 3, you won
A limited
merch drop
Scratch the bagel, match 3 in a row to win
▶Interactive. Scratch the bagel to match 3 in a row and reveal the win. Design and mechanics are illustrative, we finalise them together.
Your opportunity

Partnership and sponsorship
opportunities, all yours.

This is a revenue and partnership line that belongs to Lone Star. A premium, culturally relevant brand is exactly what partners pay to reach, and they already circle PopUp: the Wingstop cream cheese collab, Kraft, Cheez-It, celebrity backers, and an army of creators who post for free because the brand is that hot. Let them sponsor the prizes, the drops and the experiences. The reach they buy, and the revenue that comes with it, is yours.
The demand
Everyone wants in, for free
Brands pay to be next to a premium, culturally relevant brand, and creators already post for you unpaid. That pull is already yours.
The platform
They sponsor, you host
Your prizes, drops and experiences become co-branded moments partners fund, to reach your audience.
Yours to keep
A new revenue line for you
The prizes get subsidised and the sponsorship revenue is Lone Star's. Not a cost to carry, an opportunity to own.
Oreo Cheez-It Kraft Wingstop Blue Moon Chiquita
How this powers the 25

Every new store opens into an audience you already own.

Connect
Capture the anonymous line into first-party data. Turn visit one into visit five, with reasons to return you control, not rent.
Belong
The community and identity layer. More than a bagel, the lifestyle brand you already are, made into something fans can join and see themselves in.
Scale
One engine every new store plugs into. Open in a new city with members already waiting and hype pre-built, instead of starting cold.
The participation engine and the 25-store rollout are the same growth line.
Who we are

This is more than a loyalty
or rewards program.

Sota is the result of years running participation at scale, not a slide about it.
Members
600k+
Repeat participation
~90%
Prizes awarded
$40M+
1,000+ winners
Sales through the model
$100M+
Australian Loyalty Association
Winner, 2026 Asia Pacific Loyalty Awards, Best Use of Digital Technology, alongside Woolworths, Myer and Flybuys. Operator-built, and aligned to your results.
The team behind the technology

Operators and engineers, not an agency.

Sota's engineering is a founder-led team that has spent 14+ years building and running mission-critical systems for government and some of Australia's largest companies. No outsourcing, no agency layers, the people who build this are the people who run platforms like it every day.
In daily production
14+ yrs
enterprise software, live
Clients delivered
35+
government & enterprise
Senior engineers
100%
in-house, no outsourcing
Security validated by
Deloitte + KPMG
independent cyber compliance
CBRE
Queensland Government
Deloitte
KPMG
Knight Frank
Oracle
Hyundai
Griffith
What the pilot builds
Stores in the pilot
👈Drag the sliders
Customers / store / day
Join the platform to play
Average spend / visit
$23 today
Grey line is today's average. Default assumes a conservative 20% lift with the incentive.
Owned audience captured / yr
Participation engagements / yr
Total sales, with the incentive / yr
Extra sales the incentive drives / yr
a conservative 20% spend lift, all upside
Directional model. We build the real one with your store data. Paid membership is upside on top of this, not shown here.
The ask

Launch on Lone Star.
Build a national movement.

01 · Launch
Go live on Lone Star
We put it live across your stores and get real numbers on the board fast. This is how category leaders start.
02 · Scale
Take it nationwide
Your Texas result becomes the blueprint PopUp rolls out to all 25 stores and beyond. And you're the one who brought it.
03 · Own it
You own all of it
The members, the first-party data and the community are yours from day one. We run the engine, you own the relationship.
You built the movement.
Now let's own it.
Thomas Fu
SOTA Platforms
thomasfu@sotaplatforms.com
Lone Star
sota.
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