The program runs on a simple loop: create a product people are excited to share, consumers naturally do the marketing for you, and Archive captures and measures the impact.

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About PopUp Bagels

At PopUp Bagels, the mission is fueled by passion and dedication: to craft unmistakably perfect bagels with no frills. That commitment to quality goes beyond the bagel itself, innovating with top brands, chefs, and tastemakers to create epic schmears that elevate the cream cheese experience with bold, unexpected flavors. What started as a local sensation, founded by Adam Goldberg in Westport, CT, has quickly grown into a celebrated name, earning acclaim from bagel lovers and industry experts alike and fueling a nationwide expansion.

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What makes PopUp Bagels different isn't just the bagels, it's the philosophy. The brand doesn't slice, toast, or schmear. Customers are encouraged to "grip, rip, and dip," a trademarked ritual that turns the bagel into a chips-and-dip experience. The same anti-convention thinking shapes how the brand markets itself: every customer is treated like an influencer, and the only currency the brand pays creators in is the same thing they came for, bagels.

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Anna O'Keefe, a Social Media Manager at PopUp Bagels, supports the brand's day-to-day social strategy and execution across Instagram and TikTok under the leadership of Social & Partnerships Director Ardyn Solomon. She also oversees PopUp's influencer marketing program, managing initiatives ranging from creator partnerships and PR gifting to grand-opening campaigns and national brand launches.

The Challenge

PopUp Bagels has one of the highest-volume organic creator programs in the food and beverage space. Thousands of customers tag the brand every month, influencers post unprompted, and every store opening unleashes a wave of user-generated content that has to be captured in real time, because Instagram Stories disappear in 24 hours. Before Archive, capturing it meant doing it by hand.

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“Before implementing Archive, when we sent out PR packages, we then manually monitored creators’ Instagram accounts for 48 hours, capturing screen recordings and organizing them in a spreadsheet.”

A two-person social team manually monitored thousands of monthly mentions: refreshing feeds, screenshotting Stories before they expired, and logging everything in spreadsheets. Reporting to franchisees was limited to follower growth and the brand's own posts. The team had no way to measure earned media value, no impressions data, and no way to quantify the success of a single store opening. As PopUp Bagels accelerated its national expansion, opening 20 new stores in six to nine months, the gap grew impossible to close manually.

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“A few months ago, our social team of two was manually tracking thousands of monthly mentions across platforms, a process that quickly became unsustainable as the brand grew.”

The Solution

Now Archive runs PopUp Bagels' creator marketing end to end. Every store opening and brand partnership runs as a tracked Campaign, so posts, impressions, EMV, and creator-level performance all land in one place instead of a spreadsheet. For each opening, Anna's team sends a few key images and keywords, and a Magic Field collects that opening's UGC from across the window automatically, replacing the manual per-store tagging the team used to do by hand.

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When the team gets back from a week of traveling to multiple openings, they sort their feed by EMV in Social Listening so no high-engagement post slips through. For markets where Anna doesn't already know the local creators, Creator Search surfaces foodies and lifestyle creators by location. And CCO Christian Kuhn's favorite view is Competitor Insights: he pulls those category benchmarks into board and leadership conversations to show how a brand with 38 locations is out-posting national chains with thousands.

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“I can't imagine having opened those 20 stores we've done in the last six months without the tracking and tools of Archive.”

The payoff Anna keeps coming back to is proof. Because the creator currency is bagels, Archive is what lets her put a real number on what a program run on bagels is actually worth, showing franchisees, leadership, and investors the return in every monthly report and post-opening recap, all built on the same tracked data.

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“An additional way I love using Archive is requesting usage rights. We love to leverage our amazing community and the content they take of the brand and post across socials. Through Archive’s Usage Rights tool, we’re able to make sure that we have the permission of our customers to use their content across our platforms and for social collateral.”

The Results

In two months on Archive, PopUp Bagels captured more than 20,000 pieces of user-generated content and $4.5 million in earned media value, all from a 100% organic program with zero creator contracts. Across 45+ tracked campaigns, Anna's two-person team can finally quantify what every store opening is worth, reporting it to franchisees, leadership, and investors with real numbers instead of follower counts.

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“I am able to do my job far more effectively thanks to the help of Archive and its social listening tools.”