It started as a side business in 2016, then turned into a pandemic lifeline four years later. Now, it’s becoming a gateway to brand-new industries – and even, perhaps, a solution to Traverse City’s housing crisis.

Such is the story of BoxPop, a division at Britten, Inc. that is looking like it might be the company’s most game-changing innovation ever.

Britten BoxPop started initially as a one-off effort to meet an unusual ask from an existing client.

According to Matt Egan, an executive vice president at Britten and the head of the BoxPop division, the customer wanted to build a mobile tour out of a shipping container – a pop-up shop that they could take on the road and set up anywhere.

“We never really like to shy away from a good challenge,” Egan said. “We had all the things that we needed to do that type of project right here. We had welders. We had steel. We had all the right people. And so, that led us to try it.”

The project went off without a hitch and the customer walked away satisfied. Quickly, the Britten team started thinking about how much more demand there could be for this type of product: Pop-up shops; food trucks; mobile bars; portable marketing booths for expos and events; restrooms; even auxiliary office units.

“It got us thinking, ‘Hey, the shipping container thing really has a lot of legs,’” Egan said.

Those legs only grew longer as Britten learned how to outfit shipping containers with everything from bar equipment, to electricity, to full-scale refrigeration units.

The timing proved serendipitous for Britten to break into a brand-new market. Egan noted that, when BoxPop started, the vast majority of Britten’s business was still grounded in the events industry. BoxPop provided opportunities to grow even further within that niche, but also opened up new doors to industries like retail and food and beverage.

“This is all pre-COVID, but more and more clients wanted expansions of their bars and restaurants to the outside, even then,” Egan explained. “So, we embraced that industry, and we learned a lot about codes, and health department permits, and everything like that.”

When COVID hit and the events industry cratered, BoxPop was able to help Britten stay afloat, in part because the division’s potential applications reached far beyond the likes of sporting events, festivals, conferences, expos, and other large gathering occasions that were now off the table for a little while. Indeed, when Britten (and most other businesses) closed their offices and sent workers home in March 2020, BoxPop offered the company its clearest and quickest road back to action.

After the shutdown, the BoxPop division only closed its shop for a week. The Britten team spent that week reaching out to potential clients and looking for opportunities that would allow for classification as an “essential manufacturer.”

That search led to a collaboration with an Ohio company that was building N95 decontamination units as part of a contract with the federal government. By April 6, BoxPop had a subcontract in place to deliver 25 shipping containers to the Ohio-based company by April 30.

To meet the quick turnaround, BoxPop not only restarted operations, but also brought more than 30 people back to work, scheduled round-the-clock shifts seven days a week, and kept two shops going simultaneously.

“We’ve maintained work ever since,” Egan said.

Not only has BoxPop been maintaining, the division has also been growing – and at an impressive clip, too. Egan estimated that BoxPop landed “right around $1 million” in revenue in 2019. In 2020, the number was “right around $2 million.”

Last year, BoxPop brought in $3.2 million. With 20 projects in line right now, BoxPop is already “basically booked through the second quarter” and has enough work in the hopper to match or exceed its 2021 numbers, basically by mid-year.

Egan expects he will expand his team from 25 to 30 people in the next few months and that BoxPop will end 2022 with $6 million in revenue.

The growth is coming from multiple angles, too – the most obvious being food and beverage. During the pandemic, the heightened demand for expanded outdoor eating and drinking space led a slew of restaurants, bars, breweries, and wineries to connect with Britten for solutions.

Some of those clients are located in northern Michigan, including Traverse City Whiskey Co., Jacob’s Farm, and Petoskey Brewing. Many others are located in other parts of the country. Last year, for instance, BoxPop prepped 22 shipping containers for a “full entertainment complex” in Houston called Lagoonfest Texas. BoxPop containers can also be found at wineries in Napa and at bars and restaurants all down the east and west coasts.

There’s another big opportunity for growth too – one that would take BoxPop away from shipping containers for the first time: modular construction.

In the simplest terms, modular, or prefabricated, construction involves manufacturing components of a building in an offsite factory and then assembling those components into a building or structure on-site. According to projections from ResearchCFME, the global market for modular construction is expected to reach $141.8 billion by 2027, up from $95.49 billion in 2020.

Britten is eyeing BoxPop as its entry into that high-growth market.

“Modular construction is becoming one of the biggest, most attractive disruptors to the construction industry,” Egan said. “That’s leading us into a little bit more of the architectural world, where folks want permanent bars, or they want permanent additions to their offices or restaurants. We haven’t branched out officially into the residential world yet, but we are prototyping a couple things in that environment.”

2022 will be BoxPop’s test run in the modular arena. Egan said Britten is currently building a new facility that will allow BoxPop to expand its footprint by about 50%. The growth will enable the division to bring a variety of new assembly lines online, which will in turn allow it to divert some of its attention away from shipping containers and toward “turnkey building packages” for a variety of clients.

First up is a project for a water park in Massachusetts that’s a fully certified, stick-built modular building due in May.

“That project is going to be built in our shop and shipped to the client, already inspected, approved, and ready to go,” said Egan. “We’re very excited about it, as it’s going to open us up into the modular construction world.”

With the extra factory space to tool around with new assembly lines, Egan is hopeful that BoxPop will be able to devote some of its bandwidth to producing residential kit homes. If that happens, it could theoretically make a big difference for northern Michigan and other areas like it, where a confluence of high housing demand and low supply of construction labor means that construction companies can’t build houses fast enough to meet a growing need.

While breaking into modular construction will take BoxPop away from its roots, Egan is confident that the division will always keep one foot in the shipping container business – in part because Britten’s unique value proposition in that space means the company gets a lot of demand there.

“We have plenty of good competition out there (in the shipping container market), but they all have one thing in common: They are all shipping container builders,” Egan said. “Not one of them has the vertical integration that BoxPop and Britten bring to the table, where we have a major branding partner behind us that can print anything.”

With the vertical integration, BoxPop can make the containers look like anything through various graphics packages and the creative productions of its Britten Woodworks partners.

“So, we can do everything in house, where a lot of the other builders throughout the country are branching out and having to pull those pieces in from outside partners,” he said. “That’s a big differentiator for us.”