LocoPops Looks to the Future With LocoShop

It’s Wednesday, August 28.

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Good morning, readers.

They’re calling it genuinely good news for once: 

A beloved local popsicle shop is launching a second location in downtown Durham.

LocoShop, an evolution of LocoPops, will open on Foster Street this October in the space that previously housed Altered Image Hair Designers. 

It will carry just about everything that LocoPops does, including popsicles, ice cream, cakes, and sweet and savory pies as well as local and specialty pantry items and prepared meals, beer and wine, and sundries.

LocoPops was founded in 2005. This isn’t the company’s first rodeo when it comes to brick-and-mortar expansion. In the late aughts, owner Summer Bicknell opened two LocoPops locations in Chapel Hill and one in Raleigh but shuttered them several years later when it became clear that traffic wasn’t high enough to sustain the branches year-round.

“Popsicles are definitely a seasonal product, so it never really worked in the winter,” Bicknell tells the INDY. 

Since 2021, when the flagship LocoPops added a gourmet grocery section to the shop in a pandemic-era pivot, expansion has started to seem viable and exciting again, Bicknell says.

“It was clear that the sundry store really had legs,” she says. “I kept leaning into it and learning more and refining the concept. Once that started to be its own thing, I started thinking, do I want to have another location?”

Have a good Wednesday.

—Lena

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