Stores after Apple

Stores after Apple: it takes a formidable physical presence

When people did their shopping round the corner, a brand’s physical store needed essentially three things to work: location, location, location. Being in a strategic neighbourhood made the difference. That is water under the bridge in the age of e-commerce, with Amazon ruling the roost and purchases arriving at your door.

A whole new world that brings a different balance to the retail chain. Mass closures for brands’ physical stores? Some are closing, certainly, but others are opening. There is turnover, because quite simply the function of stores has changed: they are not so much places you have to go to in order to buy as places you want to go to in order to live an experience. A prestige brand needs a formidable physical store. You have to become a destination, build a temple of goods, a place to build consumer loyalty and nurture the relationship with your community. If you were at the public opening of Apple Piazza Liberty in Milan, you probably know exactly what we are talking about: Apple’s first new-generation store in Italy is a block of glass and water designed by star architect Norman Foster, meant to welcome customers looking for support but also to host developer conferences and cultural events. It was inaugurated by Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of retail, a manager who, as it happens, comes from Burberry. The first Apple Store opened in 2001 at Tysons Corner, Virginia, and featured a giant photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Perhaps because the Beatles, owners of quite another Apple, had opened an Apple Boutique in London in 1967 that was the first concept store experiment in history. Those were yesterday’s dreams. “Today’s reality,” Stigliano recalls, “runs for example through the Samsung Store in New York, where you buy nothing but try everything, in a triumph of the experiential dimension.”

Then there is Ikea, which, compared with its traditional huge openings on the outskirts of big cities, started betting on the city centre a few years ago, with pop-up stores in Milan and Rome (the latter open until January), pick-up stores for collecting goods in residential areas and the new Progetta&Arreda initiative. In the coming months, in cities where the Swedish giant is not present, there will be branded touch points inside shopping centres offering personalised furnishing advice. Once the order is placed, the customer receives an electronic ticket to pay with by smartphone. Products are delivered straight to the home or can be collected at the nearest pick-up point. The first cities to test the format will be Venice and Bolzano.

Fashion is without doubt one of the sectors most sensitive to this new wave of physical stores. The textbook case worldwide is Levi’s, the American blue jeans powerhouse with 4.9 billion dollars in revenue and 2,900 stores around the world. “In more than 120 shops across Europe,” says Lucia Marcuzzo, vice president for Central Europe, “there are ‘Tailor Shops’, where you can personalise the products you buy and make them unique. Anyone who comes into the store is helped to find their jeans and turn them into a perfect, one-of-a-kind garment.” The customers of La Martina are also very loyal: the Argentine brand synonymous with polo shirts, now among the leaders in sport and leisure clothing, organises in its 80 single-brand stores “wine-tasting evenings with partners, in our case sponsors from the world of polo, trying to stay consistent and relevant for our audience. Or we put on small live concerts,” says European CEO Enrico Roselli. Accessory lovers know well that for two years now the Coccinelle brand has let you personalise the bag you buy in its single-brand stores.

And then there is the world of cosmetics, the vanguard of retail 4.0. “We pay attention to every single step of the buying experience: the welcome, the music, the atmosphere, the assistant who lets you try the make-up and teaches you how to apply it, all the way to the complete make-up service,” stresses Cristina Scocchia, CEO of Kiko Milano, with a thousand stores in 21 countries and revenue of 750 million. Among the companies in the sector that invest most in this direction is Shiseido, the Japanese giant with 8 billion in revenue.