Italiano
EnglishIn a context where online shopping is a fact of life, and faced with the double-digit growth of the sector, retail has to ask itself a necessary question: why should customers still go to a shop?
This question brings two personal experiences to mind. The first is about a couple of friends who live 45 km from the nearest Nespresso Boutique. They have other ways of getting their capsules; they could order them online as they usually do for other products, and yet they prefer to go to the Boutique. This struck me and I tried to understand why. After thinking about it for a moment, they concluded that they do it because they like it. They like the setting, the welcome, the attention. They see themselves as coffee lovers and connoisseurs, and going to the Boutique is part of their personal ritual, of the pleasure that goes with enjoying a cup.
The other experience is about a business meeting. The person I am due to meet says: “There’s a beautiful bookshop in Viale Monte Nero in Milan, shall we meet there?” I find the idea of meeting in a bookshop a little unusual, but I am curious and I accept. That is how I discover this bookshop, Open, a space that opened from scratch in 2013 and was born from “a simple observation: publishing today is in crisis”[1], and that overcomes what this observation would suggest (don’t open a bookshop) through innovation. The project was supported by a crowdfunding campaign and defines itself as a place for socialising and networked work: a bookshop that is also a co-working space, also a café, also a restaurant, also digital.
What do Nespresso and Open have in common? The active way in which they respond to the need, and the opportunity, to reinvent retail.
In terms of function, the forerunners of Nespresso are grocers and coffee roasters, but the Nespresso Boutiques innovate and go beyond those models. They are meeting places, with a sociality mediated by the relationship with the brand; they define a social profile (who goes in and who stays out), almost a status symbol, and they are a moment of belonging to a mood and a lifestyle. Open, on the other hand, creates a different, horizontal kind of socialising between customers, both through its co-working services and through the nature of the space itself, designed by Lago.
This is the future of shops: their ability to be places for socialising, a tangible sociality that talks to the web and offers itself as both an alternative and a complement to the virtual world. Retail is asked to be what shops have always been, a place for relationships, but to be so in a different, renewed way, because this now becomes their own reason why, more than what is sold, which can otherwise be bought comfortably online, on the couch.
Whether this socialising should be democratic and open or exclusive and reserved, technical and inspirational or playful and participatory, will depend on the identity of the brand or store. In any case, it will be made by people looking for people. The relationship between customer and shop assistant is bound to become richer and to change; competence and passion become fundamental.
Training people will therefore be central, all the more so given the role technology is about to take on in this evolution. Technology is becoming a solution partner for retail, able not only to feed retail entertainment but to drive a revolutionary ability to measure behaviour and so customise the offer. But for the shop to be a place of meeting and knowledge, for the company and for customers, staff will need to be trained to be up to these new scenarios. Then the revolution will be complete.