How Apple’s Retail Store strategy beat the odds

20 years ago

“When Apple Computer Inc. opened its first Apple retail store in 2001 in a shopping mall in McLean, Va., critics saw the initiative as an expensive, dubious gamble. But as Apple prepares to take the wraps off its latest, most ambitious store yet — on New York’s Fifth Avenue, opposite the Plaza Hotel and Bergdorf Goodman — there are few doubters left about Chief Executive Steve Jobs’s retail strategy,” Nick Wingfield reports for The Wall Street Journal. “On Friday evening, five years after opening its first store, Apple will unlock the doors to a subterranean store that sprawls beneath the plaza in front of the General Motors Building, just across from Central Park. In keeping with Mr. Jobs’s penchant for eye-catching designs, all that will be visible from the street is the entrance, surrounded by a roughly three-story-high glass cube jutting from the ground, reminiscent of I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre museum in Paris.”

“The store is located in one of the most highly trafficked tourist and retail corridors in the world. If it is successful, it will enhance Apple’s visibility as the company attempts to grab a bigger slice of the computer and electronics industries. Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Co., says an Apple executive told him the store will be open for business 24 hours a day, a first for the company. ‘It really is the center of gravity of Fifth Avenue,’ says Robert Futterman, Apple’s real estate broker, of the new store location. Apple declined to discuss details of the new store ahead of its official unveiling later this week,” Wingfield reports. “The Apple stores have attracted even more foot traffic because of the swell in consumer interest in the iPod, Apple’s hit digital music and video player. Analysts say the stores give Apple a strong distribution channel that could help it enter new categories like cellular phones and other home electronics.”

“Mr. Jobs, a major stickler for design details, has been intimately involved in helping to turn the stores into hip, visually memorable shopping destinations. Mr. Jobs is one of the named inventors on a patent Apple secured several years ago for the design of a signature glass staircase featured in many Apple stores. A person familiar with the matter says Mr. Jobs himself was involved in the design of the glass cube atop the new Fifth Avenue store,” Wingfield reports. “In a recent interview, Mr. Jobs admitted that at one point he ordered workers to replace the metal bolts holding together the glass panels that make up the cube over the company’s Fifth Avenue store. ‘We spent a lot of time designing the store, and it deserves to be built perfectly,’ Mr. Jobs said.”

More in the full article here.

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