Amazon will open the first “Amazon Style” store, which will be located in the suburb of Glendale, California, in the city of Los Angeles. The new warehouse will be open to the public at the end of this year, as announced on Thursday.
Shoppers will find clothing, shoes, accessories and merchandise from a variety of well-known and emerging brands, priced to suit different ranges of shoppers.
Simoina Vasen, CEO of Amazon Style, said customers will be able to find everything in one place “from the $10 staple to $400 designer jeans.”
At approximately 30,000 square feet, the retail space is about the size of a typical TJ Maxx location, but smaller than most department stores.
The new concept represents Amazon's latest experiment in physical retail. The company began this journey when it opened a bookstore in 2015, then acquired luxury grocery store Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017. Since then, it has launched a number of formats, including takeout, stores with best-selling items online and even your own supermarket chain.
Amazon has spent years increasing its share of the apparel segment. Last March, Wells Fargo said that Amazon overtook Walmart as the No. 1 clothing retailer in the US and estimated that sales of clothing and footwear in the US grew approximately 15% in 2020, reaching more than $41 billion. (Amazon does not break out clothing sales in its financial results.)
The e-commerce giant seems to have found a path to success by combining the sale of a wide range of popular brand name staples and its own private labels as well. In recent years it has “stepped up” by opening luxury fashion stores online. A short time ago shoppers would not have even considered Amazon as an option.
Style stores hope to address some of the pain points found in traditional retail stores, such as the fitting room. Shoppers will largely use their smartphone to navigate the store.
When shoppers enter the store, they will see “display items,” which feature only one size and color of a particular product; the remaining inventory of each product will be kept in the back of the store. After logging into the Amazon app on a smartphone, they'll scan a QR code on the item to see additional sizes, colors, product ratings, and other information, such as personalized recommendations for similar items.
“This allows us to offer a greater selection without requiring customers to browse the shelves to find the right color, size and fit,” Vasen said.
After scanning an item's QR code, shoppers can click a button in the Amazon app to add the item to a fitting room or send it to a pickup counter.
In fitting rooms, Amazon has added touch screens, which shoppers can use to rate items or request different styles or sizes to be delivered to their fitting room.
Each item is then placed in a “secure locker” in the fitting room, which is unlocked after a store associate delivers the clothes. This allows customers to continue shopping without having to leave the fitting room and find an employee, the company said.
Shoppers will be able to use Amazon's palm-scanning system, Amazon One, to pay.
Amazon Style stores try to bring the online shopping experience to the physical world. Vasen said shoppers will be able to access their purchase history in the Amazon app.
But unlike Whole Foods stores, Vasen said Style stores won't offer special discounts for Prime subscribers.
Tags: AmazonAmazon PrimeAmazon StyleJeff Bezos
