Innovative Retailers Provide Experiences Impossible Online

“Shops are becoming performance spaces. They are evolving into places full of activity, where customers make things, talk about stuff, test products, taste producer, learn a skill, strut their stuff and possibly buy stuff.”

Writer Deirdre Macken made this observation in The Forum in The Weekend Australian Review a few weeks ago.

Are You A Retail Dinosaur Hovering Behind The Till?

It seems the days when shopkeepers essentially displayed products and ran cash through the till are gone. Deirdre’s observations indicate we are ‘refashioning’ the way we think about customers/consumers/??..what should we call buyers today?

Animated Products, An Engaging Experience

• The frozen yoghurt shops that appeared on pavements over summer offer more than fast food. They provide a snack experience: your choice of size, your choice of toppings in varied quantities..sometimes you’re charged by weight
• At Bondi Junction, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn and West Elm shops have recently opened and whenever you wander in there’s a design consultant ready with advice, there’s fresh juice to taste, a pizza fresh from the oven, the omnipresent caffe latte – freshly poured – and cooking lessons somewhere
• Elsewhere a fine-wine retailer has set up a vat of grapes in the window so customers can share the wine journey – from the shop assistant stomping on the grapes to the fermentation process then on to the enticing wine racks laden with bottles
• A cup-cake shop holds baking lessons
• A Build-a-Bear franchise lets you design and make your own special cuddly creature

The Shop Front As A Service Centre

Reminiscent of older European ways of working and selling from the same space, Deirdre notes an Asian feel coming to many retail strips – with artisans and tradespeople mixing their workshops with their shopfronts, with shopfronts becoming service centres that:

• show off gym bodies
• show yoga lessons
• function as office spaces

The Internet Has Made Us Co-Producers

Deirdre believes the internet has groomed us to be demanding. On the net we get experiences and feedback and we feel in control. So why would we trail around a store looking for a salesman?

“We’ll insist on participating in the purchasing moment..in a sports shoe store saying ‘How do you expect me to buy running shoes when you don’t have a running machine where I can test them?’

OR, when visiting a bookshop, we’ll wonder

“Why doesn’t the owner have a book-club selection, or doesn’t play tapes of authors talking about their books?”

Great observations Deirdre