Source: Athletic Products — PERCH – The leader in Physical+Digital Retail Marketing
As I move towards the launch of my book Nike’s Consumer Direct Offense, Amazon & StockX: The Disruption of Sneaker Retail, claims that I make in the book have led me on a search to find methods of improving visits to brick and mortar locations. In the book I discuss that small store formats in the sneaker industry are going to become more effective than the current large store format of Foot Locker locations and definitely much better than the size of Sporting Goods warehouse formats.
Every City Should Have a ‘Bodega’ | HER by Bodega Celebrates Women in Sneakers
The sneaker boutique offers a more personalized shopping experience. Running shops have figured this out already and while many mom and pop stores have disappeared in the sneaker store market, running shops have maintained by offering personalized products from orthotics, more informed employees/owners and community oriented programs. In the post above Bodega (a sneaker boutique) hosts in store events that create opportunities for customers to interact with employees of sneaker brands. These in store events are educational and provide the sinews linking small shops to an informed consumer.
What happens at larger sneaker stores, like a City Gear or a Foot Locker store, is the stores are still designed exactly as they were when the stores opened. The floor has clothing in stacks and on shelves, there are a few mannequins in the window, there is a poster hanging and then there are a flood of shoes on the wall creating a blob of colors and materials overwhelming the visitor. What tends to happen is a customer’s eyes are lost in the wave of lights, clothes and kicks and the customer gravitates towards the most familiar item.
While I realize that a small store format would be hard to implement for established stores, in the book I present a discussion on a reseller who opened a brick and mortar and it failed. I stated in the book that anyone considering opening a sneaker shop, shouldn’t. By the time I finished editing the book for the third time, I wanted to go back and rewrite the entire example to explain why and how a sneaker boutique could actually survive and a lot of it has to do with a 7 year old company named Perch.
Perch created an interactive shopping experience, that if it was combined with a system similar to Jimmy Jazz’s in store POS wall scanners, loss prevention and consumer education would be improved with two tech items. I know this introduces more troubleshooting issues, but the reason I name sneaker boutiques is because the customer in this place won’t be the same customer as the person walking into a Dick’s. The atmosphere will be an upscale shopping experience and with the price per transaction at sneaker boutiques sitting at the premium end, the consumer would be less likely to ‘break’ anything.
The biggest issue in sneaker retail is underpaid employees who are overworked and undereducated on what sneakers are best for their prospective shoppers. Take a moment to click through to the source link and to watch the video and then consider if the shoes in the video were sneakers with information directly from the company CMS. It’s not radical and the solution has been here for years, but I have yet to experience this at any sneaker shop… If someone asked me if they should open a sneaker store today, my answer would be a bit different than it was in the book.
Pre-order Nike’s Consumer Direct Offense, Amazon & StockX: The Disruption of Sneaker Retail