Thinking small
Big retailers try compact showrooms to lure shoppers.
Brick-and-mortar retail chains, known for sprawling stores that stock a bit of everything, are trying to lift sagging sales using a different strategy: cozier spaces that sell very little of anything.
Showrooms — a retail model popular with bridal designers, car dealers and, recently, online apparel startups — are now inspiring mass-market heavyweights like Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters.
In intimate salons, some the size of a café, shoppers can examine a limited selection of merchandise and place orders for products to be delivered or collected later. The customer service is often luxurious, but so is the time commitment.
Instead of slashing prices and accelerating delivery times, many retailers are aiming higher: to become a desirable place to shop.
“People don’t have to go to stores anymore, they have to want to go,” said Lee Peterson, an executive vice president at WD Partners, a strategy, design and architecture firm. “And that goes a long way when thinking about what retail has to become.”
Nordstrom opened its first showroom-style store, called Nordstrom Local, on a stretch of Melrose Place in Los Angeles last month.
The 3,000-square-foot space — Nordstrom balks at calling it a showroom and refers to it as a concept store focused on service experiences — employs a handful of specialists. Ten minutes to the west, hundreds of store associates roam a full-size, 122,000-square-foot Nordstrom department store.
Nordstrom Local was designed as a kind of neighborhood hub, where customers can get manicures, have a shirt altered or sip rosé from the bar. They do not come to shop — at least, not in the traditional sense.
The store has no inventory for sale, other than the occasional set of bejeweled boots exhibited on a shelf or the floral caftan hanging in the lounge.
Customers work with personal stylists to put together ensembles, using tablets or phones. The outfits are usually requested from a nearby, full-size Nordstrom store and delivered for customers to try on in Local’s dressing area.
S.Y. Chen, 29, a graduate student in Los Angeles, stopped by out of curiosity.
“It was like going to someone’s room to hang out, not like going into a store at all,” she said. “I would use it if I was busier, but because I like to browse, I’ll probably just keep going online or to a bigger store with more products.”
Major chains are trying everything to adapt to market pressures — a wardrobe-in-a-box subscription service from Gap for babies, a personal shopping option from Walmart, shrinking stores from Target and Kohl’s.
Showrooms are just another experiment. The rationale is simple: Instant gratification takes a back seat to visceral experience.
Online vendors such as Rent the Runway and Warby Parker have opened showroom-style spaces in recent years to offer a more tactile relationship with their products. For some companies, the facilities increased local online sales and sometimes produced as much as five times the revenue per square foot recorded by traditional shopping center tenants.
Showrooms are more likely to influence consumer purchasing than retail aided by artificial intelligence, in a pop-up setting or with a self-check-out function, according to research conducted by WD Partners.
More than half of millennials surveyed in recent years said that visiting showrooms could compel them to make a purchase, according to the firm. The share of older shoppers who said this surged to 57 percent this year from 22 percent in 2015.
By matching shoppers to the products they want and recording the preferences, showrooms can help limit the number of items that are returned.
They also require less storage space, which makes them more affordable to lease. Inventory is centralized, dispatched only when ordered. Theft is minimal.
Employee turnover, a costly problem at mall-based retailers, declines in showroom-style stores, said Nadia Shouraboura, who founded the retail technology company Hointer.
“It’s just not pleasant to spend most of your time folding stuff, cleaning displays and having piles of products to maintain,” said Shouraboura, a former executive at Amazon. “Showrooms help the progression of a numbingly boring job into something more exciting, like being a stylist.”