Nordstrom opens corner store for online shoppers
Sites offer easy returns, tailoring, human touch
LOS ANGELES – Jennifer Acree swears by Nordstrom but long ago ditched going to the mall, fighting for a parking space and dealing with the crowds. Instead, she buys most of her clothes on Nordstrom.com.
So she’s thrilled to have a new local Nordstrom store in her neighborhood where she can pick up her online orders, return them if they don’t fit and get the added personal service of alternations, something buying on Amazon just doesn’t do. “I work and live down the street and buy everything online,” she said. “And I’ll buy even more online if I know I can return it right here.”
Consider the Nordstrom Local concept, the answer to bridging the gap between online orders and personal service, combining the speed and ease of online shopping with the human touch.
Nordstrom, which debuted the first Local test store last October, with an outlet on trendy Melrose Avenue, is doubling down on the concept, with two L.A. locations. The Brentwood store opens Friday, while another in downtown Los Angeles is set for Oct. 12.
“Our customers have told us they want to shop where, how and when they choose,” said Jamie Nordstrom, the president of stores for the chain, which sees a larger-than-normal 26 percent of all business conducted online.
“There are lots of people who love shopping online but don’t necessarily want everything sent to their home,” said Neil Saunders, analyst with Global Data. “This is sort of a halfway house between online shopping and retail.”
And while, on the face of it, a store with no physical goods clearly won’t be racking up tons of sales because it’s service-based, in the long run, “it will stimulate greater levels of online spending,” Saunders said.
The Brentwood store itself is tiny by Nordstrom standards, 1,200 feet, and instead of stocked merchandise, it offers services – returns and pickup, tailoring and alternations, gift wrap, dry cleaning, a place to donate used clothes, a personal stylist and beverages for customers. The downtown location will be larger, with 2,200 square feet, and also will include a barber.
With the new stores, Nordstrom is introducing a new digital service, “Get It Fast,” on the website and the app, which offers a real-time view of available inventory in Los Angeles and lets customers decide whether to reserve it so they can check it out at the local store or have it delivered to their home.
Shea Jensen, Nordstrom’s senior vice president of customer experiences, declined to say if Nordstrom would expand what she calls a “neighborhood service hub,” as in the Local stores, beyond L.A.
Saunders said the Local concept makes sense for Nordstrom because the company can’t continue building big department stores to serve large areas anymore.
“The economics don’t work for that now,” he said.
Other brands are going small, too, but for different reasons, the analyst said. Target and Walmart are maxed out and are in place virtually everywhere, “so they have nowhere else to go but to open small outposts on college campuses and in cities.”