GOODBYE

Apple Store: the global retail phenomenon

What links McLean, Virginia, and Glendale, California? If you said “the United States of America,” full marks for geography. But on 19 May 2001, these unglamorous locations, 2,600 miles and three hours apart, were the birthplaces of the Apple Store.

Two decades later, this global chain of more than 500 outlets in 25 countries is praised and envied for its upmarket design and exceptional profitability. Back then, the idea of Apple running its own stores was retail heresy. Besides licensing independent authorised resellers, the company had launched and relaunched ‘stores within a store’ with the likes of Best Buy, Sears and CompUSA, but neither the image nor the sales figures ever seemed to come right.

Newly returned as CEO, Steve Jobs decided to make retail a priority. After launching Apple’s online store, he brought Millard ‘Mickey’ Drexler of Gap to the Apple board in 1999, and the following year hired Ron Johnson from US retail giant Target. The stage was set, and designers from Disney (of which Jobs was a major shareholder) began to dress it, building mock-up stores in a Cupertino warehouse. Those first two outlets shifted $600,000 of product in two days, but it was with the 2004 opening of London’s Regent Street outlet, in a dramatic renovation of a huge period building, that the Apple Store concept truly arrived. By 2006, when a glass cube on Fifth Avenue became New York’s newest landmark, it was going nowhere but up.

Further refined by British architects Foster + Partners under former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts, the spacious, light and notoriously till-free layout has helped the Apple Store survive economic turmoil, high-profile burglaries and staff exposés of “cult–like” training to attract over half-a-billion shoppers a year. A triumph of minimalism, it’s less on the streets, more on the balance sheets.