It all started 22 years back in May 2001 in two cities bound now by tech retail history: Tyson’s Corner Mall in McLean, Virginia and Glendale Galleria in Glendale, California. The first Apple Stores opened to predictions of doom and gloom of the retail initiative taking Apple to the brink of bankruptcy. Fast forward to 2023, and Apple Stores have become a retail phenomenon, with a higher sales per square foot than top luxury brands, as millions of customers and oftentimes curious onlookers pour in each month to check out the latest and slickest consumer tech Apple has to offer.
As the drumroll gets louder around the launch of the latest stores in Mumbai and Delhi next week, I take a trip down my experiences of over a dozen Apple Stores in the past to pull back the curtains on what you should expect from these stores, should you plan to walk into either next week. But wait, haven’t many of us been buying from Apple Stores already, those all-white-and-wood-finished stores that are found in prime mall locations all over the country? Those are Apple Premium Resellers, third-party stores that are licensed by Apple to sell Apple products exclusively, and while many aspects, from store design and product placement, are closely controlled by Apple’s guidelines, they lack the secret sauce key to ‘Apple Stores’ – an insane focus on customer experience. Or as Carmine Gallo, author of a book called The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty put it, “building relationships is the secret to selling more products”.
Iconic Design
A big part of the reason may Apple Stores are landmarks in their own rights is Apple’s choice of location and some downright architectural wizardry they pull off in some of their stores. Take the Marina Bay Sands store in Singapore, Apple’s third store in Singapore, which opened in 2020. The store is built inside a floating sphere that sits on the water in the city’s Marina Bay, an all-glass dome building 100 feet in diameter with sunshade baffles that regulate the light that comes into the store in Singapore’s hot summer months, and at night, turn the store into a sparkling evening attraction. In another nod to sustainable design, the store at the Dubai Mall opens up its 37.5-foot motorized Solar Wings to offer views of the Dubai Fountain and the Burj Khalifa but closes them down to keep the harsh Dubai weather out.
Or the now-iconic New York City landmark – the “Cube” as it’s informally known - the store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan that draws tourists and shoppers to the store entrance: a 32-foot glass cube that leads into a see-through spiral staircase into the store below, much like the cylindrical store in Pudong, Shangai. In a city that never sleeps, this is the rare Apple Store that stays lit up and open to shoppers 24 hours a day.
Customer Experience
Walk into any Apple Store and you’ll immediately notice a stark contrast to the buzz of a modern retail experience, even if the store is placed in a mall alongside other retailers, as it is in the Westfield Valley Fair Mall in San Jose (right opposite a perennially empty competitor store, I might add!) or for that matter, the store in bustling downtown San Francisco at Union Square. The atmosphere is calming, almost as if it’s a small bubble of quiet unlike any commercial ‘store environment’ that sells everyday consumer electronics, of all things! Stripped back walls with large visual imagery of the products in action, open counter displays atop mahogany surfaces, naturally- or well-lit environments – you’ll find each of these elements in pretty much every Apple Store you visit.
But there are subtle nods to accessibility and a sheer seamlessness in customer interactions that are less stated, more perceived. No sales staff breathing down your neck, yet present close enough to ask your questions – I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve sauntered into an Apple Store abroad and casually looked at the products on display without once being disturbed. And when I’ve wanted to pick up a product, as I often have – there’s no billing counter to stand in a queue, no checkout counters whatsoever. Each of the staff carry mobile payment terminals to ‘ring you up’ right where you are, an intelligent choice to reduce friction and to heighten the sense of a sales-free, no-pressure interaction – the shopping experience is most certainly there, just not front and center. Now, while I haven’t needed to use any of the accessibility features of the store, they are embedded into the store design, with aisles between display tables wide enough for wheelchairs to navigate easily. Staircases in the stores have braille on the handrails for the visually impaired, and stores that are spread across two floors have an elevator, to name some of the stuff I’ve consistently noticed.
Key to the elevated customer experience is the training levels of the staff, who’re not only adept at questions around migrating from your device onto an Apple product but also answering questions about which device, say among the options within Apple’s laptop offerings, are best suited to you. For more in-depth hands-on technical support or hardware repairs, customers can make a reservation at the Genius Bar at the Apple Store to get help from an expert. It could be a locked-out Apple ID, issues with subscriptions or even if something on your laptop is not working as expected.
Today at Apple
Apple Stores also serve as the base for the physical Today at Apple sessions, the first of which we saw for an India audience at the India Art Fair in February. These are free, daily in-store sessions that help customers use their products better and make the most of their devices. Hosted at Apple Stores globally, these vary from basic how-tos to pro-grade programs and are often customized to meet the needs of local communities via local artists and creative experts.
Tushar Kanwar is a tech columnist and commentator, and tweets @2shar.